In Mississippi, Katrina Wreaks Bitter Harvest

Farmers, Fishermen Are Storm's Forgotten Victims
David Fazio's dairy farm rises like an oasis from the wind-shattered woods. Fields of green ryegrass, shade oak trees, and pink and red magnolias bespeak order amid the twisted, gray wilderness wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Even here, 30 miles north of Mississippi's Gulf Coast, the lives of things that grow and sprout -- and of the people who tend them -- were not spared by the hurricane. Among Fazio's neighbors, 14 of 20 dairy farmers have abandoned their herds and homesteads. Fazio himself lost 110 of 180 cows after the Aug. 29 storm, which did $125,000 damage to all four structures and the family farmhouse on his 125-acre plot -- equal to five years' earnings.

After smashing 90 miles of seabed and filling it with jagged debris, Katrina roared north along Interstate 59 and spawned sustained winds of 120 mph as far as 80 miles inland. In that wedge of devastation, boats and processing plants were smashed. Wood-plank hay barns and tin-roofed dairy sheds were shredded. And this region's stoic fishermen and farmers became the forgotten victims of the storm, lost in the misery of metropolitan New Orleans and the Mississippi coast.


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All told, Mississippi's agriculture, forestry and marine industries -- which account for one-third of the jobs and economic product of this unwealthy state -- lost more than $10 billion. Poultry growers were mostly insured, and cotton-rich Delta farmers dodged Katrina's winds. But nonindustrial tree farmers -- who hold 69 percent of the state's timber acreage -- received just $400 million from Congress, a fraction of their losses.

Offshore, Katrina turned sea lanes and rich fishing grounds in the Mississippi Sound into minefields. Visible at low tide in aerial photographs, the wreckage of thousands of cars, chunks of homes and buildings, even soda machines, threaten to rip hulls and nets come the start of fishing season, June 1. Many experts say the industry may never recover, as land prices rise and wharves and canneries here go the way of those that used to dot the Chesapeake and California's Monterey Bay. "It's like a way of life that has a possibility of disappearing down there, and my memories of the coast for 50 years -- and for some of the people down there, much longer than that -- has a potential to disappear. That would be a shame," Sanderson said.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/11/AR2006031101058.html