"Weakening Isaac hovers over water-logged Louisiana" by Cain Burdeau and Michael Kunzelman | Associated Press, August 31, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — Inside the fortified levees that protected New Orleans, bursts of sunshine streamed through the thick clouds, and life began to return to normal. But beyond the city, people got their first good look at Isaac’s damage: Hundreds of homes were underwater. Half the state was without power. Thousands were staying at shelters.
And the damage may not be done....
At least two deaths were reported....
David Newman was frustrated that the government spent billions of dollars reinforcing New Orleans levees after Katrina, only to see the water inundating surrounding regions.
‘‘The water’s got to go somewhere,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s going to find the weakest link.’’
The sudden call for evacuations so long after the storm made landfall provoked a debate about whether anyone was to blame....
Oh, how little has changed since Katrina.
The water rose waist-high in some neighborhoods, and the Louisiana National Guard worked with sheriff’s deputies to rescue people stuck in their homes....
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Related:
"At least seven people were killed.... There were other signs of life getting back to some sense of normalcy. The Mississippi River opened to limited traffic, the French Quarter rekindled its lively spirit, and restaurants reopened."
Also see: Closed lock jams Mississippi River
"Gulf Coast slowly recovers from Isaac; 400,000 are left without power in Louisiana" by Kevin McGill | Associated Press, September 02, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — Gulf of Mexico oil platforms were being repopulated after Isaac forced shutdown of most Gulf oil production....
In New Orleans, the annual Southern Decadence festival, a celebration of gay culture, was underway. And the Superdome, which had minor damage, prepared to host a Saturday night football game between Tulane and Rutgers....
Related: Tulane’s Walker continues to recover after neck injury
To the east, officials pumped and released water from a reservoir, easing the pressure behind an Isaac-stressed dam in Mississippi on the Louisiana border. The threat for the earthen dam on Lake Tangipahoa prompted evacuations in small towns and rural areas....
But everything is back to... sigh.
The National Weather Service said it was bringing more rain and some drought relief to parts of the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service said two tornadoes touched down in rural areas of north-central Illinois....
"Days after Isaac, flooding and outages remain" Associated Press, September 03, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — Much of Plaquemines Parish was still covered with flood water Sunday and more than 200,000 people across Louisiana still did not have any power, five days after Isaac ravaged the state. Thousands of evacuees remained at shelters or bunked with friends or relatives. At least seven people were killed by the storm — five in Louisiana and two in Mississippi.
President Obama is to visit Louisiana on Monday, a day before the Democratic National Convention. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney visited the state Friday....
Related:
"A televised interlude in the rough and tumble of the political campaign [while] tens of thousands of customers remained in the dark Monday in Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly a week after Isaac inundated the Gulf Coast with a deluge that still has some low-lying areas under water."
But everything is back to nor... mal.
Despite the hardships, there were signs of progress.
I'm sorry, readers, but I can't read this positive shit-spinning anymore.
Workers continued their return to offshore oil and gas production platforms and drilling rigs, electricity came on for hundreds of thousands of people, and an annual gay pride celebration was held in the French Quarter.
At least you Louisiana folk know what is important, 'eh?
But much of Plaquemines Parish, a vulnerable tract that juts into the Gulf of Mexico southeast of New Orleans, remained under as much as 5 feet of water, Parish President Billy Nungesser said. The Category 1 hurricane walloped the parish, and for many, the damage was worse than Katrina in 2005.
‘‘I’ve never seen water come up this quick this fast,’’ he said.
He said there were reports that cattle in the largely rural parish took refuge on porches.
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So why did water inundate the surrounding regions so quick and fast?
"Researchers to look at levees’ role in La. flooding; Army Corps says New Orleans walls not to blame" by Cain Burdeau and Stacey Plaisance | Associated Press, September 05, 2012
LAPLACE, La. — At the urging of residents who have long felt forgotten in the shadow of more densely populated New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers says it will look into whether the city’s fortified defenses pushed floodwaters into outlying areas.
Even when government tries to good it ends in disaster!
However, the Corps has said it’s unlikely scientific analysis will confirm that theory suggested not only by locals, but by some of the state’s most powerful politicians. Instead, weather specialists say a unique set of circumstances about the storm — not the floodwalls surrounding the New Orleans metro area — had more to do with flooding neighborhoods that in recent years have never been under water because of storm surge.
Translation: the government cover-up is going to be deeper than the floodwaters.
Isaac was a large, slow-moving storm that wobbled across the state’s coast for about 2½ days, pumping water into back bays and lakes and leaving thousands of residents under water outside the massive levee system protecting metropolitan New Orleans. The storm was blamed for seven deaths and damaged thousands of homes on the Gulf Coast.
The Corps’ study was prompted by the suggestion that Isaac’s surge bounced off the levees and floodgates built since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and walloped communities outside the city’s ramparts.
Blaming the Army Corps of Engineers is nothing new in southern Louisiana, a region that is both dependent on the Corps and distrustful of an agency that wields immense power in this world of wetlands, rivers, and lakes, all of which fall under the agency’s jurisdiction.
The Corps was roundly criticized after Hurricane Katrina, which pushed in enough water to break through the levees that had surrounded New Orleans. Much of the city was left underwater, and since then the government has spent millions rebuilding the system of floodwalls protecting the metro area.
Before that, the Corps was blamed for the unraveling of coastal marshes by erecting levees on the Mississippi River.
In towns like the bedroom community of LaPlace, people want answers. There, neighborhoods were under water even though they had never before flooded because of storm surge....
And WHAT CHANGED in the interim?
On Friday, Republican Senator David Vitter asked the Corps to commission an independent study to determine whether the new floodwalls, gates, and higher levees around greater New Orleans caused water to stack up elsewhere....
The Corps said it expects the study will find ‘‘minimal’’ changes in surge elevation because of its work around New Orleans. It based that assessment on previous modeling. The agency said it would not comment further until the scientific work is done....
Other scientists agreed it was unlikely the fortified defenses caused flooding in neighboring communities. Instead, numerous factors combined to create the flooding conditions. For instance, the storm was virtually stationary for a time and dumped rain far longer than many other tropical systems.
Are you tired of the excuses and lies, Louisiana?
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And just in case you have forgotten what lies at the bottom:
"Tests prove oil on La. beaches is from BP spill; Company says buried globs were exposed by Isaac" by Cain Burdeau and Jay Reeves | Associated Press, September 07, 2012
NEW ORLEANS — Laboratory tests show that globs of oil found on two Louisiana beaches after Hurricane Isaac came from the 2010 BP spill.
Tests run by Louisiana State University for state wildlife officials confirmed that oil found on Elmer’s Island and Grand Isle matched the biological fingerprint of the hundreds of millions of gallons that spewed from BP’s Macondo well.
On Wednesday, BP PLC said oil from its spill had been exposed by Isaac’s waves and that the company would work to clean it up.
Ed Overton, the LSU chemist who did the state tests, said the oil found on Elmer’s Island had not degraded much while that at Grand Isle had.
‘‘Both were good solid matches on Macondo oil,’’ Overton said.
Two other samples collected from another barrier island did not match the signature of oil from the BP well.
So there is a new leak out there somewhere?
Specialists expected that hurricane waves would stir up oil buried along the Gulf Coast and that Isaac, which made landfall on Aug. 28 and soaked the region in the days afterward, apparently did just that.
I was told it simply disappeared by my government and mouthpiece media, so WTF?
Reports of tar balls washing up on beaches after the storm were reported in Alabama and Louisiana, two states that got hit hard by BP’s massive offshore oil spill.
On Tuesday, scouts found what they described as a large tar mat on the beaches of Elmer’s Island, prompting state officials to close a 13-mile stretch of beach and restrict fishing along that shoreline.
Still, Overton said the discovery of the buried oil does not mean that the Gulf is seeing a repeat of the summer of 2010, when oil was spewing from an out-of-control well about 55 miles off the Louisiana coast.
‘‘This is not oil everywhere,’’ Overton said. He said the difference between the amounts of oil being exposed now by Isaac and what the Gulf saw in 2010 is ‘‘night and day.’’
Still, he said more oil was likely buried in other places along the coast, perhaps as deep as 3 feet. He said the difficulty for cleanup crews has been finding and removing buried oil.
About 100 pounds of tar balls collected on the Alabama coast after Isaac are being tested at Auburn University, which has a contract with local government to assess the material. Researcher Joel Hayworth said a full chemical analysis isn’t yet complete, but the new tar deposits appeared ‘‘remarkably similar’’ in composition and consistency to tar found on state beaches during and immediately after the BP spill.
The tar balls are ‘‘clean,’’ he said, virtually identical in size and shape to ones found in 2010, and fragile enough that they fall apart when handled. That indicates material on the bottom of the coast isn’t moving much and is very near the surf line, Hayworth said.
Relatively pristine tar balls have washed ashore with each tropical system that has hit the Alabama coast since the spill, Hayworth said, indicating the material isn’t going anywhere.
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Related: BP posts $1.4b loss in quarter
Oooooh, poor BP!
"A tearful Sheriff Michael Tregre said the episode started when a gunman opened fire for unknown reasons.... Motives for the shootings and how they unfolded have not been released."
"Louisiana suspects had links to extremists" August 20, 2012
NEW
ORLEANS — At least some of the seven people arrested in a fatal
shootout with Louisiana deputies have been linked to violent anarchists
on the FBI’s domestic terrorism watch lists.
Detectives had been monitoring the group before Thursday’s shootout in Laplace, La., in which two deputies were killed and two more wounded, DeSoto Parish Sheriff Rodney Arbuckle said Saturday.
His detectives and other law enforcement discovered the suspects were heavily armed adherents to an ideology known as the ‘‘sovereign citizens’’ movement.
This is smelling like another set-up.
Detectives had been monitoring the group before Thursday’s shootout in Laplace, La., in which two deputies were killed and two more wounded, DeSoto Parish Sheriff Rodney Arbuckle said Saturday.
His detectives and other law enforcement discovered the suspects were heavily armed adherents to an ideology known as the ‘‘sovereign citizens’’ movement.
This is smelling like another set-up.
The FBI has classified sovereign citizens as people who believe they are free from all duties of a US citizen, like paying taxes.
The FBI considers the group’s members a danger for making threats to judges and law enforcement, using fake currency, and impersonating police officers....
Related: Mississippi Highway Patrol
That story just drove right down the AmeriKan media memory hole, didn't it?
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Yup, New Orleans is back to normal.
Next Day Update: New Orleans fights for its news
Related: Globe Decline a Decade in the Making
No one likes being lied to and insulted.
The Amerikan print media is literally dying in front of you.
