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During their visit to Bayou La Batre, AL, in April 2015, RAND Corporation’s Noreen Clancy, CRGC project manager, and Melissa Finucane, CRGC director, hear Brett Dungan, mayor of Bayou La Batre, and Danny Lee, director of the local Boat People SOS office, discuss the range of adverse impacts the Deepwater Horizon oil spill has had on the local seafood industry and its workforce.
As part of the effort to build capacity for community action planning and resilience building, CRGC members from RAND Corporation and the University of South Alabama’s Coastal Resource & Resiliency Center met in Bayou La Batre—a community on the Alabama coast that is a large seafood producer for the Gulf region.
CRGC members had the opportunity to meet with community stakeholders, including Brett Dungan, the Mayor of Bayou La Batre, and Danny Lee, the Director of Boat People SOS’ local office, to hear firsthand about the range of socioeconomic impacts the oil spill had and continues to have on the community of Bayou La Batre.
As Bayou La Batre is the number one producer of seafood in the state, CRGC members visited the port of Bayou La Batre to learn more about the effects the oil spill has had on the seafood industry.
In addition to speaking with local fisherman and hearing from community stakeholders on this topic, the group also had the opportunity to tour a local seafood processing and distribution factory to see the range and reach of these impacts on the local economy and its workforce.
Danny Lee, along with other members of the Boat People SOS team, shared their experiences offering support services to the Vietnamese-American community (and beyond) after the spill, as they are one of the local populations that make up a large percentage of the seafood industry workforce and have also commonly faced challenges submitting claims and receiving compensation for economic loss caused by the spill.
Danny Lee, director of Boat People SOS in Bayou La Batre, AL, holds up a final product from Dominick’s Seafood, a local seafood processing plant, while CRGC members tour the port of Bayou La Batre.
To further CRGC’s objectives, consortium members will continue to conduct local, on-the-ground research, outreach, and education initiatives across Gulf Coastal communities to improve their ability to more effectively understand, withstand, and overcome the multiple stressors brought on by catastrophic oil spill disasters.