René O'Deay gBlog

NEW ORLEANS (May 06, 2010- The Times-Picayune)—The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, New Orleans chefs, seafood dealers and grocers united in shouting one message from the rooftops: Louisiana seafood is safe to eat.

"Louisiana seafood is alive and well and healthy and safe, " said Harlon Pearce, who owns Harlon's LA Fish, chairs the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board and is on the Gulf of Mexico Fisheries Management Council.

Seafood is a $2.4 billion industry in the state, with Louisiana providing a third of the domestic seafood in the contiguous 48 states, Smith said, noting that the state is the nation's No. 1 producer of shrimp, oysters, blue crabs, crawfish and alligator, and the No. 2 producer of finfish.

"From the seafood supply end of it, things are not as bad as we may have expected, " Montero added on Tuesday.

While south Louisiana residents wait in limbo for the next developments, Smith has a suggestion: "The best way consumers can help us right now is go out and dine or go to the store and buy Louisiana seafood, to help shore up the markets that we're taking a 23 percent hit on."

see full story: Despite oil spill, Louisiana's seafood catch is fine, officials say

Southeast
Louisiana, High and dry: That's exactly how Bob and Sherry Bourg expect
to spend the 2009 storm season, now that their new hurricane-resistant home
has been installed on the shores of Lake Catherine.

Deltec, an Asheville, N.C., business, designs hurricane-resistant circular (technically, polygonal) homes and produces kits for assembly. The company trains contractors
in various locales to ensure that kits are assembled according to company standards.
Locals who follow "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" were introduced to the company when Ty Pennington and crew landed in town last spring and replaced the storm-and tornado-damaged home of a Westwego first responder and his extended family using a Deltec product.

Survived Katrina in Pass Christian, Mississippi:

A sales brochure for Deltec Homes says "round for a reason".

Dale and Carolyn Medley of Pass Christian now understand the reason, courtesy of Hurricane Katrina. The couple's unusual home withstood the storm's fury.

"We've had several people come by and look at it since the storm," said Dale Medley, while giving a tour of his unusually-shaped home.

The round house in Timber Ridge proved its worth in Katrina.

"My son's an architect and he advised that a round house, he explained to me, that the wind goes around it and it's safer with high winds than a square house," said Carolyn Medley.

Dozens of nearby houses in the Timber Ridge subdivision gave way to Katrina's wind and water. The Medley home survived the storm's wind with very little damage.

Deltec helped build home for Westwego couple and rebuild a church: banding
together with Extreme Makeover Home Edition and construction crews from around the country for 7-day rebuild of the New Orleans area home and a church damaged by Hurricane Katrina and tornadoes.

For more information visit http://www.DeltecHomes.com/

Notice the homebuilding seminars also on the site.

Grand Isle 'Round House' Post-Katrina, a survivor.

See you in a couple of weeks. Gone to Taos!

René O'Deay

Last July, the wetlands flyover tour was co-sponsored by the state, the America's Wetland Foundation and the National Guard. The intention? To give lawmakers from other states a glimpse of Louisiana's crumbling "energy coast."

Lawmakers from as far away as Puerto Rico, New Hampshire and Alaska climb aboard for a bird's-eye view of the watery coastline. In many places, it's more water than coast.

From the air, they tour a portion of the 1,900 square miles of submerged coastal Louisiana. They learn that 1.7 miles of marshland will reduce the elevation of storm surge by about a foot. Cypress and tupelo forests also have huge buffering effects:the trees capture energy and hold floodwaters. Over the years, man-made changes to the natural hydrology of the Mississippi River and the coastal region have destroyed once-extensive coastal forests, prairies and marshes. To date, Louisiana's land loss equals an area the size of Delaware — and it's growing.

"This makes me more sympathetic to my friends in Louisiana," says Rep. John Grange a Republican from Kansas. "During Katrina, you saw human suffering, but you didn't see the ecological impact like we did today."

Back on the ground, it's evident that the effects of oil and gas pipelines and transportation canals — watery highways of saltwater intrusion into now-devastated fresh-water ecosystems — have made an impact on the group.� Source: The Gambit

And for those of you who think New Orleans needs to quit living and stop asking
for 'handouts':

Guarding the Coast The oil and gas industry's front organizations, including America's Wetland Foundation run by Big Oil front man, R. King Milling ("Coast Guarding," Aug. 26, 2008, The Gambit), is nothing more than an attempt to have taxpayers foot the bill for Big Oil's destruction of our wetlands in its oil-and-gas operations along the coast over the last 50 years, which returned billions in profits to its already gloated coffers.

While Milling and the other oil and gas henchmen on the Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority ponder ways to avoid responsibility for Big Oil's destruction of our wetlands, we lose more miles of coastline.

What will it take for the citizens of Louisiana, the Gulf Coast and our elected leaders to wake up and finally hold the oil companies responsible for their destructive behavior? Evidently, $4 per gallon of gas and destruction of our homes, property and loved ones is not enough. Vincent L. Bowers: letter to Editor The Gambit

So, it isn't just the government and Army Corps of Engineers who are responsible for the destruction in New Orleans and Louisiana and Mississippi, from Katrina, the oil companies themselves have caused a major portion of the problem.
And if you bought gas and oil and natural gas from Louisiana....

The Chief of Houma Nation of Louisiana in Isle de Jean Charles on the aftermath of Ike and Gustav:

Brenda Robichaux, the principal chief of the United Houma Nation, says it broke her heart when she saw what Gustav did.

“I was in tears as I was walking because this is our community. You know, and it's very, very important that we can maintain our life here,” she said.

She says about 100 people live on the island, most of them members of her tribal nation. “We’ve lived here for generation after generation. And so it's family.”

Chief Robichaux says she gets angry thinking about how much this area has lost. The grassy fields with oak trees where kids played, cattle grazed and the barrier islands that offered storm protection.

“You know, why hasn’t the coastal erosion issue been addressed sooner? Why hasn’t those barrier islands been restored? Why hasn’t the oil and gas industry had to repair the location canals that they built that made this community so fragile and so vulnerable?”

People here say what happened to Isle de Jean Charles during Gustav should be a message to the rest of Louisiana. Coastal erosion has destroyed their protection. And now the way of life they have known for generations is in jeopardy.

“This community is a tale of what we can expect for other communities along our coast,” said Natalie Snider from the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana.

Isle de Jean Charles destruction

"Manatee area . . . proceed with caution."

by Kia Hall Hayes, The Times-Picayune
Thursday July 17, 2008, 9:37 PM

Confirming reports of manatees in and around Lake Pontchartrain, local scientists are spreading the word to boaters who might catch sight of the endangered mammal: Consider yourself lucky, and then leave it alone.

About a dozen sightings have been confirmed near the North Shore in recent weeks, and scientists are urging the public to appreciate the manatees from a distance.

"People like to swim with them, but that makes them not afraid of boats, and then they swim up to them and get hit, " said Fred Stouder, a biologist at Southeastern Louisiana University's Turtle Cove Environmental Research Station in Manchac.

Human interaction is one of the biggest killers of the slow-moving animal, which grows up to 10 or 12 feet and can weigh 350 to 450 pounds.

About 3,100 live in U.S. waters.

Manatees, also known as "sea cows, " make their way over from Florida in the late spring when Louisiana waters have warmed to their liking. Experts say the animals also travel up the east coast and to other Gulf Coast states in search of warm water and vegetation. Times-Picayune

Manatees coming to an area near you!

Be careful, these slow moving animals, described by a Wildlife coordinator as 'a very large potato with a flipper on the end of it' are easily hurt by fast-moving boats.

Correction, a reader on my gBlog brought to my attention that some of the above info was wrong.

Florida Wildlife and Fish: The average Florida manatee is about 10 feet long and weighs close to 1,200 pounds. Manatees can reach up to 13 feet in length and weigh 3,500 pounds. Female manatees tend to be larger than the males. Their calves weigh around 66 pounds and are 4 feet long.

Gambit Weekly : November 13, 2007: The Road Home's Small Rental Property Program isn't a traditional loan program at all; instead, it's an 'incentive" program. Worse yet, the rules apply in a Catch-22 fashion: Only after construction is completed " at the landlord's sole expense " and a rehabilitated property is thoroughly inspected (and a qualified low-income renter identified) can an applicant receive a forgivable loan. Until construction is finished and all paperwork and inspections are completed, landlord-applicants are on their own. Most difficult of all, they have to get their own financing to rebuild. While a forgivable SRPP loan sounds great, the banks that are financing reconstruction work expect timely repayment of every loan they make to SRPP applicants.

Somehow, that crucial bit of information didn't filter out to thousands of small-scale landlords like Mattie Mack.

A program designed to replace thousands of affordable rental units destroyed by Hurricane Katrina has not rebuilt a single one.

Louisiana Recovery Authority's Road Home 'Small Rental Property Program" (SRPP). The SRPP is a companion of sorts to the Road Home homeowners program, which has received tons of publicity. Both programs are administered by ICF International Inc.

SRPP started taking applications in January 2007.
Unfortunately, SRPP isn't helping them. In fact, since January, SRPP hasn't helped any landlords. As of last week, SRPP had not issued a single check for one of the forgivable loans, despite its $869 million budget and Louisiana's loss of 82,000 rental units as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

By David Winkler-Schmit for Gambit Weekly : Stuck on Stuck : November 13, 2007