| 加利福尼亚柑桔面临艰难时刻-1 Oranges are the life blood of Lindsay; even the local bar is called The Orange, and the old movie theater : The Grove. The town's annual spring festival features an Orange Blossom Queen and her court. And on cold nights, the town sounds like a helicopter landing pad, as farmers fire up their wind machines -- giant propellers that push warm air among the groves. Lindsay is home to some 10,000 people, and half the population works picking, packing, or growing citrus. Inside Virginia's Barbershop, as Connie Norris' young son gets a haircut, she chats with other customers about the major freeze that hit Lindsay in 1990. The frigid temperatures destroyed the citrus, and the local economy. Norris says this cold snap could do the same. "It affects all the different industries, the juice plant, the packinghouses, manufacturing plants. Even here in town, here, people won't have the extra money to get their hair cut." One of the other customers remembers that the community actually held a funeral for the town that year. It had been a bad year. The main olive plant had just closed, and then the orange workers lost their jobs. Unemployment was 67 percent. And so, says Mayor Ed Murray, the idea of the funeral was to bury all that bad luck. "We had the funeral procession through town and went out to the park and buried a can of olives, a frozen orange." He says the ceremony was symbolic and cathartic. "People who had anything they wanted to throw into the gravesite could throw it in there, to get rid of the old, and start fresh anew." Farmers say they learned some lessons from that 1990 freeze. Most of them have crop insurance now. But oranges are still the town's main industry, and workers at Lindsay's packinghouses are still vulnerable to a frost that could kill thousands of jobs. Philip LoBue owns one of the biggest packinghouses in town. His oranges are shipped all over the United States and to Asia and Australia. Workers stand along an assembly line, packaging the last oranges picked before the freeze. LoBue says he only managed to save about 25 percent of his crop because he couldn't find enough pickers before the cold set in. He blames that on the lack of a guestworker program. "Everybody was trying to pick a lot more than what they would have normally been picking. There just weren't any workers to pick, so it really accented our lack of an immigration policy." LoBue does have plenty of packinghouse workers, but he says he'll be forced to lay them off very soon. One of them is 57-year old Maria de Jesus Castaneda. And she expects her husband, a truck driver who delivers oranges, to lose his job, too. |
