Results for category "NOLA"

Barrier Islands along the Louisiana Coast

Today we visited a barrier island along the coast of Louisiana. Barrier islands are man-made islands built to protect the coast from rising sea level due to storm surges. They are built by digging sediment from the mouth of the Mississippi river and piling it along the coast creating an island composed of sad dunes.

Dune vegetation is planted on these islands to help stabilize the sediment and begin establishing an ecosystem that will act as a “natural speed bump” during storm events.

Barrier islands are relatively easy to upkeep and are a very effective way of protecting the coastline and the city behind it.

Swamp Tour

Today Dayana, Philip, and I learned, about the impacts of sea/water level rise and the decrease in land mass. Water rise in Louisiana is a serious issue that is at an incline everyday. The regulation in Louisiana is not enforced like it should be which puts challenges on the wetlands of the state. Wetlands are a beautiful, historical and cultural part of Louisiana. So loosing the magnificent wetlands would be heartbreaking to their community. Since Louisiana, is prone to hurricanes it’s very important that they find ways to protect themselves from the storms. Wetlands are a barrier against the hurricanes and help to prevent them from being as powerful as they can be. They also contain many habitats for many species that need wetlands to survive. We need to start looking at the decrease in wetlands due to water level rise as a real issue and we should all be doing our parts in climate change so we can stop water level rise.

Nippy the Nutria

By Tara and Ralph

On our tour of the Mississippi River we learned about the nutria rat. This species of rat was introduced to Louisiana for fur trade in the 19^th century. The nutria were accidentally released into the wild when a hurricane destroyed their holding pens and the nutria escaped. They are now invasive to New Orleans and because there are so many of them negatively affecting the ecosystem, a law was placed to control the problem. When a rat is killed, the tail can be cut off and the hunter can get 5 dollars per tail as an incentive for hunting the rats.

Our tour guide recollected the time he captured one. While hunting the “nutra”-as he calls it, he ended up killing a mother nutria rat and one of its babies was left behind. He felt bad for the little critter, so he stuffed it in his boot, took it home, and nursed it to health with a milk. The rat he describes as friendly. It runs around the house and and answers to “Nippy” or “MAHHH!!”. He has the pet rat named Nippy to this day. Although he loves his pet rat, he still goes hunting for nutra and does his part to help decrease the nutra population, so that the ecosystem can get back into order.

Dazed and Not-So-Confused

Hurricane Katrina may have been 13 years ago, it is still part of the psyche that makes up New Orleans. The environmental reporter, Mark, we had talked and listened to was very informative. It was also very sobering as his slide show illustrated the scars that this very preventable disaster had played out. As I’ve heard many times now, it wasn’t a natural disaster, but a man-made one. At the 17th Street Pump Station, these generators may be one of the few things that will make or break the sustainability of keeping New Orleans afloat, the engineers themselves said they would last for five days in the eve of a 100 year event. But is it enough? As we’ve seen lately, climate change has made this unpredictable and arrogant. What will it take for people to actually prepare for worst, like a 500 year event that some believe is inevitable in our era, happens and we’re caught with our pants down again?

Records

Today we met up with Mark at Cafe de Monde to speak about the music industry in New Orleans. We discussed about issues he has faced as well as the local artists. One main issue that he has faced has been the decreasing sale of vinyl and cd’s. He had mentioned that online streaming has been decreasing the sale of these items. He typically would have brought the group a Cd but cd’s are slowly becoming a rare item to the population.

Mark had been running a record label for twenty-one years and currently has fifteen artists signed. Mark is a native New Orleanian and is happy to be back in his hometown.

Some cool cypress

Woodlands Work

I enjoyed the beautiful view of the woodlands swaps and beautiful forest today! I love that we can help regulate and enforce the park so we can help restore the land that was destroyed from Katrina!

Woodlands Trail and Park New Orleans

We saw some pretty cool wildlife while surveying the plant species at the woodlands trail and park.

Untold Truth About Levees During Katrina

The levees in New Orleans were almost created to fail. For those who aren’t sure a levee is a natural occurring barrier of protection separating a body of water from land. Natural levees have helped keep out water from land for thousands of years. However since the Industrial Age levees have been feeling more and more stress due to increase in storm intensities, frequency and human influence. New Orleans and Louisiana, a state with rain almost year round and one who has been heavily effected by hurricanes knows this all to well.

In order to compensate for thebstrasors New Orleans and the federal government, the Army Corp of Engineers, decided to reinforce their levees by adding walls of steel into the levees, known as flood walls. This is an example of their efforts:

Unfinished Levee meant to keep water out of the city. This wall you can still visit.

In 2005 when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the main “fail safe” (the levees) failed around the city engulfing people and communities if thousands of gallons of water.

One of these levees was the London Ave Canal. Although not as devastating as the infamous 9th Ward flooding, the London St canal still had it’s fair share of breakage by destroying homes, displacing families and killing.

https://nola.piratelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/img_0369.mov

This is only one of the countless of stories of these walls failing. Unfortunately these stories are rarely heard about and still till this day no one has been held accountable for the failure of these walls and levees. No museums have a history of this and hardly no records exists highlighting this catastrophe.

Fortunately at the 7th Street canal there is a memorial made by a non-profit called the NOLA Tree Project, that teaches the community and those who go and tour about the event and the untold truth of the New Orleans levees.

Orleans Canal Levee

It can definitely be said that the Orleans Canal Levee was a poorly exicuted plan. As it can be seen in the image above, the end of the levee near the waste water treatment plan does not connect to anything. During the 2005 Hurricane Katrina this opening in the levee, that was designed by the Army Corp of Engineers, allowed a massive surge of water to flood the land that should have been protected. Although it is unknown what would have really happened if the levee was completed, it still shows that there was a lack of competence when designing it due to the damage that the opening allowed.