Endangered Species Act Causes Stir
Paul Coreil
Paul Coreil
Paul Coreil: But anyway, the federal government . . . We have the Endangered Species Act, which was passed in the early '70s and the sea turtles population was crashing. The nesting turtles in Mexico and Texas was just going down drastically. Anyway to make a long story short, they passed a federal law that said that all the shrimpers in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast had to pull all these turtle exclusive devices. And there was shrimp loss involved. So the day . . . it was supposed to go into effect on a Monday. On Saturday morning, I get a call from state representative Randy Roach, who's now mayor of Lake Charles by the way. He called me and said, "Paul, what are you doing?" I said, "Nothing, I'm just getting ready to go do some work outside." He said, "You need to meet me in Cameron. We got a problem."
The shrimpers had blocked the ship channel in Cameron. Now blocking a federal ship channel is an act of war. So I said, "What do you think we're going to do?" He said, "I don't know, but let's go." So we met. We might have met in Creole and then we drove together. But when I go there, it was just scary because these shrimpers had blocked the channel. There was a recreational fishing rodeo going on from Lake Charles. They weren't letting the boats back in, let alone boats that were going offshore back into Lake Charles. The wives were all gathered on the shore. They all came running, "Mr. Paul, Mr. Paul, you got to do something. Get on the radio and talk to them." And they had these VHS radios. So I got on the radio and asked them, "What are y'all going to do?" "Well, we're not buckling 'til they say this rule's not going to be implemented."
Seventeen hours of negotiations Randy and I did. They were shuttling beer to these fishermen, we heard shots fired in the air. You know there were some guns. No one was shot, but they had guns. It's something that I hoped to never to have to do again. We talked to them and we did get the congress . . . In fact, we had our congressman on the phone during the negotiations and he was talking to the national fisheries services. They agreed to delay it for two weeks or something. I think it was a week or two weeks, and they actually decided to go on and open up the blockade.
When we got there the Coast Guard had been called and they were just getting there. And realize that the Coast Guard is eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old people. They were spraying water cannons through the windshields of the shrimp boats trying to get them to break up. Randy calls the governor's office, which was Governor [Buddy]Roemer, and he asked Roemier "Pull them back. Get the Coast Guard back." So, they pulled back and went back to Lake Charles because we would have had some people hurt. Probably the most scary and real life experience of potential violence that I've ever seen.