Houston Chronicle:
Pete and May Vela's future on this spit of land in Louisiana's southernmost parish is as murky as the waters that still cover what's left of their home.There are many personal stories and personal decisions to go or stay. Well written piece."Even if you had a boat, the shrimp are gone and the harbor's underwater," said Pete Vela, a 30-year resident who splits his time between Plaquemines Parish's two chief livelihoods: shrimping and oil industry work.
The 100-mile-long parish southeast of New Orleans clings to land only a few hundred yards wide on the edge of the Mississippi River as it winds its last few miles to the Gulf of Mexico. These lowlands have led a charmed life, weathering most of what nature had to give, until Hurricane Katrina blew holes in four levees and left nearly half the parish underwater.
By Thursday, all but one breach had been repaired, but the water has only receded to the spot where a pile of boards and a half-submerged swimming pool slide mark where the Velas' home once stood.
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A ConocoPhillips refinery and a Chevron chemical plant that makes gasoline additives sit dry but idle at the parish's northern end. A Shell pipeline is among those broken and leaking in the flood zone, Rousselle said.
Along the highway, crews from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality could be seen soaking up oil, and at least one tank farm sat in water glistening with a petroleum sheen.
Huge rusting barges, tossed out of the river by the tempest, litter the levees, and much of the landscape has turned an autumnal brown. Pastures and orange groves that gave rise to an annual citrus festival died in the saltwater. Nearly everything else left standing is covered in silt. Some buildings, such as the red brick St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Port Sulphur, appear to be floating like croutons in a bowl of soup.
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