A Company Town on The Mississippi

Photos
A Bittersweet Life
Domino Sugar refinery workers and their families were forced to live in a FEMA trailer village outside the New Orleans plant late last summer after losing their homes to Hurricane Katrina floods.

Meyer, Dear and another mechanic with "Catfish" on his hard hat spend the morning fixing a broken motor reducer. They kneel on greasy cardboard as they use two-foot wrenches and heavy mallets to take apart the reducer. Three of them work together, one heaving, the other turning, no one talking unless a direction is shouted above the noise of the machinery.

"We are close-knit," says Dear, as he walks down to the break room for lunch. "You gotta be to do this."

They are close even in the way they eat lunch, with Dear cutting up sausage and passing it down the long lunch table. Out of eight men in the room, seven lost their homes in the storm. Gerald Banks, who oils machinery, watched his 81-year-old father drown and spent three hours next to the body as he clung to a concrete stairway of a house that had washed away.

On break, the men talk about levees and corrupt politicians or what they found in their homes -- fish, dead dogs, car tires. Most had no flood insurance. Some of their homes were in the path of a 25,000-barrel oil spill from Murphy Oil that contaminated 1,800 homes. One man has received a $20,000 settlement; others are waiting to hear. But for most, there will be no windfall of insurance or oil money. Domino Sugar is the surest thing in their lives.

"It's rough," Meyer says. "I ain't gonna tell you no lie."

Their shift is from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., but most work overtime because there's nothing else to do. The one exception is when a warm front passes through, and the marshes call.

On a sunny January afternoon, Meyer and David Bachemin clock off at 2:30 p.m., and by 2:37 they are hitching their boat trailers to trucks and headed for Delacroix Island. A two-lane road leads into the otherworldly devastation of fishing communities where trawlers are flipped over and branches are twisted in horrific sculptures.

They put in their boats and throttle out toward the horizon. These are the same waters that ruined their lives, but no one mentions the hurricane. The trout start piling up in the ice coolers. "I like to see that, my baby," Meyer shouts, as someone hauls in another.

Bachemin's cell phone echoes. It's his wife calling from the trailer, stressed out and fighting with their son. Bachemin tells her he'll be there soon.

In darkness, they drive back. Meyer pulls up to the fence surrounding the trailers. The white aluminum boxes are blasted by industrial lights and the refinery's glare. "Home, sweet home," Meyer says.