This grab bag of topics goes out to those who like their internet reading quick and brief.
Category: Environment
Posted inEnvironment, Opinion
500-year protection for under $2 billion? Why wait 20 years to start?
Reapirs to New Orleans’ current “100-year” flood defense have already cost more than $10 billion, and yet the coastal master plan projects “500-year” protection for a mere $1.8 billion more? (Dana M. Clark, Flickr Creative Commons) Thursday, The Times-Picayune ran a front-page story on the state’s newly-released 50-year strategy to confront south Louisiana’s coastal loss […]
Posted inEnvironment, Government & Politics, Land Use
Development atop a city dump? Policy fiasco comes back to haunt Upper 9th Ward
Despite Superfund status, government and private investors continue to dabble in doomed Desire neighborhood.
Posted inEnvironment, Government & Politics
Parking lots? An aquarium? Enviro groups question state bids for spending BP bucks
States seek to wring opportunity from BP disaster. By Benjamin Leger, The Lens contributing writer The $1 billion fund set up by BP is supposed to pay for restoration of natural resources damaged by last year’s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history. But a coalition has come […]
Posted inEnvironment, Government & Politics
Fresh testing shows persistent formaldehyde contamination in region's FEMA trailers
Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/ By […]
Posted inEnvironment, Opinion
On Levees.org birthday, we’re thankful for its years of myth-busting
Halloween 2005 must have been particularly scary in New Orleans. Most of the city was desolate and rotting, having been drowned two months earlier by a cataclysmic engineering disaster. Scores of corpses still lay in wrecked homes, awaiting an unhappy discovery. Political leaders doubted whether the stricken city would (or should) ever recover. Adding insult to […]
Posted inEnvironment, Government & Politics, Land Use
Against long odds, RTA seeks federal funds to extend streetcar line to Poland Avenue
By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer | With less than a month to go before the deadline for a final round of federal stimulus transit funding, city officials are pushing to extend the proposed Rampart Street/St. Claude Avenue streetcar line all the way to Poland Avenue, on Bywater’s downriver edge. On a visit to […]
Posted inEnvironment, Opinion
On this anniversary, it was a good idea to not keep things bottled up
Two months after hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood, I drove back to the Broadmoor neighborhood to gut my house. Slaloming around debris, I became overwhelmed with cognitive dissonance. The new imprints on my senses didn’t jibe with my old memories of home. For instance, all the pleasant greens were now desolate browns. The fragrant […]
Posted inEnvironment, Opinion
Weasel words: BP ‘cleanup’ falls far short of ‘coastal restoration’
BP’s “Louisiana Gulf Response” website exaggerates the scope of clean-up efforts since the blowout. By Mark Moseley, The Lens opinion writer | While reading a local news story on the web, I noticed a familiar yellow and green color scheme on the sidebar. Sure enough, it was a BP advertisement: “Gulf Coast Restoration,” the article teased, […]
Posted inEnvironment, Government & Politics, Investigations
Workplace deaths raise questions about OSHA experiment in self-regulation
A federal program rewards companies that profess a commitment to exemplary safety standards. The commitment, however, has not meant an end to workplace fatalities.