Friday, August 24, 2012

4 Investigates: Did money meant to fortify N.O. pump stations get put into a movie?
Corps Commander Admits Relying on Hearsay When He Blamed Katrina Flooding on New Orleans Officials ~Levees.org


~Hat Tweet~ 18z model runs for Isaac, . Classic whiplash storm coming!
 
Miss. governor urges vigilance as Isaac approaches Gulf ~WDSU

Isaac is strengthening ~Wunderblog
~Tropical Storm Isaac is strengthening. An Air Force Reserve hurricane hunter aircraft measured surface winds of 60 mph on the east side of the center, about 170 miles south of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, at 8:40 am EDT this morning. Winds at the aircraft's flight level of 5,000 feet were hurricane force, 76 mph.

Gulf Coast States Evacuation Routes ~DisasterMap.net

Infographic: 160 Years Of Hurricanes Form One Giant Hurricane!
 We follow our tropical storms like big game hunters on safari, watching as these monsters wake and go on a rampage, close enough to document every single detail, but far enough, hopefully, to never get caught in their path.
But what of the larger view? What of the trend? How do these single storms relate to one another over time? John Nelson painstakingly mapped out every tropical storm documented by NOAA and NASA since 1851, and the results are absolutely spooky. It doesn’t take a meteorologist’s degree to spot the obvious: The storms converge to form a larger entity that looks strikingly akin to a hurricane, as if hurricanes are just fractals for larger hurricanes. Come to think about it, if you keep zooming out, you eventually arrive at our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which also spirals like a hurricane. ~Hat Tweet
 
New Orleans in Isaac cone - at least for now ~WWL

East bank District C residents lead their own budget forum ~Steve Beatty, The Lens

Louisiana Thinks Funding School Run By ‘Apostle And Prophet’ Is Somehow Constitutional ~Doktor Zoom, Wonkette

LA Swift bus service hits millionth ride benchmark ~Daily Comet

Booty: Truly Amazing ~Pauline's Pirates and Privateers

Sacramento levees fail federal maintenance criteria ~Sacramento Bee
~Levees protecting most of the city of Sacramento and 15 other areas of the Central Valley were declared on Thursday to have failed federal maintenance criteria. As a result, those levees are no longer eligible for federal money to rebuild if damaged in a storm.

7 Years After Katrina, New Orleans Is Overrun by Wild Dogs ~The Atlantic


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/24/4753371/sacramento-levees-fail-federal.html#storylink=cpy

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Isaac reorganizing as it blows through the Lesser Antilles ~Wunderblog
 ~Tropical Storm Isaac could be headed into Gulf of Mexico

Alligator violations on the rise ~Daily Comet

Conquering Uncharted Waters ~Claire Taylor
~Bonnie Maillet, founder and CEO of local oilfield service company Boysenblue/Celtec International, got her start in the oilfield service sector in the 1970s, when few women were able to elbow their way into the male-dominated industry.
Today, she's selling drilling fluids internationally with a Saudi Arabian business partner.

2012 New Orleans Film Festival competition lineup revealed ~Ken Korman, Gambit

Basin Street Records On Tour

Monday, August 20, 2012

dashTHIRTYdash is a 98% volunteer effort raising money for Times-Picayune employees and contractors who are losing their jobs because of the changes coming to the newspaper Oct. 1. (The remaining 2% pays for the professional oversight being provided by the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans, which is our 501(c)3 sponsor and makes contributions to dashTHIRTYdash tax-deductible.)
Many of the people who have informed and entertained you in the pages of the T-P over the years, and some who risked their well-being to tell the city’s story in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina are losing their jobs. Even if they choose to leave New Orleans, they will face very tough odds in continuing to do their life’s work: in the last five years alone the newspaper industry has slashed almost 40,000 jobs – or 11% of the industry’s total workforce.

Tickets are now available online for the Saturday, Sept. 29 dashTHIRTYdash event, “Black, White & Read All Over,” a benefit and commemoration of the daily T-P.

Crews finish phase of work. Well to be drilled to study sinkhole ~Robert Stewart, Advocate
~Crews finished driving metal casing into the ground Sunday near a salt cavern in Assumption Parish and plan to begin drilling an observational well into the cavern to see if it caused the large sinkhole near Bayou Corne, a spokesman for the company that owns the cavern said.

Sinkhole leaves small Assumption Parish community shaken ~Daily Comet

Coast Guard continues to monitor Mississippi River after tugs sink

On Mississippi, trouble staying afloat ~John Schwartz, NYT~The Potter is scooping a stretch of the river's navigation channel just south of St. Louis, sucking up about 60,000 cubic yards of sediment each day and depositing it via a pipe 1,000 feet to the side in a violent, muddy plume that smells like muck and summer.
The Army Corps of Engineers has more than a dozen dredging vessels working the Mississippi this summer. Despite being fed by water flowing in from more than 40 percent of the United States, the lower part of the river is feeling the ruinous drought affecting so much of the Midwest. Some stretches are nearing the record low-water levels experienced in 1988, when river traffic was suspended in several spots.


100,000 CADIENS, CREOLES ET AMIS DU FRANCAIS EN LOUISIANE
~The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) is the state agency charged with French language educational and cultural economic development initiatives in Louisiana. The agency has multiple legislative mandates that include francophone tourism, economic development, culture, education and international relations. On Friday June 15, 2012 a line-item veto was performed by Governor Bobby Jindal that slashed $100,000 from CODOFIL’s budget (approximately 40% of its total budget) for the upcoming year. This budget cut leaves CODOFIL just enough money to pay operating costs with no room for a budget to accomplish its goals

Interview: Harry Shearer Will Coviello talks to the man whose new album, Can't Take a Hint, is a mashup of comedy and music