Biloxi, Miss. – The water now is smooth as glass, but the devastation from the hurricane that barreled through Danny Le’s world last week is everywhere: Shrimp boats 100 feet long tossed on shore like toys. The masts of others that sank jut out of the water.
Le, 21, rode out Katrina in the cramped cabin of a 50-foot shrimper, his father desperately working for more than seven hours to keep the boat afloat. Nearby sits the boat of a neighbor who wasn’t so lucky – the vessel is a shattered hull crumpled on the bank.
Shrimping helped build Biloxi, a Mississippi coastal city that once called itself “the seafood capital of the world.” And over the past two decades, Vietnamese immigrants have sweated their way to dominance over the shrimp industry here.
Hoping to protect investments worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, most Vietnamese shrimpers rode out the storm on their boats. They huddled together in a canal deep inside Biloxi’s Back Bay, often with their families aboard.
“That’s all we’ve got is these boats. … One of these big boats, they cost $700,000. Even if it sank, we’d still owe the bank,” Le said. “That’s why people stayed. These boats are everything to us.”
Though the U.S. Coast Guard will release no official information, shrimpers say that at least 11 people died after a line of six boats broke loose, were battered against a bridge and sank. Among the bodies that floated to the surface the next day, they say, were those of two children.
In all, captains estimate that 25 to 30 boats sank or were so badly damaged they won’t be repaired, as much as a quarter of Biloxi’s entire fleet. Now, nearly all that’s left of it is bottled up along a narrow stretch of waterway called the Industrial Canal – and with it the livelihood of the Vietnamese immigrant community here.
To get out, they must wait until authorities can fix three suspension bridges that lead to the sea. The process could take weeks or months, even as the crucial fall shrimping season passes them by.
At stake is the future of shrimping in Biloxi. But so is the viability of an ethnic community that, after two decades of battling for acceptance here, saw itself as finally gaining a measure of both stability and respect.
“The Vietnamese community here is 80 percent dependent on shrimp,” said Bang Van Luong, a captain whose boat, Shanghai I, sustained thousands of dollars in damage.
“(Often) you see a wife and daughter working in the (shrimp) processing factory, and the husband on the boat. Now homes are gone. Boats are gone,” Luong said. “I don’t know how we’re going to survive.”
Inside Luong’s boat, photographs are spread across bunks and chairs. They are some of the only possessions he managed to salvage from his home, which Katrina shoved off its foundations and across his front yard.
Luong came to the United States in 1975 after fighting alongside U.S. Green Berets in the Vietnam War, and confronted something he didn’t expect: racism.
As Vietnamese immigrants poured into the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida and began shrimping, they found success. They bought small boats, then bigger ones. Locals, unaccustomed to the competition, struck back.
The boats of Vietnamese shrimpers were burned and their houses firebombed in the early 1980s. In 1990, a boat captained by a white shrimper exchanged gunfire with a Vietnamese-American’s boat off Louisiana.
But many Vietnamese immigrants in Biloxi say those days are behind them. As their numbers have grown, so have their roots in the community.
Two days before Katrina, the community celebrated a growing prosperity by consecrating a new Buddhist temple in a heavily Vietnamese neighborhood near the tip of a peninsula that reaches into the gulf.
It was one of the Biloxi neighborhoods hardest hit by the storm.
As the water rose, a group of monks and elderly women who had come from California for the celebration were trapped in the temple. They climbed onto tables and finally into the building’s attic for shelter, said Steven Nguyen, who was among the group.
“If the water had risen 2 more feet, we would have died. Fifty people would have died,” Nguyen said.
On the docks and processing facilities nearby, the pungent smell of dead fish permeates the air. The storm sheared open the facilities’ massive storage freezers, leaving thousands of pounds of shrimp to rot in the sun.
For the shrimpers, that means that even if they can get to sea soon, there is no place in Biloxi to sell what they catch.
Whether they survive will depend on things they still don’t know, boat captains say: How quickly they can get out. How quickly debris in the fishing grounds settles. If they find shrimp.
Many are pessimistic. The shrimp industry along the Gulf Coast has already been battered by rising fuel prices and cheap imports that have cut the price of shrimp in half in just a few years.
Combined with the destruction wrought by Katrina, some are simply leaving the sea and Mississippi behind.
“I’m going to Florida tomorrow,” said Tommy Vu, 47, whose boat was destroyed in the storm. He said he’ll try to make a living for him and his family as a mechanic.
“Fuel is high. Shrimp is low,” he said. “I’m not going out for shrimp anymore.”
Evacuee’s stories
UPROOTED TEEN STAYS OPTIMISTIC
Huddled with four classmates, Kyle Lane on Wednesday tried to focus on the graph paper laid out across his desk in algebra class, but the 16-year-old kept stealing glances at the new girl sitting at the next table.
Finally, he looked at Dieminque Harris, one of the dozens of young Hurricane Katrina evacuees enrolling in Colorado schools, fiddled with his pen and gently spoke.
“I’m kind of curious about what happened,” he said. “Where did you go?”
Just two weeks ago, Harris, 17, was a student at the Medical Sciences High School at Delgado Community College in New Orleans, eager to finish school and give birth to her baby in two months.
But Wednesday – 11 days after she and her fiancé tossed some clothes and a few personal items into his Buick and scrambled to get out of the Big Easy – she was sitting in a classroom at the Challenges, Choices and Images charter school.
“It was great, and all of a sudden, ‘Bam!’ a hurricane hits, and we have to leave,” Harris said.
Her new home is a dormitory on Community College of Aurora’s Lowry Campus, about a half-mile away.
She is surprisingly calm and laid back – and optimistic. During her lunch break Wednesday, she and a group of students sat under a shady tree on campus.
Students in Colorado “seem like they grew up different,” she said. They are, she said, more polite. “They’re like, ‘Hi!’ They come up and introduce themselves. No one in New Orleans really does that.”
BACK ON TRACK AT WAL-MART
Brittney Jones was afraid the hurricane had washed away a future she had only just begun. A freshman in college, a job as a cashier at a Wal-Mart in New Orleans – it all meant no one “would look at me as being a child anymore,” said the 19- year-old Jones.
Hurricane Katrina stole those symbols of independence. But Jones said the new job she has at a Wal-Mart in Aurora put her back on track.
“It feels like home,” she said. “It’s gotten better and getting better every day.”
Jones and five sisters evacuated from New Orleans and have been living with 11 other family members in a home in Green Valley Ranch since the weekend.
Jones’ supervisor in New Orleans helped her get in contact with a manager at the Wal-Mart on Abilene Street and East Exposition Avenue. Jones spoke with the manager Sunday, and to her surprise, she was given $250 in cash collected through the store’s disaster-relief fund and was told to come to work two days later.
CRANKING OUT JOB APPLICATIONS
Corey Hunt, 22, was visibly exhausted Wednesday afternoon as he slumped over his infant daughter’s stroller, using it as a makeshift desk while he filled out a job application.
He had arrived at Lowry at 4 a.m. with his girlfriend, their 4- month-old child, Ashley, and his girlfriend’s family.
When a woman told him there would be an impromptu job fair, he didn’t hesitate to get there with baby Ashley in tow.
While Hunt cranked out as many applications as he could, Joe Hughes from the Fin Tech metal-finishing company fed Ashley a bottle.
“I’m tired, but I need to find something as soon as possible,” said Hunt, who worked as a cook in New Orleans. “I’m not used to not having a job.”
From staff writers Sheba Wheeler, Karen Rouse and Felisa Cardona.
