4:42 am
BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) – It may be months before officials know the extent of hurricane damage to Louisiana’s seafood and aquaculture industries. But Hurricane Rita’s damage picked up right where Katrina’s left off on Louisiana’s ragged coast.
Louisiana is the nation’s second-biggest seafood producer, behind only Alaska. It leads the nation in several species, harvesting 40 percent of the nation’s shrimp, 35 to 40 percent or more of its oysters and almost 35 percent of its blue crabs.
Oyster prices will jump, but any increase in shrimp prices is likely to be much less, since most of the nation’s shrimp are imported, said Sherylyn Harley LeBon, a spokeswoman for the National Fisheries Institute.
Shrimpers and shrimp processors, hit hard for years by cheap frozen imports from Asia, now have to worry that they may lose more customers while they are out of business, said Ewell Smith, executive director of the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board.
He said shrimpers west of Bayou Lafourche should be able to get back to work within two weeks. But market share – and the fact that New Orleans is a major market – are big concerns, he said.
Flooding or power failures caused by Hurricane Rita put nearly every shrimp dock and processing facility out of business, at least temporarily, said Martin Bourgeois, shrimp program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.
“I’m not sure of any port anywhere along the Louisiana coast – or, for that matter, from Galveston (Texas) to Bayou LaBatre, Ala., where a fisherman could land a pound of shrimp,” he said Tuesday. “Gee whiz, we were enjoying a very productive white shrimp season before these storms.”
After Katrina, shrimpers were able to work without problems west of Bayou Lafourche. But Rita flooded docks and knocked out power across the rest of the coast.
“There was a lot of frozen inventory lost because of this,” Bourgeois said. The fleet survived, but many shrimpers’ houses were flooded and their families displaced. “In order for them to proceed, they have to put their lives in order,” he said.
The hurricanes also damaged about two-thirds of the oyster industry in the state, and damaged alligator, turtle and crawfish farms.
On Tuesday, some 500,000 people in Louisiana were still without power and 350,000 people had no telephone service. Six of the major oil refineries in Louisiana were shut down and mandatory evacuation remained in effect for 10 southwest Louisiana parishes. Fifty-three parishes were declared a state of emergency from Rita.
The entire coast was hurt, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco said. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like it. … Our fisheries are threatened. All of our agricultural assets are threatened. Oil and gas are threatened.”
LeBon said every part of Louisiana’s oyster industry is in trouble. “It’s the docks, the vessels, the freezers you keep them in, the ice houses, processing plants,” she said. “We need the government to help get the infrastructure back up.”
Oyster beds must be reseeded. It takes about two years for oysters to grow to marketable size.
Hurricane Katrina wiped out an estimated two-thirds of the oyster harvest, and Rita’s impact is still being assessed, said Greg Lutz, an aquaculture specialist at Louisiana State University.
David Bushek, treasurer and president elect of the National Shellfisheries Association, said oyster farmers elsewhere are already seeing an increase in demand. For example, oystermen in New Jersey’s Delaware Bay are getting higher prices at the dock.
“I don’t know that there will be a critical shortage of supply or anything, but there will be a sufficient shortage that prices will probably go up in the short term,” he said.
Prices for purses and alligator skin shoes could also increase.
Pelts & Skins, LLC, which has four farms in southern Louisiana and Florida and owns more than 200,000 alligators, said Katrina cost it 30 percent of this year’s production, and it expected more losses from Hurricane Rita. It will take at least five years to recover the losses, chief executive Zachary Casey said.
“Wild alligator skin prices have already increased 50 percent since Hurricane Katrina and depending on the damage left by Hurricane Rita, that price may rise,” he said in a statement.
Alligator farmers collect eggs from nests in the wild, then hatch them indoors. Alligators usually hatch in August, and a number of buildings were damaged or without power.
“On the good side a farmer doesn’t have much invested yet in those animals. But on the bad side, we’ve got about a two-year cycle on alligator farming. Whatever happened in Katrina will affect us for the next two years,” Lutz said.
Pet turtles – entirely an export business – are also in the hatching and incubation phase this time of year, and power outages likely reduced the survival of the young turtles as well, Lutz said. The impact on that industry won’t be known for weeks or months.
Crawfish farms were to the west of Katrina’s path, but right in Rita’s.
Normally, crawfish ponds aren’t flooded until mid-October, and filling the ponds too early lets dead plants decompose, reducing the amount of oxygen in the water.
“So a lot of crawfish farmers who are probably very good managers and very conscientious producers may find themselves in a situation where they have no option but to watch the water quality deteriorate in their ponds because they flooded too early,” Lutz said.
Crabbers lost traps and couldn’t get bait for those which remained because the menhaden fishery was at least at a temporary standstill, said Wildlife and Fisheries’ Bourgeois.
Menhaden is caught in huge amounts, then rendered into oil and fish meal, and some is frozen as bait. The menhaden processing plant in Empire was “essentially destroyed,” Bourgeois said. He didn’t know what had happened to the plants in Cameron and Intracoastal City. The condition of plants in Mississippi was also unknown.
The huge menhaden ships at Empire were stranded on a highway. “I don’t know if there’s any way to salvage them,” Bourgeois said.
Bourgeois said he doesn’t expect long-term damage to shrimp or crabs themselves.
“These are short-lived animals. Their life cycles – particularly shrimp – is just about a year. And they’re mobile. They’re able to survive these types of things. But the industry that depends on them has been crippled.”