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Show We^esdoy^SeptZJQOSJL [JheiJtah Katrina deals a blow to family shrimping business had made shrimping an increasingly luckless business. In a sense, Katrina has accelerated a The Washington Post day of reckoning that had long been approachPORT FOURCHON, La.-Ngo Van Nguyen ing: Will this community of trawlers remain fled the communists of North Vietnam as a loyal to the hard-earned family business or child. In the 1970s, he braved his way to the will they, especially the younger VietnameseUnited States as a refugee, bringing along his Americans, leave shrimping behind in favor of a >vife and two young children. He then faced new way of life? down initial suspicions from many Cajuns in "I don't want to see it go, but it's becoming so bayou country while trying to establish his hard," Nguyen said, holding up his heavily calshrimping business. And starting with one lused hands. small boat, Nguyen built his business over the Timmy Tran, 37, Nguyen's brother-in-law, years into a 30-boat fleet, complete with his own embodies this dilemma. His 100-foot-long ice house and shrimp shed. shrimping boat lies crippled and beached on its Nguyen is nothing if not determined. side off Bayou Lafourche, tossed there by the So when Hurricane Katrina struck Bayou storm's deadly winds. Lafourche, a waterway in southeastern Tran, a high school dropout, does not know Louisiana 2 1/2 miles off the Gulf of Mexico, how he will survive without his boat. His Nguyen did not back down. Although many monthly expenses include a $1,500 mortgage of his relatives scattered as far as Houston to payment, $700 for his wife's 2005 GMC Yukon escape Katrina's wrath, Nguyen weathered the sport-utility vehicle and the costs of raising his storm on the bayou, staying on the boat of his three young children—not to mention the loan town's mayor so he could remain close to the and insurance fees still due on the boat. docks, boats and warehouses along the water. "That's all I got right now," said Tran, point"I wanted to stay with my business," said ing at his green and white shrimping boat, Nguyen, 55, who learned the shrimping trade as named T-Brothers after Tran and his two siba child. He hails from a long line of shrimpers, lings, one of whom is also a shrimper. He purincluding his great-grandmother, who lived to at chased it nine years ago for $250,000. least 100. Tran rode out the storm in Houston with his That business has suffered severe damage— immediate family, returning later to survey the and is possibly beyond repair. Nguyen's losses damage. He isn't sure he wants to continue in include his SI million ice house, two tractorthe shrimping business. trailer beds to haul shrimp and several heavy"You work all day and all night," he said. duty scales that cost roughly $15,000 each. And "You don't his $10,000 conveyor belt was damaged by a sleep out large, green dumpster that was blown into it by there. At first the storm's winds. I liked it, but "I put 40 years in this," Nguyen said. "It's too now I don't late for me to start again." like it." Nguyen is part of some 1,500 Vietnamese Like it or families settled along the Mississippi, Alabama not, it is hard and Louisiana coast, making a living as shrimp- to imagine ers --or trawlers, as they are known here--in the life here any heart of Cajun country. Now Hurricane Katrina other way. has all but destroyed their livelihood and put In the towns this community's future in peril. around Bayou Lafourche, -oeverything But for Nguyen and his family, that future revolves is not just about trying to repair the damage around the wrought by the hurricane. Even before the water. There storm, foreign competition and high fuel prices BY D A N A HEDGPETH /LAIWP photo BUSINESSMAN AND SHRIMPER Kim Nguyen, left, of Biloxi, Miss., and Ngo Van Nguyen, of Cut Off, La., sit on dock a few days after Hurricane Katrina wrecked havoc in Port Fourchon, La. Shrimping is one of many industries now in disarray following the hurricane. are stores that repair nets and sell bait and other equipment. There are charter fishing boat companies for leisure anglers. There is a small restaurant that caters to wealthy outsiders with summer homes built on wooden stilts over the bayou. And, of course, there is shrimping. Boat crews go out for at least two to six weeks at a time, trading their family life for the constant smell of diesel and salty spray from the gulf waters. The groups of four to five men work all night-shrimping is best in the moonlighttossing out nets and hauling them in. Each boat boasts two huge metal poles, called outriggers, used to cast the nets. The season runs from May, when trawling boats line up at the mouth of the bayou to get to the gulf, until October or December, depending on the size of the boat and where it is trawling. From 1996 until 2001, business was good. Fuel was cheap and shrimp prices were about $5 a pound. But in recent years, cheap farm-raised shrimp from Asia—including from Vietnamhas undercut Louisiana shrimpers, locals say. Shrimp now goes for $3.25 a pound. And due to the rising cost of fuel, it can take as much as $65,000 to fill the massive tanks of a 100-foot boat. "It's the same thing as going to a casino," Nguyen said. "Sometimes you lose. Anybody in the shrimping business is taking a gamble." Last year, Nguyen's shrimping business barely broke even. "It's a dying business for the Vietnamese," said Nguyen's son Vuong. "It's the field that got us to where we are, but it's time to get out. You can see the signs every year we're not making a profit." Ngo Van Nguyen looked at the last catch one of his boats had in its belly before the hurricane struck and ponders what he might do next. "I wait and see what will happen," he said. "I will look and see for a job. I don't know what I will do exactly." County coronor faces grim job of identifying neighbors ing is standing. Just next door is the Garden of Memory Cemetery, where tombstones poke up through ground made sodden by floods. Farther BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss.-The makeshift down, four mangled houses lie pancaked on morgue in this leveled town of 8,000 people is a the railroad tracks. They were pushed there by parking lot on a narrow two-lane road that runs a storm surge that was 25 feet high, and made along some rusty train tracks. Six refrigerated the oak trees look like bushes. The huge, twisttrailers are lined up in neat parallel behind a ing, roundhouse punch Katrina delivered to the chain-link fence. Bay St. Louis-Waveland area—the two towns, For a week now Norma Stiglet, the county separated imperceptibly, are located within a coroner, a grandmotherly woman with white few miles of each other and linked by Central hair and spectacles, has been identifying Avenue —is evident in the collapsed roofs and the decaying corpses of lifelong friends and the trees that lie split open. Some of the roofs neighbors who tried unsuccessfully to ride out are marked in code with orange paint. The code Hurricane Katrina. indicates searchers found a body there. "It's almost indescribable, because I was The recovery effort was at first haphazard, born and raised with these people," Stiglet said conducted by volunteers and local law enforceSunday, sitting by the trailers in a rickety foldment. When officials from FEMA arrived there ing chair. "You want to help them. But what can were chain-of-command issues and confusion a coroner do?" over Mississippi state laws for body recovery The official death toll in Mississippi is 150. and identification. Also, communications in Bay The last official count in Hancock County, of St. Louis-Waveland are spotty. Cell phones do which Bay St. Louis is part, stood at just 36, but not work and radio traffic is jammed. "Running that could be ludicrously deceptive. One law up and down the street on a four-wheeler, that's enforcement officer estimated it is more likely to communication," Stiglet said. be between 600 and 800. The residents are "in The FEMA search and recovery teams folfor a shock," he said. The reason the number is low poorly drawn maps. They put in 14-hour so low is that the state only counts bodies that days, slogging through mud that is in some have been recovered and positively identified. cases two feet deep, and climbing piles of debris, For days, Stiglet was alone and besieged as under a blazing hot sky. "You just line up and she did her work. Finally, some organization is start walking, and find an odor," said Capt. Rob beginning to take shape: the Federal Emergency Trautwein, member of a unit from Hoover, Ala. Management Agency's Disaster Mortuary "Seven days into this, your nose is your biggest Assistance Teams, or DMORTs, have begun clue." to arrive with additional coroners. FEMA has Trautwein stood with the rest of his crew at coordinated with local law enforcement, and the beach, trying to scrub the mud and nastisearch-and-rescue units from around the counness from his boots with the salt water of the try are conducting a grid search of the entire Mississippi Sound. Every now and then, amid town, house by house. the macabre discoveries, they are heartened to After so many days, some of the discoveries find a survivor. And, sometimes, more than are hideous. Stiglet refuses to talk about such one. One unit found 28 people in an attic. On matters. "We don't discuss that," she said. Saturday evening, a Pennsylvania unit found But other officials describe the conditions two others, barely alive, clinging to a wrecked frankly. Bodies have bloated, and heat, water shrimp boat in a canal. and insects hasten their decomposition. Some of They find a lot of dead animals, but some live the bodies are so badly decomposed they don't ones. The Hoover unit discovered a bedraggled have fingerprints. Others are damaged or torn and half-starved stray dog, and named him apart. "It's not at all pretty," said James Johnson, Lucky. They also found a mud-encrusted kitten, emergency operations coordinator. "They're and gently bathed her in the gulf waters. finding pieces. If you find an arm, do you call it On Saturday a search unit from Montgomery a body? It's pretty grisly." County, Md., brought in the body of a man in What keeps people working in such circumhis 60s discovered after his neighbors smelled stances? "In my opinion it's determination and something rotting in the rubble on their street. love of your fellow man," Stiglet said. He was wearing a life preserver. Born and raised in the area, Stiglet has been The unit has been digging out bodies since the coroner for Hancock County since she was Wednesday. But given the wreckage confronting first elected in 1990, and must watch people she them, its commander, Chief John Tippett, 47, of knows suffer the terrible uncertainty of loved Damascus, Md., said he expected to find more. ones unaccounted for. "It's hard, very hard on "There have been victims, but not as many everyone, but it's harder on them than on me. as there could be," he said. "We've been very And we just don't hardly have much info for relieved at not finding larger losses of life." people." On a given day, Tippett and his unit search Sometimes, Stiglet cannot confirm the iden40 square blocks. When a body is discovered, tity of the corpses. The density of the wreckage, they radio their command center at a Sonic the intensity of the heat, and the depth of the fast-food stop on Highway 90, announcing their water and mud have combined to make identi"find" along with their global positioning coorfication a gruesome task. She tries to match a dinates. The message is relayed up the chain of body with an address where it was found, or an command to the Emergency Operations Center, object. "We're using the house numbers where and law enforcement and the coroner are notithey were found," she said. "We just never fied. thought we'd see water like that." They then spray-paint the coordinates, along The morgue sits on Central Avenue in the lot with a code indicating a death, in vivid orange of the defunct Alcan Cable Co. Around it,, noth- paint somewhere on the location. They may use B Y SALLY JENKINS The Washington Post /LAIWP photo NORMA STIGLCT, the Hancock County coroner, has the task of identifying the decaying corpses of lifelong friends and neighbors who tried unsuccessfully to ride out Hurricane Katrina. "I was born and raised with these people," Stiglet said Sunday, sitting by a portable morgue in Bay St. Louis, Miss. "You want to help them. But what can a coroner do?" a door, or a roof. But sometimes there is nothing but splinters, so they spray-paint the street. Next, they take a couple of basic photographs for the coroner. "The photos are because they are overwhelmed, and it may take them a couple of days to recover the body," Tippett said. "And they like to see it as close to the time of death as possible." At the Edmond Fahey Funeral Home in Bay St. Louis, Edmond Fahey is in no position to bury his neighbors. The ground is still too wet, the cemetery is a wreck, and there is no water or electricity in the town. Fahey's home and possessions were lost in the hurricane, as were the homes of every member of his staff. On Monday, a week after the hurricane struck, he stood on the porch of the funeral parlor, shirtless, a stricken expression on his face. "Devastation is not a word to describe it," he said. "It's worse." Fahey rode out the storm inside his funeral parlor, along with his staff, Stiglet and an embalmed body. "People know where to find me," Stiglet says. "They know they can find me at the funeral home." The parlor took on a lot of water, but it stood. Fahey and his staff have been living there ever since. "We've been in contact with a few families, but no funerals are arranged," Fahey said. "It'll be a while before we can conduct a service. All his hearses are ruined. "They look good," Fahey said, "but they don't run." A SEARCH AND RESCUE VOLUNTEER with the Refuge Society in Tulsa, Okla., searches with his scent dogs, Phobos and Tromos, in Bay St. Louis. Miss., on Sunday. AATWPphoto |