Conditions in Plaquemines Parish, LA
January, 2007
By Mischa Byruck
Emergency Communities Director of Development
Plaquemines Parish follows the Mississippi River south from New Orleans to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. The eye of Hurricane Katrina first made landfall here on August 29, 2005, commencing the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history. The Parish suffered 125 mph winds, a twenty foot storm surge and twenty-seven levee breaks. Eight different oil spills dumped 6.5 million gallons of oil on the parish and the towns of Buras, Port Sulphur, Empire, and Pointe a la Hache were all virtually demolished.
A few months later, Hurricane Rita slammed the parish again, flooding homes and delaying the recovery process by months. No structures were left undamaged, and almost every home was rendered uninhabitable because of the mold that grew as a result of the prolonged flooding. The Parish was home to over 16,000 residents before the storm. Roughly 5,000 have returned.
Plaquemines parish is a rural area between five and fifteen feet below sea level, bordered by levees, great mounds of earth that hold back the Mississippi on one side, and a network of bayous and tributaries on the other. Most of the residents are either fishermen or work in the offshore oil industry. Many are elderly or retired; their families have been here for generations. It is the kind of place, rough and self-sufficient, where you don’t live unless you love it.
Virtually all residents still live in FEMA-owned trailers, which are mostly stacked side-by-side in immense, dehumanizing parks. Though they live cramped in with their families,they are also isolated,without communal space to entertain and separated from their friends and loved ones by the hundreds of miles of the post-hurricane diaspora.
The physical environment is one of total devastation—collapsing houses, oily fields, and debris on every lawn. Wrecked and molded cars are stacked in the ditches by the side of the road. Crumbling walls, empty foundations and strewn cinder blocks
make it seem like mere weeks have passed since the storm. There is a severe shortage of services. There are gas stations, liquor stores, hardware stores and a few crab shacks, yet the nearest grocery store, laundromat and movie theater remain over an hour’s drive away.
The local schools, all run out of trailers, have roughly 800 students between them, and offer only a few extracurricular activities. Many students commute fifty miles to school each day. Without activities to occupy their time, many of the children are turning to petty theft, interracial violence, drugs, even random vandalism, to
assuage their boredom.
Homeowners, in a more vulnerable position than many have ever been, find themselves taken advantage of by out-of-state contractors on a daily basis. They are depressed and lonely, disconnected from their pre-Katrina lives and with little to ease their pain.
Despite these hardships, people are coming back, for jobs or family, or just out of habit, but more often because their land is all they have left.
