GRAND BAYOU, La. — October 31, 2012 — Most decisions about the details of a huge class-action settlement of damage claims from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill will come from stately offices and a federal courtroom in New Orleans.
But the consequences will reach farther south, where Louisianans – many of them subsistence fishermen – count on swampy bayous and gray Gulf waves for their livelihood, and are struggling to support themselves on catches they say have dwindled to a fifth of their pre-spill numbers.
''It just ain’t there anymore,'' said Maurice Phillips, a 58-year-old fisherman and trapper from Grand Bayou who traces his ancestry to the region’s first Native American residents.
Phillips is one of hundreds of fishermen who must decide by Thursday whether his share of a proposed $2.3 billion settlement fund will make up for the losses he suffered when BP’s Macondo well spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into the waters where he and his family have fished for generations.
The Seafood Compensation Program fund is part of a larger proposed settlement between BP and Gulf Coast residents who suffered economic or health damages from the spill.
It would compensate seafood vessel owners, commercial fishermen and their crews for damages suffered from April 20, 2010, when the Macondo well blew out, to April 16 of this year.
In the beginning of October, a court-supervised clearinghouse reported that it had received 7,115 claims and had made $105 million in offers to about 700 claimants, half of whom had accepted the payments at that point.
Read the full story in Houma Today