Endangered Species Act Causes Stir
Paul Coreil
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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.