Vietnamese, Cambodian fishermen among hardest hit by BP oil spill

“When you say to them ‘BP gives you an opportunity,’ they say ‘what is opportunity?’” says Tong, who came to the U.S. in 1980 from a refugee camp in Thailand, when he was 2 years old.

Many of the fisherman work out of the nearby Buras marina, where their boats rock idly. “My boat is my house, my life, right here,” said Toan Nguyen said from the deck of his shrimp boat. “There’s no oil here but they won’t let us fish.”

When the wholesale price of shrimp dropped to 50 cents a pound last season, Nguyen and other shrimpers went on a strike, which had little effect due to a flood of cheap Asian imports. With rumors of price collusion among wholesalers, state officials had promised fishermen better prices this year, but the season was canceled before it started because of the spill.

“Last year a lot of people went broke, so this year everyone was counting on this season to make some money,” said Nguyen.

Nearly five years after Katrina, Buras remains an isolated community with no doctor, no school, no pharmacy, and no grocery store. After the hurricane, the local diocese closed the Catholic church many in the Asian community had attended.

“If this continues with the fishing being closed, everyone will have to move to New Orleans and on one will be left down here,” said interpreter Tong, who is still waiting for his Road Home grant to rebuild his house in Buras, boarded up since the 2005 storm.

Plenty of lawyers

While the Vietnamese and Cambodian fishermen are having trouble communicating with BP, they are having no problems finding lawyers to talk with.

“They come here and go to meetings and drive around and walk up and asking you if they need a lawyer to represent you,” said Tong. “Spencer is a lawyer and we want to see him actually helping the community, and then maybe we will sign up with him.”

The area has previous experience with litigation over smaller oil spills. During Hurricane Katrina, nearly a million gallons of oil spilled from ruptured pipelines in nearby Empire, Louisiana, an incident that became part of a larger class action lawsuit.

“Many people signed papers with lawyers and they’ve never heard anything back,” Tong recalls. “You ask them who their lawyer is and they don’t know, they don’t even have a card. You ask them why they signed up and they say ‘well, everyone else was signing up.’”

IN PICTURES: Louisiana oil spill

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