With the peak of hurricane season approaching, all eyes are focusing on Louisiana’s industrial Achilles heel, Port Fourchon. Coastal erosion at the tip of Lafourche Parish has exposed the energy hub directly to the Gulf of Mexico. Only a beach, which is daily washing away, stands between potential disaster and pipelines handling 90 percent of the crude oil coming ashore from the Gulf’s 3,700 offshore platforms, according to the Associated Press. That adds up to 15 percent of the nation’s crude oil flowing to inland refineries. The story states that “a direct hit from a strong Category 3 storm or worse could cripple the facility for weeks and create a national energy crisis overnight.”
While the beaches wash away, federal agencies including the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency quibble over how the shoreline restoration projects and breakwaters will be funded.
“Every storm, the beach rolls back. We’re getting to a critical point now,” Chett Chaisson, the port’s economic development director told the AP. “We keep telling that story and the money just doesn’t come. We know that the port is going to be a little island out there in the water that you have to get to by an elevated highway.” But, he added, “if it totally goes, this country has a big problem ... It’s much cheaper to protect this port than it is to try and build it somewhere else.”
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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