DULAC — The late summer sun beat down on the docks nestled in a bend in Bayou Dulac, radiating heat.
A shrimp boat skipper known as “Lucky” hoisted anchor and pushed off toward the bay. On the other side of the bayou, a couple of locals cast nets from a small wooden dock.
Watching from the shade, Brad Defelice pointed to the property behind the fishermen across the bayou. Soon, he said, an investor from Florida will redevelop it into a fishing camp. The man who previously owned the property lived there for years but decided to move north of Houma to retire. He said he’s lucky he could find a cash buyer. Otherwise, he said, it’s impossible to sell a home down the bayou.
Up and down the roads that snake into the coastal marsh, the landscape is changing.
Oak trees are dying because of the general subsidence of the land and the encroaching salt water in the southern part of Terrebonne Parish. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
It’s no longer just the steady onslaught of coastal erosion, which is stripping away marshland and inviting salt water further north. Now, as the insurance crisis and a shaky recovery from Hurricane Ida ravage coastal Louisiana, places like Dulac and Chauvin are seeing their identities fade, too.
Long a vital part of Louisiana’s cultural and economic firmament, bayou towns are experiencing an exodus of the longtime shrimpers and fishermen, residents say. They are being replaced by out-of-towners buying up properties in cash and building vacation fishing camps.
Throughout the bayous in this part of Louisiana, the fresh wood frames of vacation homes are springing up next to properties that have been lying in rubble since 2021’s Hurricane Ida.
Hurricane-ravaged homes lay in rubble near shiny new fishing camps in Cocodrie, where insurance is out of reach because of high costs. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
The longtime neighborhood dive bar in Chauvin is up for sale. Down the bayou, a stalwart seafood store is closed. All of the local schools have shuttered, requiring students to get on buses to Houma.
Defelice, clad in the white shrimp boots that are ubiquitous here, said it seems like “everybody” is moving north, to higher ground. Defelice himself moved from along the bayou to Houma a few years ago. And the shrimp trade isn’t what it used to be, either. Cheap imports continue to flood the market, squeezing the shrimpers and processors that make their living on the bayou.
Defelice and his co-worker Erin Phillips plodded around the dock at David Chauvin Seafood Company, cleaning out water lines and preparing for the opening of the white shrimp season. Phillips, who lives nearby, said he has been noticing oysters popping up in the bayou, thanks to the saltwater intrusion that is physically reshaping the region, stripping it of its marshes.
Gazing out over the brackish waters, Defelice echoed a sentiment often uttered by longtime residents: “I love this place.”
‘Not a bite’
People have been living in the furthest reaches of Louisiana’s winding bayous for centuries. Long ago, Bayou Petit Caillou, on which communities from Houma to Cocodrie sit, was connected to the Mississippi River, before it shifted course eastward. Those were the days before man-made levees siloed the waterways, directing their sediment-rich flows to the Gulf.
A shrimp boat captain known as Lucky unmoors from the docks at the David Chauvin Seafood Company in Dulac on a summer afternoon. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Along the far reaches of the bayou, not far from where the coast is fading into the Gulf, a Native American mound rises from the side of the road. The mound dates to 1000 A.D., and an oak tree atop it is thought to mark the grave of a Biloxi Nation member. A century ago, Europeans began using the sides of the mound as a cemetery.
Lora Chaisson, the principal chief of the United Houma Nation, another of the coastal Louisiana tribes, said it feels like the communities that have lived along the bayous for centuries are being pushed away. She estimates that her settlement, Pointe-Aux-Chenes, has lost up to a fifth of its people in recent years.
Chaisson is doing her best to stay. She had her home elevated 11 feet in the air, got a metal roof and installed hurricane windows. And her home held up relatively well during Ida, though it sustained around $50,000 in damage, she said.
Still, the insurance crisis is weighing on her community. Her monthly mortgage payments have tripled. She put her house on the market for sale last year.
“Not a bite,” she said. “Not one.”
‘Skeleton town’
Jessica Simms, a program officer at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, spent years interviewing people in coastal Louisiana as the coastal land loss crisis was pushing people out, as part of a doctoral dissertation.
Simms frequently heard people say they were determined to stay. But since Ida, many have packed up and moved north. As that happens, Simms said, communities are fracturing. There’s no “conscious effort” to track the migration.
An exception was Isle de Jean Charles, the first federally funded relocation of a community because of climate risks. The community was outside of levee protection and the state, using a federal grant, relocated many of its residents to a plot of land miles north.
The insurance crisis is different. The state isn’t buying out residents who can’t sell their homes. Some people are leaving, while others are dropping insurance or raising their deductibles.
A casket, bottom, floated out of the ground during Hurricane Francine. Flood water still surrounds the cemetery in Dulac. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Meanwhile, the natural allure of bayou communities is attracting outsiders, who are buying up properties to use as fishing camps.
“The local folks are being replaced by the wealthy people who don’t live there full time and aren’t part of the community,” Simms said.
Brittany Hamby, 38, has lived in Houma since she was 13. And she’s been building home equity for six years, with a rent-to-own agreement on her house in the southernmost part of Houma. She raised her three kids here; one still lives with her. Hamby tried to hang on in the place she’s lived for 25 years.
Now her daughter lives in Shreveport, and Hamby isn’t far behind. Despondent with the future of Houma, and facing an insurance bill they can’t afford, Hamby and her family are packing up and moving 340 miles north, to Haughton.
“It’s going to be a skeleton town before you know it,” Hamby said.
Bayou roots fraying
At the shrimp docks in Dulac, a sign in front of the office of the facility has words in English and Vietnamese, to cater to the immigrant community that powers the shrimp trade.
Inside, fans churned to stave off the sweltering heat. Kim Chauvin cooked burgers on the stove. A parish councilwoman, Chauvin has been vocal about the changing tides of Dulac and her eponymous hometown, on the other side of Lake Boudreaux.
“I see a lot of these bayous becoming touristy,” Chauvin said. “It’s really sad that we’re losing out on that.”
Floodwater covers the street around a fallen highway sign near a Dulac seafood processing facility at the Highway 56 and Highway 57 detour. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Chauvin and her husband married at 18 and bought the facility in Dulac after the BP oil spill, allowing them to move their backyard shrimp-processing
Chauvin said she welcomes investments from out-of-towners, as long as they take care of their properties. The communities need all the economic activity they can get.
But she worries that these tight-knit places where generations of the same families have long worked and fished are turning into tourist areas. She listed a series of businesses along Little Caillou Road that have closed: an icehouse, a restaurant, a convenience store. Chauvin’s library is being merged with two other community libraries seven miles north.
Young people aren’t moving in, Chauvin said. Unless an out-of-towner is looking for a new camp, selling a home here is “next to impossible,” she said. The shrimpers and anglers who have made a living off the bayou for generations are being driven away.
“They’re going to be pushed out,” she said. “That’s the sad part. That’s what built the lower parts of Louisiana.”
The Times-Picayune is investigating Louisiana’s insurance crisis. If you have a story to share, contact reporter Sam Karlin at skarlin@theadvocate.com.