When Kenny LeFebvre is out of work, so are the two men who help him haul glistening blue crabs from the waters he has fished since he quit school at 14. So are his sister and brother-in-law, who sell him bait, buy back the catch, pack it up, then resell it to buyers who put it on dinner tables in Maryland.
And so are thousands of other families just like theirs in some of the world’s richest fishing grounds, livelihoods in limbo as winds from exactly the wrong direction — the southeast — threaten to push an oil slick the size of Puerto Rico ever closer to the fragile, fingerlike bayous.
“I don’t know what I’ll do. I really don’t,’’ said LeFebvre, who unloaded 2,100 pounds of crab about 20 minutes before natural resource officials ordered the fishing zones in St. Bernard Parish closed. There was no sign of oil yet. Not even a whiff in the breeze. And the crabs had just started biting.
Read the complete story at The Boston Globe.