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Full Interview with Sassafras LA

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Sassafras LA

Olivia Bourgeois, Ronnie Collins

Alex Naquin, and Caroline Guidry

Galliano, Louisiana

February 16, 2012

OB: I’m Olivia Bourgeois.  I’m 17 years old.  I live in Cut Off Louisiana and I was born in 1994.  I was 16 [at the time of the oil spill].

AN: I’m Alex Naquin.  Larose, Louisiana.   I was born July 29, 1994 and I was 15 at the time of the oil spill. 

CG:  My name is Caroline Guidry.  I’m from Galliano, Louisiana.  I was born in 1995.  At the time of the oil spill, I was 15.

RC: I’m Ronnie Collins.  I live in Galliano.  And I was born in 1994 and I was 16 at the time of the oil spill.  

Yeah, I’m a fifth generation oysterman.  My grandpa’s Collins’ Oysters, in Golden Meadow.  I had kind of gotten out of it, a little.  I would go with my dad when I was younger oyster-fishing, but after Katrina my dad had went with my mom and my other grandpa into the oil fields.  He drove tugs and carrying the barges and stuff.  So I wasn’t really in touch with him as much as I was when I was younger.  But I know just from him saying, we were this close to being out.  I don’t know if we’re still in business, but I know we’re getting some because we’re family. 

We lost our good oyster lease on Grand Isle, which is where we get our best oysters, our salty oysters from.  And another thing that really affected was the freshwater diversion killed a lot of the baby oysters from the nursery where we’d get the oysters when they were small.  You’d bring them to Grand Isle and you could actually see on the oyster the rapid growth. Maybe a few months later we’d harvest them.

It was the Davis Pond (freshwater diversion) that was opened up and the freshwater pushed the brackish/saltwater water out. 

AN: They pushed the water, because the oil was creeping. So the best way was to sort of increase the freshwater coming down to push the oil out.

RC: And the dispersants, the dispersants. That was bad because that made the oil sink. 

AN: The combination of those two.  It wasn’t the actual oil on top of the water that everybody saw. 

CG: The dispersants affected the crab because crabs are bottom feeders -

RC: Same as oysters -

CG: Crabs are hard to get now.  Oysters, the oyster industry –

RC: We’re coming back, actually.  We came back this year.  We [gestures to AN] actually had the pleasure of eating some two nights ago.

AN: We went over and played some paintball and the incentive was to eat some raw oysters right after we were done.  So we had some before and after.  So it was fun. 

CG: Yeah, the crabs are still hard to get, but like Ronnie said, the oyster industry’s coming back -

RC: The crabs are coming back also  –

AN: It’s staggered.

CG: Yeah, everything’s coming back but the general consensus is that things are still slow, everything’s kind of still slow.  Work’s slow for some people. It was really slow when it happened.

OB: My dad, he works 14 and 14, two weeks on an offshore oil rig and then two weeks at home.  And he’s a shrimper.  He’s a tool pusher, so he has like the big bosses and then him and there’s a few and then they have a big old crew underneath them. His entire crew, one went to North Dakota, one went to Africa, they were spread all over. It was just him and the other tool pushers and they couldn’t go offshore anymore and they would stay in the yard.  It’s just like New Iberia area, and they would go there and they’re doing work on some rigs or I think they worked on his boss’s house a little bit too.  They’re just pretty much sitting there doing whatever they can, they’re preparing the rigs to go out but they can’t get permits.

They say, “Okay the moratorium’s open, whatever, you all can go drill,” but they’re not allowing any permits to allow them to drill. So that was rough.  And we were so worried that he’d have to go far away.  We had to start saying well, we have to watch what we buy, we have to watch what we spend, just in case because he may get laid off.  We didn’t know.  And then the two weeks he’d be home, his favorite thing to do is shrimp.  So it’s not for money, it’s for pleasure, more.  So that, I guess he was almost like heartbroken, because that got hard to do.

AN: A lot of people, it wasn’t that you lost the source of income, but it was the scare that you could, you didn’t know where it would go.  Or also, his life completely changed [gestures to OB], their whole lives, the whole family, he couldn’t do what he wanted to do offshore, a lot of it –

CG: Whether for money or for pleasure. My dad pushes in-shore petroleum products, so he wasn’t that affected because that’s all off-shore stuff.   But our summer destination was taken away, Fourchon. The Fourchon beach is still closed.  The Grand Isle beach opened when?

AN: Last summer, right before summer.

CG: Yeah, so our whole summer was wiped out. 

AN: I’m not really tied, through my mother or father, to the oil industry.  My dad used to be in the boat industry and my whole family for years has worked in the oil fields but they kind of got out and my dad went into agriculture and my mother owns en embroidery business, actually, employs Olivia’s mother.  And so, the aspect of the economy didn’t happen right at that exact moment. It was basically our way of life.  We come back at the end of February we start wake boarding and that had to stop because a lot of the waterways were closed.  Fishing stopped. 

RC: Well, it didn’t necessarily stop.

AN: Well, a lot of the areas closed.

RC: It was the year I had come of age that my parents would finally let me take the boat out on my own and I went and I had a chart and I mapped out the water zones and I had to run sixty miles just me and a couple buddies just to catch our limit of red snapper.

AN: So it wasn’t as easy, if you wanted to do more inshore, you couldn’t.

Down here, it’s a lot of leisure activities you can do.  A whole paradise kind of went. We didn’t know what to do.  And that’s how we all kind of got started up, our whole organization, just seeing everything in kind of dismay and stuff and not knowing what to do. We felt like they weren’t doing enough, our whole community, communities felt that they weren’t doing enough.  So that’s where we were kind of spurred to action, just to do something. 

CG: And besides all the effects you could see, there was just kind of this feeling in the air.  I know my family was, thanking God we were some of the lucky ones. My dad pushes in-shore products and my mom’s a school teacher and we could just look left and right and we’d have neighbors who were shrimpers and we’d have friends who were affected, whether their parents’ business were shut down or whether their parents were helping to clean up.  It was a weird feeling.  Because like Alex said, it was our way of life.  It’s not just about jobs or anything, you know, this is who we are.

I know we all kind of felt like we weren’t getting help and we felt innocent.  Because for a state that contributes so much to the U.S. economy, we felt like we deserved more, more help, more response, quicker response.

AN: And actually Lafourche Parish started an energy council, and Caroline and I serve on behalf of student council at South Lafourche but also Sassafras, to mediate those issues if it does happen again.  It was all because we felt we could have done a lot more, we could have gone out there.  We couldn’t do any kind of response until the oil hit our shores, which was weeks later.  And we could have been there the first.  We’re the closest.  We could have been out there, and we couldn’t.