By 1986, shops on Canal Street were closed and windows were boarded up and colorfully painted. Just a decade earlier,
But by the mid-1980s, one in eight workers was unemployed in Louisiana, the highest unemployment rate in the nation. The cruelest impact was on families, as fathers left their children and wives.
One of the biggest hits fell on the small bayou communities that had thrived in the 1970s. In Morgan City, one in four were jobless.
As oil prices dropped – as low as $10 a barrel – some pessimists said Louisiana’s heyday as a prosperous and carefree supplier of energy was over forever. Even if prices rebounded, they said, the Gulf was running out of recoverable oil. But technology proved them wrong, as new deepwater drilling techniques allowed energy companies to find oil and gas in ways that would not have been imaginable just 25 years ago.
