BP Oil Well Capped, But Trauma Still Flowing

These are hard times in the hard-working town of Bayou La Batre, Ala. It's known as the state's seafood capital — and it struggled to get back in business after Hurricane Karina.

But once again, the processing plants and shrimp boats lining the bayou are mostly idle after the BP oil spill.

So when Feed the Children trucks recently arrived at the community center, the turnout was huge. About a dozen volunteers worked quickly handing out big cartons packed with food and household goods. Residents had to sign up in advance, so some were reluctantly turned away.

"We're out. We only had 800 cards and 800 boxes of groceries," a volunteer gently tells those without tickets for the day's goods. "I'm sorry, we just don't have any more."

No one makes a scene. This is not a place where asking for help comes easily.

"It almost makes you not even want to walk up and ask," says Lena Hofer, 25. "Because of how many times I've had to do this, it's really hard when they send you away after you do, especially when you need it like I do. I'm about to cry. It's hard."

The red circles around Hofer's blue eyes and frail frame are evidence of the toll from the spill.

"I'm a homemaker," she laughs, as if she no longer believes it. "My husband was a shrimper. It's bad. It's put us in a really bad spot."

"We are very, very close on the edge of losing everything," says Aaron Hofer, Lena's husband, holding back tears. "But, you know, God feeds the birds. How much more does he love us? I have to tell myself that, like, 100 times a day."

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Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea

In this section of the Larchmont neighborhood, built in a sharp “u” around a bay off the Lafayette River, residents pay close attention to the lunar calendar, much as other suburbanites might attend to the daily flow of commuter traffic.

If the moon is going to be full the night before Hazel Peck needs her car, for example, she parks it on a parallel block, away from the river. The next morning, she walks through a neighbor’s backyard to avoid the two-to-three-foot-deep puddle that routinely accumulates on her street after high tides.

For Ms. Peck and her neighbors, it is the only way to live with the encroaching sea.

As sea levels rise, tidal flooding is increasingly disrupting life here and all along the East Coast, a development many climate scientists link to global warming.

But Norfolk is worse off. Situated just west of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, it is bordered on three sides by water, including several rivers, like the Lafayette, that are actually long tidal streams that feed into the bay and eventually the ocean.

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