Farewell, Sheriff Lee

Harry Lee has passed.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff was born in New Orleans and passed away October 1, 2007 from leukemia. Say what you want about him, but he never pulled and P.C. bullshit like most politicians do. He called it how he saw it. You'll be missed, Harry.

Voice of the Wetlands Festival

The fourth annual Voice of the Wetlands fest will be held October 12-14 at Southdown Plantation in Houma. Here's a link to the flyer

The Voice of the Wetlands' president is none other than Louisiana native Tab Benoit.

This very talented blues guitarist started the VOW in 2003 to bring attention to the vanishing coastline of Louisiana. Besides the fantastic line up of music, there will be flights over the Louisiana wetlands available for $35 per person in groups of 3.
To take advantage of this special rate, please call Hammond's Air Service (985) 876-0584 or you can click here for more contact information.

Hubby & I will be in attendance on the 13th where we look forward to seeing the VOW Allstars, featuring Tab Benoit, Jumpin' Johnny Sansone, Anders Osborne, Louisiana's "rockin fiddler" Waylon Thibodeaux and Big Chief of the Mardi Gras Indian tribe, the Golden Eagles Monk Boudreaux

So come on down to Houma and enjoy the music and get educated on the Wetlands.

Walker Website

I checked out a website of someone who left a comment on this blog. She's from Buras, Louisiana.

Her website details what became of Buras and all of Plaquemine Parish during and after Katrina. She also provides links to the different areas of the Parish and how they were affected and how they are recovering, from Industry to Schools to Agriculture and Livestock. This site is definitely worth a visit if you want to know what's going on down south of New Orleans. It's an extremely comprehensive website.

Plaquemines Parish is eroding away thanks to the barrier islands of Louisiana eroding at an extreme rate. In places up to 100 feet of shoreline are disappearing every year..

messenger

Go here to create your own.

A lesson on the Wetlands

Hat tip to Varg

What will it take?

We Could Be Famous: Embarrassing Dysfunction in N.O. Criminal Justice System

Nagin

Chris Rose has written an article about the in-name-only mayor of New Orleans.


Here's a little taste
The truth is, I don't know what one man can do to fix the problems around here. And that's the rub; we never will know what it would have been like to have an effective leader who unified the community for a common goal and took our fight to those who screw us over, someone who said: This is all wrong.


Right after the storm there was so much hope about bringing the city back. More than 2 years later those hopes have vanished.

As Chris writes
.....we can pretty much rely on our mayor to say or do something of such enormous folly at least once a month that it has become routine and we have now come to accept it as part of the New Normal around here, that's just the way it is


Sad, so sad.

Highway 90

Hubby & I took our monthly tour down Highway 90 to assess its progress in recovering from Katrina.

In the small neighborhood of Venetian Isles there's a building boom, but you wouldn't know it by this section.
Venetian Isles Fire Department is still working without a building.

September 2007

September 2006

Katrina Cottage

There's a lot that appears to be used by FEMA as a storage place for used FEMA trailers. We spotted this Katrina Cottage sitting there. Seems like this will be the replacement for those problem-plagued FEMA travel trailers used by thousands of Katrina victims.

About a mile away from the FEMA site is a boardwalk for viewing a small section of Bayou Sauvage, a national wildlife refuge that runs parallel to Highway 90.


We hadn't stopped here for quite a while so we decided to check it out.

We found this "shrine" dedicated to someone nicknamed "Zeke the Alligator Savage". Very interesting.
It's heartening to see nature coming back. While this area was laid flat by the storm, you can see the progress it's making in these two shots


September 2007

March 2006
Over in Lake Catherine the rebuilding progress is finally in full swing. Camps and homes are being rebuilt using updated materials and processes.

This camp has a steel structure

This "camp" is about three times the size of my house!!!

Here the remnants of someone's home


At Chef Pass we saw this big old shrimp boat

The new Rigolets bridge is progressing nicely

Get away

dreams of Maine

Jena

the whole story

NOMA in the WSJ

NOMA in WSJ

an article in a recent issue of the Wall Street Jounal by Tom Freudenheim
is a pleasant read about the New Orleans Museum of Art , including its history and its surviving
Hurricane Katrina. An excerpt:

Disasters can tear people apart or bring them together. The initial shock of confronting today's New Orleans is not just about numbers -- deaths, homes destroyed, displaced lives -- but about the fact that two years after America's worst natural disaster people are still trying to pick themselves up and rebuild not just their physical surroundings but their still-fragile psyches. Disasters also remind people of essentials: what really matters in their lives. The New Orleans Museum of Art might well serve as an inspiration for those of our museums that have grown fat and self-satisfied, forgetting their missions of protecting the public patrimony and providing education, pleasure and even diversion for their visitors

These museum stalwarts soldier on because they understand that the art museum can bring added value to the injured lives of New Orleanians -- wound-salving that may be more critical for locals than for tourists. The traditional French Quarter, with its honky-tonk attractions, looks intact but feels sadly underpopulated. Reservations at the best restaurants are now easily available, so a convention visitor might even wonder what all the fuss about Katrina was about. The ability of a semitropical climate to make everything look lush and green is too happy a mask for what is actually a series of endless tragedies (optimists speak of "opportunities"). Even what's left of the Lower Ninth Ward is largely hidden by acres of profuse green weeds. The ghoulish may find that picturesque; those of us who are day-trippers end up feeling guilty about our obvious voyeurism.

Here's a link to the whole article.