Intracoastal City, LA is another end of the road city, one of the many in Louisiana and has been near and dear to my heart since the early 2000s due to the opportunity it offered me. As previously mentioned by @StarbaseLANews it was one of the four sites considered for staging hardware and heavy cargo. Long before it was a Gulf oil and shrimping hub, the stretch of marsh and riverfront 13 miles south of Abbeville was called Lower Egypt. Settlers first arrived in the mid-1840s when Robert Green tried raising hogs on a 40-acre tract at the mouth of the Vermilion River, followed by the White, Foster, Kibbe, and Cessac families, who farmed, fished, and trapped along the water. Around 1930, out-of-state investors bought nearby Belle Isle to form the Louisiana Furs Corporation, prompting Alpha Richard and his wife to open a boat landing and gas pump so visitors no longer had to travel down by boat all the way from Abbeville. Everything changed in 1941 when the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway reached the Vermilion River, followed by the dredging of the Vermilion River Cutoff in 1944 to give boats a straight shot into Vermilion Bay. Real estate developers renamed the crossroads Intracoastal City, and as offshore drilling pushed into the Gulf, the port boomed. N. R. Broussard opened a boatyard in 1959, Seacoast Products added a menhaden ("pogey") processing plant in 1964, and by the 1980s peak, roughly 200 oil-and-gas support companies, tugboat outfits, and shrimp docks lined its single main road. Just as important to that boom was the sound of rotors overhead. In 1949, the same year it was founded in Lafayette, Petroleum Helicopters Inc. (PHI) established a base at Intracoastal City to ferry seismic crews and roughnecks out to the early Gulf rigs, cutting hours-long boat rides down to minutes. As drilling moved into deeper water, Intracoastal City became one of the busiest offshore heliport corridors on the Gulf Coast. PHI expanded its footprint into a 22.5-acre complex (7LS4) with hangars, passenger terminals, maintenance shops, and landing pads for 45 helicopters, while rival operators Air Logistics (later Bristow) and Era Helicopters built out their own heliports alongside it. The late-1980s oil bust and devastating storm surges from Hurricanes Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008 battered the harbor and heliports, shrinking the town's permanent footprint to a handful of residents where two school buses once ran. Still, Intracoastal City remains an active working port and offshore staging point for shrimpers, pogey boats, and Gulf crews, a familiar National Hurricane Center storm-watch breakpoint, and the gateway where LA-82 turns west toward Pecan Island.