Spill imperils a distinctive culture: ‘There’s a sense of doom’

By Drew Jubera, Special to CNN
May 25, 2010 1:25 p.m. EDT (CNN) — Talk to Jack Fillinich and you’ll hear it. It’s Sunday morning and he’s sitting in front of the single-story house in Golden Meadow, Louisiana, that he’s lived in his whole life. He’s 69. He’s wearing slippers, jeans and no shirt, repairing a shrimp net. And he’s repairing a shrimp net on a Sunday morning with no shirt on because that’s what he’s always done: fix nets, build boats, go fish. But talk to him and you’ll hear it — the creeping sense that the unfolding oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, even after all the natural disasters he’s seen roar through this wondrously hard-luck region, might be last call. “This one’s different,” Fillinich says. “A storm comes, you fix the damage and you’re rolling again. This, it might be a year before they clean it all up. It might be five years. It might be longer. We don’t know.” Fillinich’s dad fished here. Now his son fishes here. Beyond that: “My days are numbered, it doesn’t matter about me,” he says, his own boat across the two-lane in front of his house, bobbing in Bayou Lafourche. “But my son, he’s 41. And he has a son. “It looks like it’s going to stop there.” … “I’ve never heard so much fear in people’s voices,” says Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell, which chronicled southern Louisiana’s long legacy of environmental problems. “A hurricane is an event with a beginning, a middle and an end. This is more like a nuclear accident offshore and a radiation cloud is coming in. “Nobody knows what the consequences will be. There’s a sense of doom.” … Like many people here, Byron Encalade sees this disaster, much like Katrina, as decades in the making. Louisiana’s wetlands, which can serve as buffers against storms and oil spills, were already disappearing at an alarming rate — about 24 square miles a year. Since 1932, Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles, or land roughly the size of Delaware. … “It has been an ecological disaster for 50 years,” he adds. “It could be climaxing now with this spill.” … “I’m still numb,” Tamara Augustine says. “Every red wave that washes in, I feel helpless. I see it washing up and there’s nothing I can do.” …