Transcript

NARRATOR:

In these waters on the night of April 20, the drill rig Deepwater Horizon exploded. The blown out well continues to spew oil into these pristine waters.

SUE GALLIANO:

There was this overwhelming sense of something really bad happened here. They were doing this live feed of the oil coming out of the ground and them spraying the Corexit on it, and we all kind of glued to that on TV watching it.

Everybody realised right away it was going to impact us. It was just coming in, little globs, little – floating in right on the water. And as far as you could see, little globs of it. Then the dread really started. But what are you going to do now? What’s going to happen now?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The oil spill presented a challenge to everybody. The first year that April – when it hit May, June, July, many of the boats were put into service. BP actually paid them to help skim water and to aid in the cleanup. They did miss a whole season. They went back out last year, though.

So LSU’s been studying this propagation of oysters for some time, looking at other ways to grow oysters in a controlled situation. In the long run, it’s what’s going to save oystering in Louisiana.

[BIRDS NOISES]

JULES MELANCON:

The oyster is the substance that I crave for. And it’s like my favourite food. And that’s why I’m here now. The oyster farming has been way in my life since I was a little bitty kid. I remember oystering, oh – from the first time I ever knew what life was about was the oyster business.

Before the spill, I was getting my boat ready to fish. The oysters I had, they were wiped out from Katrina. We had to start from nothing. Then around 2008 and 2009 the oysters started really coming back. And I was in the process of getting my boat ready to fish the 2010 season.

For the oil spill, when they opened up the flood plains, it wiped out the oyster industry. We’ve been struggling. There’s no more oyster farming, so that’s why I started with this cage culture. Because I had time to invest in it and try it out.

This cage culture is kind of new to me. But you see the oysters right there. That’s our way of life, they’re going to be coming back. That will suit for me.

Now I had a little revenue from this this winter, but it wasn’t the revenue I usually make. You’ve got to have a lot, a lot of cages to make a lot of money. But I made enough money to pay back my equipment. I’m still in recovery, and it’s going to be three years from the spill next month.

I’m 55 years old. I’m in it till the end. And I’m just going to keep doing it as long as I can make a living out of it. It’s going to take a little investment, but I’ll be there.

SUE GALLIANO:

Grand Isle is one of the places that was easy to work in the offshore oil industry out there. When the oil industry came in, back in the ’30s and the ’40s, it afforded a new way of making a living for people who quite possibly couldn’t work daddy’s boat.

Most of the people who work in the oil industry here that live on the island, their jobs were maintained. They didn’t lose their jobs.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now offshore – there’s a lot of people that work offshore. Those folks don’t work here, but they come through here. You know, they buy gas, they eat lunch. Every little bit of that helps. It may not look like a lot right away, but if you were to take those jobs away, you’d feel it.

CHET CHIASSON:

Our tenants are not the oil and gas companies. It’s the service industry for the oil and gas industry. That’s our base of our local economy here. We had a pretty rough year and a half post-oil spill. And we’ve been on the incline since then.

There was a lot of regulation that came down. And there was an interpretation period of, what do those regulations mean? How does it impact the industry? So no permits were being issued, no plans were being approved for new drilling. So that took a long time.

And that’s why we had such a lull. We’re continuing to grow, our port is continuing to grow, the Port Commission is moving forward on expansion plans.

This is our newest area. We’re kind of like Dubai, but we’re not building palm trees. We’re building land for industrial development. This here was open water six to eight months ago. The flip side of it, though, is that this is actually taking place a year and a half or two years after we thought it would be taking place. There was a time when we didn’t know what we were going to have to do or where the port was going to be.

We know with some of the plans that are in place now, there’s going to be a demand for about another 500 jobs. We have so many jobs available that we can’t fill them all. The deep water side of the industry is doing well and has a huge upside right now. As far as the port itself and our business, we’re doing very well. We’re back at a 100 per cent of what we were prior.

SUE GALLIANO:

Tourism was affected really badly the first summer. I mean, it was terrible. The spill was in April. Well, June, July, and August was not good. Lots of folks have had camps here for years and years. And generations of families have been a part of Grand Isle’s makeup.

People come down on the weekend. And if they all stopped coming because of the oil spill, I mean, the island would just dry up. If you’re a tourist town, you have to have tourists. Subsequently, it’s coming back as the word gets out that we’re OK and viable and the beach is good.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MARLENE CHAPPELL:

Have you been over to the beach?

I’m no spring chicken, let’s face it, you know. And if I’m going to be doing something, I want to be where I want to be. I had a big family, four girls, and lots of people in the family. So I treat everybody that comes here like just an extension.

During the spill, we had all of BP’s cleaners and workers and everything, so we stayed real full. But then whenever you got your place full, when you have people that keep coming back every year, they find someplace else. They were very scared of the oil.

So it’s taken probably two years for them to even start calling again. And the first words out of their mouth is, how bad is the oil spill? How bad is the tar balls? You know, is it safe for my children?

Unfortunately, there are some people on this island that has said everything is fine. Don’t worry about it. Adults, I feel like, can take care of themselves. They will be able to see for themselves. But children should be protected. And you tell them, you know, what you honestly think.

It’s gradually picking up. I’m getting a few. Generally, by this time I have all of Easter all of Memorial Day. And I have probably half. A lot of them just found other places to go, and it’s taking them a while to get out of that. But I am gradually getting my people back. I’m not going to be destitute. I may not be as busy as I was, but I do have people coming in.

The people that owned houses, a lot of them just said they wasn’t going to fight no more. You know, a storm, you come in here and you get all the mud and the dirt and you go back up. But this stuff right here, it’s got stuff in the soil. You don’t know what it is and you’re scared. The dumb ones like me that just want to be here, they haven’t given up.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SUE GALLIANO:

So we’re happy that it’s kind of in the past a little bit, but we’re still waiting to see what the final outcome will be. The people have kind of moved on, but the environment, it’s going to take a while to correct itself.

[MUSIC PLAYING]