Buccaneer State Park Reopens

WAVELAND — Five years after Hurricane Katrina smashed its buildings and wiped out its waterslides, Buccaneer State Park is open to visitors again.

Slightly more than 100 camp sites opened last month, offering visitors full hook-ups to water, sewer and electricity. Another 74 are under construction with a scheduled completion by mid-summer. When it’s all finished, campers will have almost 300 sites to choose from.

Renovating and rebuilding the park is a $17 million project.

So far, the main office has been rebuilt, along with a playground, a maintenance facility, three bath houses, two pavilions, the administrators’ residences.

Here is their website.

Why didn't we get this?

From Deepwater Horizon Response External Affairs deepwaterhorizonresponse.com

MIAMI -- A Sentry plan has been initiated to provide real-time ocean monitoring off the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas. Vessels will be used to conduct maritime patrols to provide early identification of any weathered oil products such as light sheen, which will naturally dissipate, or mousse mats and tar balls that could potentially threaten the Florida Keys and east coast of Florida. A vessel departed from John's Pass, near St. Petersburg, Fla. on the first patrol and patrols will generally last from four to 10 days.

Additional vessels and aircraft Sentry patrols may be implemented as necessary to provide early warning detection of any weathered oil products.These vessels are intended to provide a minimum of 48-hours additional notice so responders can maximize preparedness and response activities and notify the public There have been no reports of Deepwater Horizon/BP Oil Spill-related oil products reaching shore in the Florida Peninsula and there is no indication that it will have impacts from weathered oil products in the near future.  Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill activities in the Florida Panhandle are being coordinated by the Incident Command Post in Mobile, Ala.

More on the Queen Bess Pelicans

"As of noon Saturday, only five oiled birds were crated up for rescue, Carloss said, adding that was a sign improvement over 34 feathered victims rescued on Friday and 59 on Thursday

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/spill+hits+pelicans+hard/3119379/story.html#ixzz0q7ECx31F"

2010 Bayou Liberty Pirogue Races

ARE CANCELLED

Friday, May 14, 2010 St. Tammany bureau
For the first time in 60 years, the arrival of June will not be synonymous with the Bayou Liberty Pirogue Races.

According to Beth DiMarco, who with her father, Armand "Junior" Pichon, have been the key figures in the judge's reviewing stand at the annual pirogue races, this year's event has been canceled.

Sponsored by the Bayou Liberty Civic Center, the annual festival always has been as much a family reunion as a pirogue competition and fundraiser. Families greet each other, citing familial ties; paddlers churn through the water, hoping this might be their year to go home with a gleaming trophy and a fistful of cash; and civic center volunteers serve up cheeseburgers, refreshments and heaping dishes of nachos until, at some booths, there are no more festival foods to be devoured.

This year, families will have to keep in touch through more mundane means, festivalgoers will have to get their food and music fix elsewhere, and paddlers will have to keep on dreaming.

DiMarco explained that bids are being let on a construction contract for St. Genevieve Catholic Church and that, coupled with the Bayou Liberty bridge work, necessitated the cancellation.

"It's sad, but with all the activity with the pontoon bridge being dismantled and one lane on the new bridge, I guess it would be best on the safety side," DiMarco noted.

Money raised from the event traditionally has been used for playground maintenance at the Bayou Liberty Civic Center, still in disrepair since Hurricane Katrina devastated the Bayou Liberty area in 2005. Anyone wishing to contribute to this cause, or other civic center efforts, may send a check payable to the Bayou Liberty Civic Center to 33154 Dave Pichon Road, Slidell, LA 70460.

Though disappointed about this year's turn of events, DiMarco is hopeful that by 2011 all obstacles will have been cleared for the return of the races.

As her father always says, "This is part of our heritage."

Until the event is next held, the reigning champion of the Bayou Liberty Pirogue Races will remain Richard Savoie, who lives in Bayou Gauche near Des Allemands.

Published on NOLA.com

Published in The Times-Picayune Sunday, May 16, 2010

A surviving pelican from Queen Bess Island

After six weeks with one to four birds a day coming into Louisiana's rescue center for oiled birds, 53 arrived Thursday and another 13 Friday morning.

And, center spokesman Jay Holcomb said more are on their way from the rookery on Queen Bess Island, near Grand Isle.

He described it as a change from one level of crisis to another, but said it was something that people with Tri-State Bird Rescue and the International Bird Rescue Research Center always knew would happen. About 20 people are working at the center, and so far that's plenty, Holcomb said.

He and veterinarians Heather Nevill of Tri-State and Sharon Taylor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say the birds were not yet ready for cleaning.

They're being kept in wooden pens with mesh covers, white cloths over those and heat lamps to keep them warm so they won't preen themselves until they can be washed.


God bless the people from International Bird Rescue Research Center and TriState Bird Rescue.



If you want to donate money to these angels, click here for Internatikonal Bird Rescue and for TriState Bird Rescue. Please.

Here it comes, East Coast

Computer models show Gulf oil reaching East Coast

This is kind of ironic in that the East Coast is so against oil drilling of their coast……

POSTED: 02:04 PM Thursday, June 3, 2010
BY: The Associated Press
Computer models show oil leaking from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico could wind up on the East Coast and even get carried on currents across the Atlantic Ocean toward Europe.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research models showed today that oil could enter the Gulf’s loop current, go around the tip of Florida and as far north as Cape Hatteras, N.C. According to researchers, oil could threaten East Coast beaches by early July, but they cautioned the models were not a forecast.

The oil could then head by Bermuda on its way to Europe.

Martin Visbeck, a research team member with the University of Kiel in Germany, says it is unlikely any oil reaching Europe would be thick enough to be harmful.

STUPID SCUZZBUCKET

QUOTE:
Gulf Oil Spill 'Not An Environmental Disaster'




Don't worry about the oil spilling into the Gulf, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) says, because the worst spill in U.S. history is "not an environmental disaster," just nature taking its course.

"This is not an environmental disaster, and I will say that again and again because it is a natural phenomenon," Young said after Congressional hearings last week. "Oil has seeped into this ocean for centuries, will continue to do it. During World War II there was over 10 million barrels of oil spilt from ships, and no natural catastrophe. ... We will lose some birds, we will lose some fixed sealife, but overall it will recover."

Young, of course, has notoriously close and longstanding ties with oil companies, and went on to criticize the Obama administration's stated moratorium on new offshore drilling permits in the wake of the Gulf spill.

The Alaska Republican has already taken heat for those comments from his challengers on both sides of the aisle. "The man is an ostrich," Democrat Harry Crawford said. "He has his head in the sand if he can't see that this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, man-made disaster in history."

Republican challenger John Cox acknowledged, "We know there's a problem. We know that this is a major disaster."

We are NOT okay

The latest pictures from Boston dot com, taken today, June 3, 2010 shows the brown pelican suffering, suffocating to death in that fucking BP oil that washed ashore. I can't stop crying. It's been 45 days, people have lost their livlihoods, their futures. Our wildlife is suffering.

Our state bird reflects what's happening to US. Look at these pictures, see what's happening to them, know that this is MORE than the politics...can someone tell Obama? Please? He's due here tomorrow and will probably be shown another clean beach.

My heart hurts too much to show the pictues. These birds are suffering needlessly, so are Ridley Kemp turtles, oysters, shrimp larvae, crabs, fish and God knows what else.

Yet we still have to go to BP or the fucking Coast Guard (the spineless whores) with our hats in our hands and say "please can I use this to clean up my shores", "please sir can I have another".

louisiana seafood is safe and delicious!

American Zombie: Battling the misinformation

NYT on Billy Nungesser

An excerpt from the NY Times:

Within hours of the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Mr. Nungesser, 51, became a go-to guy for the news media. In the ensuing weeks, he has turned into the angry everyman of the oil spill, whether delivering a broadside against the government and BP’s response efforts on CNN or standing in the gymnasium of Boothville-Venice Elementary School (Home of the Oilers!) before an anxious crowd of shrimpers and fishermen.

“I know it’s going to be rough,” he said to the crowd in a speech that sounded at times like a locker room pep talk. “I know everything’s not going to go our way. But they’re not going to beat us.”

“Go get ’em, Billy,” someone shouted from the bleachers.

To hear Mr. Nungesser tell it, the big boys — BP, the Coast Guard, the Army Corps of Engineers — have all been better at pointing fingers than solving problems.

Along with Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mr. Nungesser has been a dogged advocate for a plan to build barrier islands out of dredged material to keep the oil off the shores.

There are a number of experts, including the Army Corps of Engineers, who think this is a bad idea, citing cost, time and environmental impact. In Mr. Nungesser’s gospel, that kind of response, even if it turns out to be true, is only half an answer. Come up with a better idea, he tells critics, or keep your reservations to yourself.

“These guys have no clue and no ability to think outside the box,” he said at the morning staff meeting.

Despite an affinity for the spotlight, Mr. Nungesser is a hard man to pin down. Between a cellphone that buzzes like an angry wasp, an unending string of interview requests, a visit by the president and the actual work of managing the parish, it is nearly impossible to slow him down long enough to confirm some basic biographical facts.

For example: How did Mr. Nungesser come to own an elk ranch in the parish?

The elk, he said late Thursday night over a 10-minute dinner of Sun Chips and soda, were bought from a man in Nebraska with the money he got from selling his house to his sister when he went to live in a shipping container.

Mr. Nungesser throws out sentences like that, and before one has a chance to ask him to elaborate, he is back on the phone, talking to a state trooper or a parish official or his fiancée, who needs to know that a television camera crew was following him home that night.

Back to the shipping container.

“I had a Jacuzzi,” he clarified. “It was nice.”

In his 20s and early 30s, Mr. Nungesser worked for his father’s business, a catering company that served offshore drilling rigs. In 1991, before he got involved with the elk (he sells the velvet off the antlers for arthritis medicine), Mr. Nungesser realized that metal shipping containers could be modified and used as living quarters for workers on offshore rigs.

He had a hard time at first selling the idea to investors, mainly friends and friends of friends, and so he moved into a container himself. The company, General Marine Leasing, eventually reached $20 million in sales, and now, instead of a shipping container, he lives on a palatial estate built on a man-made hill in front of an artificial lake.

Mr. Nungesser rode out Hurricane Katrina on this estate and decided to run for parish president as a Republican in 2006, he said, out of frustration over the local response to the recovery.

It was a big decision. A run for state representative in his early 20s had left him cynical about politics, despite his pedigree: his father was the chairman of the State Republican Party when there was not much of one to speak of, and he was the chief of staff for Gov. David C. Treen, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, in the early 1980s.

Mr. Nungesser’s preparations for public office had come from running a business, an experience that made him good at laying into uncooperative oil companies but not always agile when it came to the give and take of a democracy.

“In private business, Billy was, in essence, the chief cook and bottle washer,” said Anthony Buras, a member of the parish council. “In the private business mentality, you move forward the minute you make a decision. Sometimes in government that isn’t always doable. There have been some times where there’s been some conflict with that.”

Mr. Nungesser’s impatience with the parish council is not something he takes pains to hide, railing against “the egos and the jealousy” of his political opponents with the same irritation he displays when criticizing the response to the oil spill.

That is the mode he seems to enjoy most, and one he was fully engaged in late Thursday night on the front porch of the Myrtle Grove Marina.

He had just taken a regiment of journalists out in boats to see oiled pelicans, and now, his clothes drenched from a sudden downpour, he was balancing a flurry of phone calls with the demands of the news media.

Standing in white shrimp boots that he called his Cajun Reeboks, he kept up the phone conversation while hooking up his microphone for a CNN interview like a seasoned correspondent.

Fired for wearing safety equipment?

From Save Our Gulf dot org:

 

BP Tells Fishermen Working On The Oil Spill That They Will Be Fired For Wearing A Respirator

We have had numerous fisherman, that have been hired through BP's Master Vessel Charter Agreement to work on the oil spill response, tell us that their BP "bosses" have told them that if they use a respirator or any safety equipment not provided by BP that they would be fired.

Hundreds of fisherman have been hired to attach booms to their shrimp boats in place of nets and drive their boats directly through the oil slicks to corral and collect the oil that is spilling from BP's broken well in the Gulf of Mexico. These fisherman have one of the highest potentials for exposure to toxic air pollutants from the crude oil out of all of the responders working the spill. In addition to crude oil there is the added danger posed by the aerial application of dispersant chemicals and there have already been reports that fishermen working on the spill feel that they have been impacted by the dispersants.

It is only prudent that these fisherman be provided respiratory protection and encouraged to use it. Instead, they have not only NOT been provided respiratory protection, they have been threatened with being fired for using their own respiratory protection.

When we first realized that these workers were not being provided with adequate safety gear we activated our project that provides safety gear to people working on hurricane recovery but, in this case tailored to oil spill response. We have since distributed hundreds of half face respirators with multiple packs of organic vapor cartridges a piece as well as nitrile gloves, sleeve protectors and booties.

LEAN also participated in what we thought was a successful Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), brought by a team of layers led by attorney Stuart Smith, requiring BP to provide the volunteers with safety gear. As a result of that TRO, "the Judge ordered a consent agreement, now court record, wherein British Petroleum has agreed to amend the Master Vessel Charter Agreement and take responsibility to ensure workers are properly trained in haz-mat protocol and are provided all necessary equipment at BP's expense," said James Garner, of Sher Garner Cahill Richter Klein & Hilbert, L.L.C.

"It appears that, despite the obvious potential for exposure to respiratory toxins, BP does not consider respiratory protection necessary equipment," said Paul Orr, Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper, "and even so to prevent the fishermen from using their own respiratory protection if they chose to do so is deeply troubling."

"The fisherman have entered into this (Master Vessel Charter) agreement with BP in order to make some income while they are unable to fish," Orr went on to say. "These fisherman are choosing to put themselves in harms way in order to provide for their families and that BP would force them to sacrifice their health in order to make ends meet when simply using a respirator could protect their health is unconscionable."

"There's no way you can be working in that toxic soup without getting exposures," said Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) office of solid waste and emergency response. Kaufman likened the situation to the World Trade Center cleanup after 9/11, which left workers with long-term respiratory problems despite repeated official claims that workers did not need respirators because the working conditions were safe. "It's unbelievable what's going on. It's like deja vu all over again," he said.