LAKE CHARLES, La. – As the strongest storm to hit Louisiana in 160 years howled and hammered him, Phillip “Rooster” Dyson Jr., held onto an …
LAKE CHARLES, La. – As the strongest storm to hit Louisiana in 160 years howled and hammered him, Phillip “Rooster” Dyson Jr., held onto an industrial icebox on the back deck of his 50-foot shrimping trawler and prayed for daylight. He thought of his four children and the rest of his family and realized he might not live to see them again. “It was that point when you know you messed up but it’s too late to turn back,” Dyson,36, recalled. “It was a living nightmare.” Most everyone in lower Cameron Parish evacuated well out of the path of Hurricane Laura, which roared ashore early Thursday over the coastal town of Cameron, the parish seat, with 150-mph winds and wreaked a swath of destruction as far north as Shreveport. At least 14 people died during the storm. But the shrimpers of Cameron did what they do each time a storm approaches: They motored their trawlers 30 miles inland, tied them to a pier at the Port of Lake Charles and hunkered down in their cabins to ride out the storm. Hurricane Laura, however, delivered a destructive mauling unlike any they’d ever seen, tearing boats from moorings, sucking captains out of cabins and sinking boat after boat into the channel. Fifteen shrimping boats tied up to wait out Laura. Only five survived, the rest sinking to the bottom of Bayou Contraband, the channel that cuts along the port. Remarkably, no one drowned. As Laura lashed at them and with rescue teams unable to respond, shrimpers and other boat captains performed daring mid-storm rescues to save each other from the violent squall. Still, the ordeal dealt a serious blow to Cameron’s shrimping industry, already hobbled from past storms like Hurricanes Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008. “Shrimping is the lifeblood of our parish,” said Scott Trahan, vice president of the Cameron Parish Police Jury, the local elective body. “Everybody’s family has someone who shrimps.” On Wednesday night, as Laura strengthened in the gulf and headed for Cameron, Dyson drove his four children, mom, sister, niece and nephew to a WoodSpring Suites hotel in east Lake Charles, then he moored his trawler – christened “Daddy’s Girls” for his three daughters, ages 11 to 16 – to giant steel cleats on the port’s pier. His father, Phillip Dyson Sr., tied up his own 55-foot steel-hulled trawler next to his. It was the same drill the Dysons had done for Rita and Ike, without incident. “I figured if I stayed with the boat, I’d have a better chance of saving it,” said Dyson, who earned his nickname as a youth by endlessly watching the John Wayne western, “Rooster Cogburn.
