--- title: Evicted by the Oil Spill | TIME description: With contractors flowing to the Gulf Coast to work on oil spill cleanup, rents are rising and fisherman Gene Hickman faces eviction from his home canonical: https://time.com/video/7QmVOip9/ og:title: Evicted by the Oil Spill og:description: With contractors flowing to the Gulf Coast to work on oil spill cleanup, rents are rising and fisherman Gene Hickman faces eviction from his home og:url: https://time.com/video/7QmVOip9/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7QmVOip9/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Evicted by the Oil Spill twitter:description: With contractors flowing to the Gulf Coast to work on oil spill cleanup, rents are rising and fisherman Gene Hickman faces eviction from his home twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7QmVOip9/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Evicted by the Oil Spill > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Evicted by the Oil Spill [Watch (HLS stream): Evicted by the Oil Spill](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7QmVOip9.m3u8) (5:16)  _Published 2010-07-08. With contractors flowing to the Gulf Coast to work on oil spill cleanup, rents are rising and fisherman Gene Hickman faces eviction from his home_ --- Jul 27, 2023 2:22 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Gulf Oil Spill by the Numbers](/video/1VyYPAD3/) ### The Gulf Oil Spill by the Numbers [Portraits From the Oil Spill](/video/DxeqNR0P/) ### Portraits From the Oil Spill [Potential Long-Term Damage from the Gulf Oil Spill](/video/eWjvR62M/) ### Potential Long-Term Damage from the Gulf Oil Spill --- ## Transcript >> Everybody is jumping on the bandwagon. They call it a gold rush or BP rush. Some people is disastrous too and some people just-- it's a hay day. >> It's boomer bust these days for folks in Lafayette, Louisiana, just one of many coastal- fishing communities reeling from the affects of the oil spill. Before the spill Gene Hickman operated a thriving commercial and charter fishing business here. But now things have drastically changed for Gene and his family. >> They're gonna shut the whole rig down-- -[ unk ] oil almost all the way up to Lafayette already and the oil is still coming out of the well and just getting more hopeless it seemed every day. >> Especially hopeless now because Gene and his wife, Vicky, who have lived in the area for over 25 years have just been told they must vacate their home. They say their landlord who owns the fishing charter company James' been running no longer needs their services. >> They [ unk ] really knew that that was it, you know. I was gonna have to find another place to live. >> Around Lafayette, people who own homes and fishing camps are competing for the new renters in town, the visiting oil spill clean- up workers and managers. Homes like these are now renting for two to three times as much as they would have before the spill, some for even more. And Gene says, his landlord wants to get in on the action like everybody else. >> He's gonna probably rent it for somebody who's working the BP oil spill, cleaning up. A camp I used to rent for $ 1, 500 a month is now going for like $ 5, 000 and it's all get rented by oil spill employees. >> BP claimed that their vessels of opportunity program was designed to provide local boat operators an opportunity to assist with oil respond activities. But there are a number of new faces in town and many of them work for contractors hired by BP. At one work site, a handful of men were reluctant to go on camera when asked where they're from saying they didn't want to be fired. >> Are you [ unk ] from Louisiana or-- >> Well-- >> somewhere else? >> I lived from-- -[ unk ] all over. >> Yeah. We got guys from Hawaii, Alaska, California, New York. >> Gene says, he's definitely noticed a lot of newcomers to Lafayette, a town with a population of about 1, 500. >> You can see a lot more trucks coming down bringing stuffs and boats going to clean all every day, you know. People I haven't seen before. Living in Lafayette, you'd just about know everybody even if you don't know their names, you'll recognize their faces. >> At the Lafayette Incident Command Post, US Coast Guard Spokesman and Commander Dave Smith says that they are utilizing specialty contractors. >> And then we have a number [ unk ] contractors who specialize in oil recovery, which is [ unk ] there's the US and Asian corporation and a company called [ unk ], which is a [ unk ]. >> All the people arriving here to work for these contractors need housing. >> The companies that they work for are speaking of the [ unk ] so, you know. >> People [ unk ] sky high with stuff going on and people are paying. >> Neither Gene or his brother John a shrimp fisherman who lives nearby can participate in the vessel of opportunity program because of health issues. John had quadruple bypass heart surgery three years ago. And Gene says, he was recently diagnosed with skin cancer. -[ unk ] being contaminated. >> I don't wanna go out there and get those fumes on me right now because I'm looking at 30 days of radiation and chemo and I'm scared that going out there is gonna mess up my immune system right now. >> If they can't find a place to live in the next few days, Vicky says, they might have to move in with their niece. >> We're gonna have to leave the community and, you know, almost everybody knows my husband and it's just gonna be hardly even that and we're gonna have to. >> We've made a lot of good friends and just to see it all have to get severed because of this. It's sad. [ unk ] what my Dad-- I couldn't stand on the bucket and drive the boat for him, crab and shrimp and-- >> Once fishing for living gets in your blood, that's it. >> Caroline Kim reporting from Lafayette, Louisiana. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Evicted by the Oil Spill","description":"With contractors flowing to the Gulf Coast to work on oil spill cleanup, rents are rising and fisherman Gene Hickman faces eviction from his home","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/7QmVOip9/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2010-07-08T15:04:01.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/7QmVOip9.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/7QmVOip9/","duration":"PT5M16S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/7QmVOip9/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```