Results for category "NOLA"

London Avenue Canal, East Breach

From the event of Hurricane Katrina in August 29, 2005, the hurricane’s surge broke through many flood walls and levees. The houses from London Avenue were badly affected due to the flood wall that did not withstand the hurricane’s strong winds and water. According to a bulletin board that was available for the public to see, before the floods, the neighborhood was thriving with black and white middle-class home owners. Once the flood came by the flood wall failed making water and sand go through the neighborhood destroying many homes and killing hundreds of people.

There was a tiny blue house where it had books on the inside with a sign that said “Take a book, share a book.” This is a place where people from the neighborhood can share and exchange any book they choose. It is still being used today.

Because of the floods from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many homes are up on either wood or concrete poles that are about 5 to 7 feet high to help prevent flooding inside of people’s homes.

Crops for a Friend

By: Ashley Hollett and Morgan Plummer

One of the missions of CSUCI’s NOLA Service Learning experience is to help local communities combat food insecurities in surrounding neighborhoods. With the aid of student volunteers and faculty, we were able to plant a variety of crops on the Carol property in Buras, Louisiana. The process included tilling the land, establishing a canal around the plot and planting various crops including tomatoes, herbs, melons, watermelon, pumpkin, corn, cucumber, eggplant and marigold as an insect repellant.

Tilled plot

Hanging on Bald Cypress trees

Another day another transect

We are surveying the species here in woodlands trail and park Nola

Garden

Today we go the opportunity to plant some vegetables in Carol’s garden. The soil was tilled for us when we arrived so all we had to do was plant. Carol had an incident during Katrina were he had fallen into a ditch receiving multiple injuries throughout his body. This accident made it difficult for Carol to harvest and plant his fruits and vegetables. The garden had clay like materials indicating that it might’ve been a river bottom in the past as well as sea shells. We were able to plant tomatoes, squashes and some wild flowers into the garden.

Carols Garden

Thank you Carol and Ronda for letting us plant your beautiful vegetables! And letting us be a part of your family today! We had so much fun working and learning how to self grow plants in a sustainable and beneficial way. Glad we got the chance to help out Carol today! He is so passionate about growing his own crops it’s inspiring!

Into the Swamps We Go

Richie Blink

There are many issues that come with conservancy and policy is, in theory, something that comes with its own baggage. Richie had talked about the difficulties in actually implementing conservancy efforts, in that, in theory, they would help rebuild the wetlands in the Louisiana delta. But because local communities have either not been educated or indifferent to the environmental impact it would have on their lives, there is little he can do make them do it.

Richie has also been trying to balance what he wants a healthier ecology in the Plaquemines Parish swamps and the jobs that the oil companies may bring into the communities within the area. It’s difficult to navigate this topic, he believes, as he’s in a bid for a future re-election, while also trying to advocate for conservancy.

It’s unclear on what he is willing to do for this advocacy work, while trying not to do be blackballed in his social and professional life.

Planting for the Future

Marigolds

Endless blackberry

Flying NOLA: Using Drones to Capture Southern Louisiana Deltas

Drones are a vital tool for the future of land management and assessment. At CSUCI, the ESRM program prides itself in the use and practice of using UAVs, or drones, to capture important coastal ecosystems. In this capacity, we flew over the Mississippi Delta to survey wetland degradation and rehabilitation on various barrier islands and marshes. Richie Blink, of Delta Discovery Tours, is in need of new, updated maps and aerial imagery to better understand coastal changes over time.

Drone pilots included myself and fellow ESRM students Walker Santos and Nick Cooper. While drones provide relatively quick “plug and play” accessibility, they are not without their fair share of trouble shooting necessities. While deployed in the field, we encountered problems with linking the RC to the drone, mobile landing sites, and signal loss. Despite these issues, we were able to capture video of our stop sites and the surrounding landscape. The positives of using drones include the instantaneous deployment and video capture, as well as the range of flight of both lateral distance and elevation. Drones are a much needed technology in visualizing our coastal wetlands and the opportunity to fly these areas is one to not be overlooked or taken for granted.

-Matt, Walker, Cooper