Big Oil hurt coast, so why doesn

POINTE-AUX-CHENES — Along Bayou Point-aux-Chenes, the waterway that separates Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes, Anesie Verdin’s daughter and granddaughter prepare shrimp to be boiled then dried as he takes his boat into the nearby marshes.

Everywhere is evidence of how coastal erosion is destroying his community and way of life.

Verdin, a commercial fisherman, says back then, some places here were so thick with trees you could barely see through them. When the oil industry cut canals into the area to get to its drilling sites, he says, things started changing. He says those canals brought the equivalent of poison into the marsh: salt water from the Gulf of Mexico.

Dead oaks in the marsh are skeletons of the past. The salt water has killed their root systems as it destroys the marsh, turning canals into open waterways.

But Tulane environmental law professor Oliver Houck says the destruction turned more aggressive when oil was discovered in Plaquemines Parish.

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