This road, once surrounded by acres of lush vegetation and marshes, is now the sole interruption to a large body of water that stretches to the horizon. Large rocks that shoulder Island Road now serve as the last defense from rising waters.

But the crumbling road isn’t what concerns Albert Naquin, chief of the small tribe of Biloxi-Chitimacha and Choctaw Indians that live on the Isle. Rather, it’s the state of the community at the road’s end.

“The biggest threat is that we’re going to wind up being non-existent and it’s happening faster and faster,” said the 63 year-old tribal chief. “I know we’re going to try to hold onto the island as long as we can, but it’s going to be gone.”

There is a physical disparity between how Naquin describes the Island he grew up on and the one he sees today. His island, he reminisces, was full of native Cyprus trees, vegetable gardens and marked by a small little canal. It’s what he called paradise.

Today, the handful of choking trees and decaying stumps that dot the skyline serve as a stinging reminder of what once was. That narrow canal—it’s now an entire open body of water. And experts say what has happened to the Isle de Jean Charles a mere snapshot of the fresco that’s Southern Louisiana wetlands—a fresco that’s increasingly being painted with watery blues.

***

Over thousands of years, the free-flowing Mississippi River dropped sediment and flooded regions, resulting in the formation of marshes and land. The curves, twists and turns of the river were crucial to hashing out Louisiana’s landscape. The marshes now make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. coastal wetlands, an area of roughly 4,600 square miles.

But what took thousands of years to build has taken mere decades to dismantle. Since 1930, more than 2,300 square miles of wetlands have been eroded—an area larger than the size of Delaware. And it isn’t stopping: Close to 80 percent of wetland loss in the United States points back to the Pelican State.

“It’s like watching the Titanic go down. I mean it isn’t gradual,” says Oliver Houck, Professor of Law at Tulane University. “And the only reason that it’s not accelerating more is we’ve lost so much marsh that volumetrically, as a percentage, there’s less left to lose.”

The universal statistic used to put this into perspective is that for every half-hour, an area the size of a football field is lost—and that’s every hour, day, week, month and year.

“The crucial area of the marshes is simply getting smaller and smaller, and at this rate it will disappear,” says author and prominent ecologist Dr. Carl Safina. “And as it shrinks, the productivity of it shrinks by like amount.”
What’s disconcerting about the land loss is how the Louisiana way of life is so heavily shaped by what goes on in these marshes, or what does not.

***

“The marshes are the critical nursery ground for probably trillions of shrimp and fish and lots of species as well as the feeding and wintering grounds for millions, probably, of ducks and geese and lots of other kinds of birds,” says Safina, who is the founder of the Blue Ocean Institute, an environmental organization dedicated to the ocean conservation.

The wetlands also provide room for enterprise. These nurseries also spawn the beginning of a food chain that fuels a $3 billion seafood industry, one that also includes recreational fishing. More than a third of seafood within the continental U.S. comes from southern Louisiana—shrimp, crabs, oysters and crawfish. And the coast beckons to travelers, allowing the state to rake in $9.3 billion in tourism each year.

But with disappearing wetlands comes the increasing chance of disappearing profits. “If we lose half the marshes it means that we’ve lost about half of the productivity of the marshes,” Safina says. “They are what they produce, and if they’re not there, they’re not able to produce.”

“All the little fish that spawn in our delta could cease to have a nursery,” says Foster Creppel, a local wetlands activist and innkeeper of the Woodland Plantation in West Pointe à la Hache, La. “And if that happens then they’re not feeding the fish, the tuna, and the redfish and the wahoo and everything else that’s out in the Gulf.”

***

Creppel owns a piece of history—the antebellum mansion that sits on his 50-acres of Mississippi River-front property was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. That mansion, a nine-bedroom inn, is also the iconic image that is stickered on bottles of Southern Comfort whiskey. But due to the disappearing marshes, Creppel is aware of the fact that his property could be part of history for another reason—hurricanes.

“The hurricanes have done more damage now to Louisiana and this region because I think we have wetlands lost,” says Creppel. “There aren’t as many barrier islands and not as many ridges.”

Besides being lucrative breeding grounds for seafood, Louisiana’s wetlands serve a more primitive function. They act a natural shield against impeding hurricanes, not only slowing down the winds with trees and land but absorbing consequential flooding. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one acre of wetlands can store up to 1.5 million gallons of floodwater.

But because of the vast deterioration of the marshes, hurricanes not only wreak more havoc, they also pose a greater threat to the wetlands themselves. When Hurricane Katrina blew through in 2005, the wetlands went with her, about eighty square miles worth. And that was just in eight hours.

“When the hurricanes come, they can blow father up,” Safina says. “The salt water can go farther in. Every time that happens, the edges of the channels collapse a little bit more and what was marsh becomes open water in a progression over time.”

***

Wetlands loss was once a natural evolution that fell in line with each shift in the Mississippi River. Historically, there was an overabundance of wetland creation versus depletion. Now, times have changed. Canals, dams and pollutants have impacted the flow and quality of the Mississippi River as it bleeds into the Louisiana delta.

Man-made levees are built to protect high population cities like New Orleans from flooding. But they also starve the wetlands from rich nutrients and sediment deposits along the river’s banks. Dams set upstream dehydrate the marshes from a natural flow of fresh water, leaving acres to die to increasing salinity from creeping saltwater.

“The seas are rising, the salt is coming in, the Mississippi River that used to build and maintain this area is sediment-starved,” says Houck, who has recently authored a book, ‘Down on the Batture,’ which reminisces on what the Mississippi Delta once was like. “It’s as if we’re on short rations, you know, and we’re on one-third of the bed-lode that we used to have. Two-thirds of what built us and maintained us is now gone.”

Also, chemicals and fertilizers from farmlands in states as far north as Wisconsin and Minnesota travel all the way down to Louisiana’s fragile ecosystem, introducing harmful pollutants to an already-threatened marshland.

“Instead of creating this incredible vast, vibrant, living delta, they create a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where there’s almost nothing living on the seafloor outside the delta for about the size of the state of Maryland,” says Safina.

So when the BP Deepwater Horizon Rig exploded last April, there was much concern as to what impact the looming oil would have on this fragile area of Louisiana.

***

Dave Cvitanovich is a life-long oysterman who works in Venice, La. He has a stronghold on the oyster-business, owning hundreds of acres of breeding grounds. His oysters will normally land on the plates of popular restaurants in New Orleans, some of which his family owns. A good harvest year for Cvitanovich would come out to 3 million pounds. He’s only caught ten percent of his peak catch post the blowout.

“You’ve got this oil saturated in the marsh. This oil is saturated in the mud. How do you get it out? They had miles and miles of booms, they had dispersants, this that and the other,” says a frustrated Cvitanovich. It’s hard to say just how bad the blowout has impacted Cvitanovich’s oyster beds. Oysters thrive on the right mix of freshwater and saltwater.

So when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal ordered to open a number of diversion dams weeks after the blowout occurred, the hopes of flushing out the oil back into the ocean and away from the marshes backfired on Cvitanovich’s oysters. Unable to endure a surging amount of fresh water, many of his oyster fields didn’t survive. Cvitanovich is now left anxiously awaiting to see what’s in store for next season.

“We’re talking seven to eight months now that it happened and you step on that piece of ground [near the wetlands] and oil’s at the bottom of your shoe,” he says. “When’s the end of it? Is it this week? Next month? Next year? I don’t know, you don’t know. No one can give us an answer.”

“As bad as this blowout was, it’s nothing. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what all of oil industry giants, Chevron, Exxon, everyone of them, have done to the Louisiana coastal zone,” says Houck, who has fought Louisiana’s energy industry for nearly 30 years. “The real damage to the zone is the destruction, the active destruction of the zone with this network of canals and levees and drilling machines that have just torn it apart.”

***

Houck is a former federal prosecutor from Washington D.C. whose work targeted polluters along the Potomac River. He then joined the litigation team of the National Wildlife Federation where he fell in love with another river, the Mississippi.

Witnessing firsthand the effects of Louisiana’s oil and gas companies for decades, Houck isn’t too surprised. More than 10,000 miles of canals and pipelines have been dug through Louisiana’s wetlands, facilitating better pathways and transport to and from oil reservoirs.

“The marshes are the enemy,” says Houck, commenting on how they have been treated. “We tear them up, we get rid of them. They’re referred to as ‘over-burden’ as if they were some nuisance on top of precious oil.”

And the small natural channels that were deep enough for smaller boats have now been dredged at the bottom and widened to accommodate oil-tankers, cargo ships and supply boats. “Those channels and all the cutting in the marshes has resulted in the marshes eroding over time,” says Safina. “As it’s eroded, the saltwater has gotten in further, those forests are dying back; as they die back, the freshwater swamp turns to salt marsh, and then the marsh erodes to open water, and then it’s gone.”

Oil and gas exploration has existed in Louisiana since the 1930s, and since then, Houck says, local legislators have jumped on the industry for funds. “’Kind of work together’ is much too loose a phrase. They’re one in the same,” the New Orleans professor says. “The energy industry owns Louisiana politics, and they own it every level. They own it at the parish level, the state level, the legislature, the White House, the Congressional delegation.”It’s this intimate relationship, he says, that has allowed for the carving of the Wetlands and the looming consequence.

***

It would be an understatement to say that oil and gas play a big role in Louisiana’s economy. These energy industries have a $70 billion impact on the state, according to a 2007 economic study by Dr. Loren Scott, a now retired professor of Economics at Louisiana State University. Roughly $12 billion are distributed to household income for an industry that employs more than 320,000 in the state. Louisiana’s energy industries paid roughly $1.2 billion dollars, or 13 percent of the total state tax revenue, in 2009, according to Louisiana’s Department of Natural Resources. Back in 1981, it paid $1.62 billion, which amounted to more than 40 percent of the state’s income.

“The oil and gas industry and the maritime industry are very powerful and they’ve been the backbone of our economy in south Louisiana, but this commercial seafood industry has also,” says Creppel. “I just don’t think we’ve had the right philosophy about harvesting and using those resources.”

That is why it’s commonplace for local residents to work both industries. It’s what Cvitanovich, an inland navigation specialist as described on his business card, does when he’s not oystering. He helps the oil and gas companies lay pipeline through bayous and estuaries. “It’s a hell of a balancing act,” Cvitanovich says, “It’s like walking on eggshells sometimes. At the same time, you’ve got to live with one. It’s just like a marriage.”

The marriage of oil and water is what has many in the region so strongly opposed to the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling, because it’s also seen as a ban on livelihood. “The moratorium on deepwater drilling to me was not a very wise thing to do,” says Creppel, the wetlands activist. “We need the oil, unfortunately until we get better at renewable energy, we’re going to be really dependent on gas and oil. I don’t see that changing for a while.”

***

A federal program instituted in 1990 has provided a glimmer of hope for Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands. Under the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration act, Congress has paid an average of $50 million every year for marshland preservation and has spent roughly $1 billion during the 20 years since the act was enacted.

And in 2010, a $35.6 million budget request in President Obama’s 2011 spending bill was passed, providing construction and research funding to the Army Corps of Engineers to reconstruct the wetlands, the first time in history. The Louisiana governorship has its own office, the Office of Coastal Activities, dedicated to overseeing restoration, creation and redevelopment projects associated with wetland conservation.

But Louisiana’s dams, river pollutants, levees, oil and gas exploration all continue play a role to a dampening future for these wetlands. It leaves some without hope, as the realization dawns that it may be too late to save Louisiana’s marshes.

“I’m not sure any dramatic change at this point, unless it’s truly dramatic, I mean of a scale of engineering, for example, we haven’t even imagined yet, that there’s anything that can save south Louisiana over time,” says Houck. “We’re never going to get Louisiana back, not the Louisiana fathers and grandfathers knew of.”

Others are a little more optimistic about the wetlands. “Now we’ve destroyed it in 100 years. To think that we can come in and build wetlands restoration projects that rebuild these wetlands in ten years is ridiculous,” says Creppel, addressing the criticism he often hears about such projects. “It’s gonna take commitment and education, a lot of money and a lot of time.”

But it’s time that Chief Naquin and his people just don’t have.

***

“If a hurricane comes, another Gustav comes, I don’t think there’s gonna be any houses left on the island,” says Naquin.

In 2000, there were 68 families related to the tribe that lived on the island, now there are less than 20 families—it’s in part to a multiple of reasons, but connected to one common problem. There’s no room on the island.

Naquin described the island to have once been as wide as five miles and seven miles long. He says it’s now a quarter of a mile in width and two miles in length, and because of that, it has become near impossible for future developments in hopes expanding his community. As a result, many tribe members move to other cities and towns and inter-marry, as he describes it, the Indian blood is going down.

It’s why he has raised controversy in his small tribe proposing the idea take the few million dollars in federal and local tax dollars to repave the road and use it relocate 13 miles inland to Bourg, La. He’s riled up many tribe members, but he remains adamant and fearful.

“If nothing is done to bring the Indian community together, we’re just going to fade away,” Naquin says. “Instead of just being Indian, we’re just going to be people.”

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Numbers given by the federal government on how much oil is accounted for and how much oil is still missing are controversial. As the government estimates 75 percent of oil has been removed, evaporated, burned, washed ashore or dispersed, it’s the last word that causes debate. Oil that has been removed, evaporated, burned or washed ashore has been for the most part, removed from the environment. Oil that has been dispersed is still in the environment, just broken up into small droplets.

“It’s all in the water,” author and ecologist Dr. Carl Safina said.

Residents worry that oil still in the water could show up later due to storms and changes in the tide.

“It’s like a ghost in the water,” Grand Isle Mayor David Camardelle said. “If the gulf gets rough, they’ll call me in the morning and say, you got more tarballs on the beach.”

When it comes to the beaches and barrier islands, much of the oil has been removed, but some still remains. Visit http://www.geoplatform.gov/gulfresponse/ for a detailed and interactive map showing oil, oil testing results and other information on the BP Blowout.

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• Gulf Response: Maps

But he dreamed up these plans before the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and now, Mayeux can’t be certain what the seas will bring him in the short years leading up to his retirement.

“All we have are ‘We don’t knows,’” said Mayeux, a resident of the barrier island town of Grand Isle. “We don’t know the unknowns.”

Mayeux says he’s unsure what kind of money he’ll be able to reel in over the next few years because of the possibility that there’s oil still mucking up the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The oil, he worries, may spoil future harvests or scare away customers.

His worries aren’t unfounded: He says he’s noticed a lack of seabob shrimp in Louisiana waters lately, a species that’s usually plentiful in the winter months. “Maybe the oil got them,” he says. “I have no idea.”

It was his empty nets that prompted him to file for his share of the $20 billion fund that BP has forked over to compensate Gulf Coast residents who’ve been impacted by the spill.

“I’ve been compensated for 2010, but where am I going in the future?” Mayeux wonders. “We don’t know. We have no idea.”

The fisherman says he got a check from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility for losses he suffered in 2010. The controversial payment program is BP’s way of compensating residents who suffered from the worst oil disaster in the nation’s history.

The claims process is overseen by Kenneth Feinberg, a high-profile lawyer who has experience attaching prices to personal tragedies: he handed payments to families of the victims of 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings.

Dubbed the Claims Czar, Feinberg was appointed by President Obama to be the independent mediator in the Gulf claims process. And despite his history handling high-profile tragedy funds, Feinberg is in new territory down in the Gulf, judging by the size of the fund and the sheer volume of claims that have been filed so far.

In just under 6 months, Feinberg has paid out a dizzying $3.3 billion. But the money’s not getting out fast enough for the thousands of residents who say they’re still bleeding from the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spewed from the seafloor this summer.

Among the more than 483,000 unique claims that have been filed with the GCCF so far, there are hundreds of spill victims who say they’ve gotten lost in the paperwork. Many say they’ve been underpaid or inexplicably denied. Others complain about the sluggishness it takes for money to appear in the mail, or about payment options that are simply too confusing.

To address concerns like these, Massachusetts-native Feinberg has been holding town hall meetings in oil-spattered areas along the Gulf Coast. In town after town, he takes the podium to quell crowds of spill victims who, in turn, hurl complaints at the man who has become the face of all their frustrations.

“We’re trying to do the right thing,” Feinberg proclaimed at a Jan. 10 town hall meeting in Grand Isle, where fisherman Mayeux sat in the audience, along with more than 200 others. “This is an unprecedented job. There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of claims, but we’re getting through them. The money is getting out.”

Still, many people say they’re unhappy with the way Feinberg and BP are handling the payment program. Among the sorest of sore points with spill victims is his ‘final quick payment’ option, designed for claimants who feel the oil has already done its worst. Takers receive a check within two weeks, $5,000 for individuals or $25,000 for businesses– but they must waive their right to ever sue BP for more money down the road.

During the confrontational question-and-answer segment of the Grand Isle meeting, several residents stood before Feinberg to say $5,000 just adds insult to injury.

“You are here today to tell me, in my opinion, that a person’s life is only worth $5,000,” said scornful Grand Isle resident Karen Hopkins, the bookkeeper for a local shrimp wholesaler.

Another woman, who said she was a fisherman’s wife, told Feinberg the $5,000 was “a slap in the face.”

The attorneys general from four Gulf-region states released a joint-statement in December, urging claimants not to take the final quick pay option without first speaking to a lawyer, unless they were positive they wouldn’t be impacted by the spill in the future.

But claims data provided by the GCCF indicates the majority of claimants have seized the quick pay option: Nearly $800,000,000 of the BP fund has been paid out this way to date.

There are two other options open to people who have documented proof that the oil has damaged their way of life. They can file a claim for interim payments to receive a check once per quarter, if they can prove past and on-going damage from the spill. Or, citizens can file for a ‘full review final payment,’ which, according to the GCCF, is “an offer of a lump sum amount for all past and future damages based upon specific documentation received and expert analysis of future damage.”

But Feinberg says the GCCF is still in the process of determining precisely how to calculate future damages, which is unsettling to many residents like Mayeux, whose years of expertise in local waters are now useless when guessing what future harvests will be like.

“I understand where Feinberg is coming from,” said the fisherman in an interview after the meeting. “He doesn’t know either. But give me some figure to compensate for my loss! He can’t come up with it.

Feinberg assured the packed house at the Grand Isle Community Center that full review final payment formula would be released within the next few weeks, based on information from “Louisiana experts and fishermen,” he said. He pledged to hold a public comment period after announcing the calculation, to get feedback from claimants before it became final.

But that was just one small point in a sea of frustrations, as residents raised a host of other complaints to Feinberg at the meeting. Many complained of the GCCF’s lackluster 1-800 hotline, which irritated many callers with busy signals or unhelpful service.

Others took issue with Feinberg’s status as an independent mediator, while BP is paying his law firm $850,000 each month (“Who else is gonna pay for this program?” the lawyer snapped in response).

Claimant after claimant stood before him to say they’d been wrongfully denied, when their co-workers or employees had gotten money. And frustration is giving way to desperation. At a town hall meeting on Jan. 11 in Lafitte, one man made local headlines when he got down on his knees before Feinberg to beg for claim money.

Feinberg isn’t the only one listening to complaints like these. Local lawmakers have gotten such an earful from their constituents about the GCCF that they summoned Feinberg to Capitol Hill for a Jan. 27 hearing to grill him on his program. There, some criticized the sluggish pace of the process and accused him of a lack of transparency.

Feinberg testified at the hearing that he suspects some 7,500 of the 481,000 claims filed so far are fraudulent. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted at least eight alleged scammers to date.

But for the hundreds of thousands of others who are legitimately hurting from the spill, fraudulent claimants are the least of their worries.

“I was figuring on four, five more years,” said Mayeux. “Then I was going to throw in the towel. But they haven’t accounted for the oil, and we figure in the spring, it’s gonna come back.”

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Related Links:

• Gulf Coast Claims Facility

Established in 1954, the volunteer fire department for Venice, Louisiana has been helping residents rebound time and time again through hurricanes, oil spills and economic hardship. Venice, 80 miles south of New Orleans, sits down the Mississippi River on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, at the end of the road.

The firehouse and its staff grew from a modest beginning of one Chevrolet pick-up truck. Eventually growing to fit the needs of not only Venice, but of surrounding towns, this small time fire department can say it’s seen it all, from house and boat fires, to alligators, to the 27-foot floods that came with Hurricane Katrina.

With old photo albums that survived Hurricane Katrina, retired fire chief Ernest “Noonie” Bourgeois spins tales of the good old days.

“My wife and I took all these pictures and we put them in an album,” said Noonie, the fire chief for 32 years. “We kept the histories going.”

And what a history it is, laced with destruction and rebuilding.

At the end of 2010, the department moved into its third fire house, a sleek, ultra-modern two story white building that stands out in stark contrast to the modest trailers and homes surrounding it. Directly next to the firehouse sits an old, abandoned garage that used to hold oil pipes. Now, it sits disheveled, with the bright yellow line shining on the paint showing the flood’s high water mark.

Everything this firehouse does serves the town. When not fighting fires, the workers hold fishing tournaments to raise money, helping salvage wreckage and even flying Santa Claus overhead in a helicopter, something which always gets local kids excited.

But with all the good times and memories that Noonie has about the department, he also recalls the bad times. For three and a half months in 2005, Noonie and his wife lived through one of the toughest rebuilding efforts he hopes the town will probably ever have to go through.

“My wife and I were the first ones down here after the hurricane,” said Noonie. “We lived on a gazebo and slept on lawn chairs.”

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Venice did not have an easy time rebuilding. First, the fire department had to get on its feet and get its evacuated trucks back from the state. However, the Plaquemines Parish president at the time did not want the residents to return home, and initially refused to allow the trucks back into Venice. After a fight with the Salvation Army, Noonie says he was able to bring the trucks back down and start the process of healing, “It was so the people could have protection,” he said.

And protection they needed, in the months immediately following the storm, the department responded to over sixty fires, residual effects of wet power lines and electrical units that were not cleaned properly after the water receded.

A major task for the department was to help hose down buildings, houses and streets so that it was safe for people to live in Venice again. They also distributed groceries off of the fire trucks. Noonie kept as many of his crew in Venice as long as possible to make the transition safer for all residents.

Through thick and thin, the fire department has made it their mission to stick with the residents of the Venice community. They strive to provide a safe feeling in both difficult and calm times.

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• Plaquemines Parish

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ravaged southeastern Louisiana and continued along the gulf coast to Mississippi and Alabama.

According to the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Katrina resulted in the deaths of more than 1,800 people, forced 250 thousand people to leave their homes and caused damage of around $125 billion.

Even though New Orleans received most of the news coverage, Katrina first struck farther south, in Plaquemines Parish. Half of the parish was destroyed.

Venice, the southernmost inhabited area on the Louisiana coast, sits within a ring levee on the Mississippi River – one which Katrina overpowered. The entire town was flooded, oil field vessels and barges were strewn about like child’s toys, and homes and buildings destroyed.

A Venice resident for 80 years, former Fire Chief Ernest “Noonie” Bourgeois, is now his town’s unofficial historian. He remembers the storm like it was yesterday.

During his early days, he spent his time commercial fishing commercially, but supported his family as a firefighter for Boothville-Venice Fire Department.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, Bourgeois says his two-story house, standing about five feet off the ground, had water up to the ceiling. When he came back, his $150,000 home was destroyed.

He remembers that he and his wife were the first ones to return to Venice after the hurricane, but had to live on their gazebo. Both would wake up from a lawn chair each morning because they were forced to live on their porch for almost four months.

Despite that, Bourgeois says it did not stop him from parking two trailers on the side of the firehouse to distribute groceries and ice until the National Guard took over .

With sustained winds of 127 mph (Category 3), Katrina was one of the strongest storms ever to lash the United States coast.

“It was bad,” he said. “I thank God that we didn’t lose any more lives than we did. People had enough to move out and I’ve had enough of hurricanes and storms and running off-shore crew boats.”

He also remembers the devastation inflicted by Hurricane Camille. Bourgeois ran a 100-foot crew boat back in Aug. 1969 when Camille, last century’s second strongest hurricane, made landfall in Louisiana. Because predictions underestimated Camille’s strength and the town was evacuated at the last-minute, the 200 mph gusting winds and 24-foot flood levels killed 143 people.

Noonie says Katrina was even more brutal, though the town recovered quickly once people started moving back. What hurt Venice the most was that Katrina destroyed all of the grocery stores and most schools.

Fortunately, the fire trucks were moved to a safer location, so after the storm passed the fire department could step in to help. Once the storm was over, firemen used the hoses on the trucks to wash down buildings and streets, so the town could begin to rebuild. Bourgeois says that after Katrina, the department put out 69 fires in three months.

Shrimp boat captain and 57 year resident Roland Mollere, has few fond memories of how his hometown has survived decades of storms.

“This place has been devastated since 1967 with Betsy, and then Camille came along and Katrina took the rest of it out,” says Mollere. “Now everything is a trailer or a trailer park.”

“So, five years after Katrina, everybody’s gettin’ back on track, everybody that took a major hit,” said Kurt Fromholz, a spokesperson for Plaquemines Parish president Bill Nungesser.

“They’ve reinvested, rebuilt, you know they might have a trailer now before they had a house, but they’re back living in the southern end and they’re goin’ along when all of a sudden the oil spill happens..”

Life-long and battle scarred residents of Venice remember hurricanes vividly, but they are confident that if they survived Katrina and her predecessors, they can survive this spill.

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Once the so-called “special master” of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, Feinberg now serves as the government-appointed administrator of the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Compensation Fund. It is he who decides whether a claim is legitimate.

The Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded last April, killing 11 rig workers and spilling an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the course of 85 days.

BP took full responsibility, vowing to pay for all legitimate claims to people who could prove their livelihoods had been damaged by the oil spill. According to the Gulf Coast Claims Facility website, Individuals and businesses eligible for compensation must prove damages involving clean-up costs, property, loss of profit or physical injury or death.

On May 14, President Obama announced a moratorium on drilling new deep sea wells in the Gulf of Mexico, one which also halted permits for new work on existing oil drilling rigs. The ban hurt Gulf Coast communities economically dependent on offshore drilling for jobs and income, as well as the fishing industry. Coast fishermen are still uncertain about the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants used to combat the oil spill, particularly their impact on shrimp and crabs.

Clint Guidry, the secretary of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, came to the meeting prepared with questions and a list of claimants’ problems. He argued that everyone’s livelihoods and claims are equally important, no matter their size.

“You have to remember that at the beginning of all of this we asked for some stability in our lives,” Guidry said. “That’s why the $20 billion program was created, because we lobbied for it and we wanted that.”

In June, BP told the U.S. government that it would create a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the oil spill. About five months later, Feinberg said that he expected to dole out $10 billion in emergency claims from the $20 billion fund to those who filed before Nov. 23 and planned to pay claimants within 48 hours or businesses within seven days. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. This month, more than 120,000 claimants who received payments chose a one-time disbursement—$5000 for individuals, $25,000 for businesses. BP offered one-time payouts to claimants who waived their right to sue.

The Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) has 12 offices in Louisiana, including one in Lafitte, and others in Florida and Alabama, to help businesses and individuals file claims for costs and damage due to the spill. According to the website, the facility has paid $2.7 billion to more than 170,000 claimants and has received over 468,000 claims.

“I again say Louisiana alone has received more money under this program than any other state—over a billion dollars, so I’m going to listen to these claims and these frustrated claimants and do what I can to help,” Feinberg said during an impromptu news conference after the meeting.

Empire shrimper Elmer Rogers-Nicholes pointed his finger at Feinberg, telling him that his 13-year-old daughter woke up on Christmas morning without water or electricity in their home. At the meeting, he waved a stack of documents at Feinberg, before handing over a manila folder and urged Feinberg to look at his case that same day.

Rogers-Nicholes said it wasn’t the first time he had tried to get Feinberg’s attention. “He lied to me in New Orleans, he told me 24 to 48 hours, so why not lie now,” he said.

At the end of the meeting, Feinberg told him that he would personally look over his claim and call him by the end of the week. Two days later Rogers-Nicholes said that he had not yet received a call from him.

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The rehabilitation center, though, has already been closed and moved to Hammond, La., a town just north of Lake Pontchartrain and almost 100 miles from Fort Jackson and the gulf coast. The facility in Triumph was set up on the grounds of the fort within a week of the blowout. However, all that remains are a few trailers on the site and a open field.

“I’m not sure exactly the reason,” said Kurt Fromholz, a media specialist for the Plaquemines Parish government. “But [the federal government] said that it was ’cause of one of the tropical storms that didn’t really do anything.” Fromholz pointed out that the change of location added on two hours of travel time for the oiled birds.

According to a July 4, 2010 press release , the “facility has more than met the needs of the Deepwater Horizon Response efforts and the wildlife that has come into its care.” The release also stated the center was moved due to its location in a hurricane evacuation zone.

“To minimize harm and stress on the animals in rehabilitation during the storm season, an alternate facility located north of the hurricane evacuation zone has been selected,” the statement continued. With that, the facility moved and the fort’s area returned to relative normalcy.

The fort, along with Fort St. Phillip directly across the river, was the first line of defense that the country had against maritime attacks on the river. During the Civil War, Fort Jackson defended the Confederacy from Union attacks on the Mississippi, but was eventually bombarded into submission on April 28, 1962 . That lead to the eventual surrender of New Orleans.

The National Park Service says the fort was under water for nearly a month after Louisiana was hit by Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005 and Hurricane Rita in late September. The combination of trees blown down during the storm and flood waters destabilized the fort’s walls, leading to further destruction.

There are currently no plans to reopen Fort Jackson to public at this time.

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Big Mama, a massive Loggerhead sea turtle, scaling in at 300 pounds was one of the first three oil-covered turtles to be rescued during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Michele Kelley, stranding coordinator of the Louisiana Marine Mammal and Sea Turtle Rescue Program in New Orleans, wrestled with the loggerhead in the back of a rescue vehicle for almost two hours. Fortunately, Big Mama was later released with a clean bill of health and into the wild with a satellite tag so they were able to track her movements.

“Turtles were the most heavily impacted, but I think with marine mammals we’re not really going to know the impact on those animals until further down the line,” said Kelley.

The oil spill could not have come at a worse time for sea turtles like the Kemp Ridley. More sea turtles were killed and injured in the Gulf of Mexico in the months following the BP oil spill than in any similar period during the past two decades, according to a Jan. 26 report released by the National Wildlife Federation.

Small, never weighing more than 100 pounds, the Kemp Ridley, has been listed as endangered for forty years. It nests on the shores of the Gulf Coast from May to the end of October, and lives mostly along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.

While thousands of sea turtles drown as accidental catch in shrimp trawlers every year, they can also die from the fumes released from burning the oil at the surface of the water and become disoriented and get pneumonia. Climate change is likely to harm sea turtles because they must adapt to rising tides, an increase in water temperature and changing ocean currents.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill has caused 172 million gallons of oil to leak into the Gulf of Mexico and massive amounts to come ashore, destroying wetlands and marshes in southern Louisiana, Alabama and Florida. The marshes serve as the critical nursery grounds for wildlife, providing many species that are unique to Louisiana with the ideal conditions for breeding and growth.

Scientists say that they will not be able to see the effect of the oil spill on marine life until larger contaminated microorganisms make their way up the food chain. In other words, the shrimp eats the contaminated plankton. The fish then eats the shrimp and then gets eaten by large mammals. Then scientists start to see the effect that the oil has on the wildlife living along the gulf coast.

A Nov. 7 report shows that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collected 608 dead sea turtles, only 17 of them visibly oiled. They found 4,219 dead birds and more than half of them were visibly oiled. Dolphins have been observed swimming in the oiled waters and come to the surface for air only to inhale toxic chemicals. They found 74 dead dolphins, only 5 of them visibly oiled. Not all of the deaths can be directly related to the oil spill. The workers are still evaluating the impact on wildlife.

Brown pelicans, another protected species also threatened by the spill dived into the oil-slicked waters and become mired in the sludge, unable to fly or escape. Shrimp and plankton are more exposed to the dispersed oil because they are unable to relocate in great distances. Large sea mammals, like dolphins and whales, must come to the surface to breathe, so they were also vulnerable to the large oil plumes, large sections of toxic oil at the surface of the ocean.

Fish and Wildlife Services biologist Karen Viste-Sparkman has overseen cleanup efforts by Gulf Coast workers in Venice, Louisiana to safeguard the habitats of endangered species. She helps to collect both tarballs, and tarmats, the larger chunks of oil that have washed up along the Gulf Coast.

“In one area they are cutting the vegetation from the plants that grow there and have oil on them, so birds going into the vegetation don’t get oil into their feathers,” she said.

Others like Kelley think that the BP cleanup efforts aren’t yet finished and should continue at full steam.

“The wind comes through the north and it’s actually blowing the oil back out of the marshes, back into the water,” said Kelley. “I think they did their cleaning, they put their efforts forward, but then they said, ‘Oh, it’s over.’ Is it?”

“I hope people don’t lose focus because Louisiana is going to be hurting for a while,” she said. “We’re really good about recovering, we’ve proven it after Katrina and we’ll recover after this.”

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Simply killing the well, however, has not prevented the oil from threatening the Louisiana coast. Oil continues to come ashore and sometimes can be found in seafood. Even with federal government for their seafood businesses to bounce back.

While the fears of oil contaminated foods are still very real, many seafood-related business workers blame the news media for exaggerating the problem.

“The perception of the seafood down here in south Louisiana is our biggest killer,” said Ray Griffin, owner of Cochiara Marina in Lafitte, LA. Griffin said that he wanted to see either the federal or state government come up with “legitimate testing” for all kinds of seafood.

“The coast guard says, ‘It’s safe, it’s fine,’ and then the Plaquemines Parish president does his own study and says, ‘Well, we have some traces of this and that. We’re not quite sure yet.’ So no one knows what to believe.”

Other fishermen repeat the same story over and over again, including lifelong Lafitte fisherman Chet Hebert.

“I still get calls today and they asking us, ‘Is the seafood good? Have y’all eatin’ it? Has anything been tainted? Has anyone seen anything? So, it’s out there,” he said. “They’re going to have to eat it to see it’s good and that’s all.” The federal government has set up a response site, called RestoreTheGulf.gov, to help quell public fears about the seafood contamination from oil and dispersants. The website is updated with information about areas in the gulf closed to fishing, the latest seafood testing results, and contact information for both fishermen and the public. There has not been an update on the website since August 13, 2010,when food harvested from the gulf was pronounced “safe to eat.”

According to Gulf fisherman, this has done little to change the public’s generally negative opinions about seafood safety and the downward spiral of seafood-based businesses in the Gulf.

“I know they [the government] have some places where they have it, and they won’t let you go there,” said Venice shrimp boat captain Roland Mollere, about remaining zones closed to fishing. Moller says he’s brought in multitudes of shrimp without any traces of oil. Mollere also said he has personally eaten and fed his family the seafood he has caught in the gulf.

“It’s always perception, perception,” said Matt O’Brein, owner of Tiger Pass Seafood in Venice. O’Brein opened his new shrimping and crabbing business the week of the oil spill in April 2010. O’Brein claims the oil has caused the price of gulf shrimp to fall and that buyers are using concern about safety and possible ensuing lawsuits it to keep prices low.

“We hear a lot of ‘hooplah’ from up there.”

He remains, however, cautiously optimistic.

“I think we dodged a bullet,” he said, adding that many news outlets had written their stories before getting even to the coast.

Many of the fisherman in south Louisiana had a recurring message they all wanted the public to hear – “Come to Louisiana, the food’s safe.”

Said Ray Griffin, “What I keep trying to tell people is that… south Louisiana is open for business. Come give us a shot; I guarantee it will not be your last trip to Louisiana.”

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Related Links:

• NOLA.com: “Safety of Gulf seafood debated 8 months after BP oil spill”
• NOLA.com: “Experts disagree whether Gulf of Mexico seafood is safe to eat”
• FoodSafety.gov – Gulf Seafood Information