Commercial fishermen faced with tough choices

The commercial fishermen of south Louisiana face a tough decision.

Do they return to the waters as independent shrimpers or stay enrolled in the Vessels of Opportunity Program? One avenue provides a familiar setting and semblance of normalcy, while the other produces a check without the worries of consumer demands.

Most of the coastal waters have re-opened for fishermen, but that status was only half the problem from the start. Once it was known that oil leaking out of the Deepwater Horizon would reach the Louisiana coast, seafood paranoia settled in and it became apparent that casting could cost more money than a haul of shrimp could yield.

Dean Blanchard, who owns Dean Blanchard Seafood Inc. on Grand Isle, said the government has lied throughout the crisis, so consumers are not going to believe them when they say the shrimp is safe for consumption.

“If everything is good, they should give us some papers that say it’s safe, it’s been checked and they’re going to stand by it and guarantee it, and if we get sued they’re going to pick up the lawsuit,” said Blanchard, who has been eating Gulf shrimp for the past couple of days. “But they don’t go that far because nobody in the government is ever held accountable for anything.”

There are three stages of animal testing via FDA protocol: a field sensory test, another sensory test in Pascagoula, Miss. and then the samples are sent to one of the six FDA labs around the country for tissue examination, which looks at pH levels for components of oil.

The FDA, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have all approved the consumption of Gulf shrimp.

But the American consumers are not the only paranoid link on the seafood chain. The shrimpers themselves, Blanchard said, would be less reluctant to leave the Vessels of Opportunity and return to shrimping if they knew for certain the waters would remain open.

“There’s a definite fear of that,” Blanchard said. “There is waters that are closed that nobody can give you a reason why it’s closed right now and nobody can give you a reason why what’s open is open. What’s to say they won’t close it again?”

Blanchard said most of the English-speaking shrimpers in his area were working for VoO, and he was working with Cambodians and Vietnamese fishermen who did not get in to VoO.

But the program may not be operating at full-strength much longer, especially shrimp boats.

Skimming operations, and other tasks for larger vessels, have dwindled with the capping of the well, leaving four more activity areas for the VoO: boom management, wildlife transport, people transport and smaller cleaning operations such as tarballs and sheens.

VoO program liaison Geoff Howse said 993 boats are employed as of Aug 23. Of the vessels on hire, 614, or 62 percent, are 45-feet or less in length. Four hundred sixty-eight of the boats waiting to be hired are between the 30-foot to 45-foot range.

Owners of the larger vessels are sent through decontamination ports, taken off hire and some are placed in a strategic reserve to safeguard against an unforeseen catastrophe.

“But we’ve also got other things going on,” Howse said. “We’ve got boom maintenance. There is about 1.5 million feet in Louisiana of boom. That is a lot of boom that has to be maintained. The winds, the rain, the wake from boats upset that boom, so we need vessels out there every day maintaining it.

“It took a long time to get 1.5 million feet of boom out there, and it will take longer to bring boom in. Looking at time frames, you have months of stuff there in boom management.”

State Director of Coastal Activities Garret Graves said the booms will not be removed until the well is permanently killed, at the earliest.

Then each coastal parish will have go without oil sightings, including underwater plumes and tarballs for a specified amount of days, specific to each parish.

“Before we put our guard down, I think we need to be very confident and have clear awareness on where this residual oil is,” Graves said. “We don’t want to pull up all the stakes and send all the skimmers away and everything else only to have a storm come through and stir up the plumes, and next thing we know, we’re covered in oil again.”