DELACROIX ISLAND, LA — The sorting tables at Tino Mones Seafood, an open-air crab broker in this southern St. Bernard Parish fishing town, usually are crawling this time of year with snapping blue crabs. Workers typically haul in one load after another, more than 20,000 pounds a day.
Not this year.
Now workers mostly sit, smoke and wait to offload boxes of blue crabs from the occasional fisherman who pulls up to the dock. Less than 5,000 pounds of crabs on a recent day were iced, boxed and shipped out, owner Tino Mones says.
The looming Gulf of Mexico oil spill has forced many local fishermen here out of their trade. St. Bernard Parish — ravaged by the floods and winds of Hurricane Katrina five years ago — is again in survival mode, this time against a silent, slow-moving threat.
"St. Bernard, as I know it, will never be the same," Mones, 61, says. "When you have boats and traps and overhead (costs) and you keep getting whacked down and whacked down, you can't take any more."
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Photo by Denny Gainer, USA Today