While murals and music are generally created for public pleasure and appreciation, one program is using these media to educate young people about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
More than 50 students from kindergarten through 12th grades enrolled in summer camps conducted by the nonprofit Young Audiences New Orleans chapter contributed to a mural…
The rest is here!
As the movement for healthy meals in public schools continues to grow both nationwide and locally, one organization will become the first nonprofit group in the city to provide a school with freshly prepared and cooked meals when classes resume in August.
Liberty’s Kitchen, a program that trains at-risk youth to become independent in a culinary setting, will cook 1,200 meals…
Read the rest here!
Mayor Mitch Landrieu will announce $67 million in cuts next week to offset a New Orleans budget deficit of the same amount.
Landrieu, who spoke at the Algiers Economic Development Foundation’s annual luncheon Wednesday at English Turn Country Club, said the cuts are necessary for the city’s financial stability…
Full article here!
Conflict resolution programs to end school violence, better quality lunches and oil-free schools by 2015. These recommendations weren’t made by education professionals or by Recovery School District Superintendant Paul Vallas, but by a group of 150 middle school students who are members of “Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools,” a student think tank that works to improve the city’s public schools…
Full story here!
Oil spills into the Gulf of Mexico at an astronomical rate, soldiers die in Afghanistan, and Israel and the Palestinians have yet to make piece. Yes, there is a lot in the world to make us pessimists, but the reality is that life does go on. All of my recent posts have been about serious subject matters, but this one is pure fun, pure New Orleans. And again, let me make this very clear: ONLY IN NEW ORLEANS.
Everyone knows about the famous running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, a traditional element of the annual San Fermin festival in July:
The running of the bulls involves hundreds of people running in front of six bulls and another six steers down an 825-metre (0.51 mile) stretch of narrow streets of a section of the old town of Pamplona. The event begins at 8 a.m. when a first firecracker is lit to announce the release of the bulls from their corral. Runners gather earlier at the beginning of the itinerary to ask for the protection of the Saint by singing a chant three times before a small statue of San Fermin which has been placed in a raised niche in a wall. A second cracker signals that the last bull has left the corral.
This event, which is of epic historical proportions, was brought to New Orleans for the first time in 2007 and drew about 200 participants. Last year, 4,000 people participated, and this year’s number is definitely higher. So you’re probably wondering about the bulls. No, NOPD would never allow bulls to be released on the streets of New Orleans, but the Big Easy Rollergirls are just as dangerous. An “all-female flat-track derby team,” the Rollergirls are joined by some of their colleagues from other derby teams all over the country to chase the runners. They skate, wearing red and black tutus/mini skirts, red and black fishnets, and helmets decorated with red horns, and they wield these hard plastic bats. If you’re too slow and they catch up to you, you get a nice smack on the behind. These women are ruthless.
This is something I have been wanting to do ever since I learned about it, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me this year. The website’s instructions said to wear white and accessorize with a red scarf and sash, so I went to the fabric store yesterday and stood in like for forever to get a yard of something red. I was at the corner of Burgundy and Conti in the French Quarter by 7:45 a.m. on Saturday in full Encierro garb, and was lucky to find the friend I was meeting up with in the crowd. We must have been the only sober adults there (my excuse being that I had to go to synagogue for 10 a.m.), but in addition to all the twenty-somethings and middle-aged couples, there were also a few old men in wheel chairs and tots in strollers. The crowd anxiously waited for the run to start at 8 a.m. while the Rollergirls prepared for battle:
The day’s fashions varied, and some were normal while others were just plain weird:
And here’s the “statue” of San Fermin:
Then the guy in charge started speaking from the balcony, accompanied by the event’s mascot, Blue Balls:
For some reason I didn’t quite catch, we were instructed to squat down:
And then we were off! Everyone there just walked for a few blocks to thin the crowd so the “bulls” would have somewhere to go, and before I knew it we all started to run and the bulls were after us:
If I counted correctly, I was assaulted a total of five times by the bulls. These rubber bats are harder than you think, and I’m pretty sure I have bruises. A few stills:
The run ended at Ernst Cafe, a bar and cafe on the border of the French Quarter, where they had set up a block party:
I left at around 9 a.m., sweaty and thirsty, but feeling that it had been every bit worth it, and wanting to be a Rollergirl. This is why I live in the greatest city in the world!
This was supposed to appear in last Sunday’s money section, but due to the fiasco I previously posted about it was taken out of the budget. I spent this week shopping it around, but the few people who responded didn’t want it, so it’s time to post it on here. Note: Minimal editing was done by the section editor, but it is not copy edited, though I have done my best.
Two-and-a-half months after the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig set off the most catastrophic environmental crisis in the country’s history, the immediate and long-term economic impacts of the incident and the ensuing Gulf of Mexico oil spill on Louisiana have become clearer, but no less bleak. Though the spill has negatively affected the state’s various sectors in a myriad of ways and to different degrees, industry leaders, researchers, government officials, and business owners all agree that the critical period is not the current state of affairs, but what lies ahead in the months and years to come.
Chris John, the president of the Louisiana Mid-Continental Oil and Gas Association, predicts that the economic consequences of the moratorium on offshore drilling will last for at least a decade.
“The thirty-three deepwater drill rigs effected by the moratorium are billion-dollar pieces of equipment, and they’re not going to stay idle in the Gulf,” he said. “They’re signing multi-billion contracts throughout the world and moving, so if the moratorium runs for six months or more the negative impact could last ten to fifteen years before we get up and running.”
Louisiana’s oil and gas industry is worth $70 billion, according to the Louisiana Mid-Continental Oil and Gas Association, and 30 percent of the United States’ crude oil comes from the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf Economic Survival Team, formed in June under the leadership of Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Scott Angelle, estimates that since each drilling rig averages 180 to 280 employees for each two-week shift, and because each job supports four other jobs in local communities, that the suspension of drilling activity will result in a loss of up to more than 20,000 Louisiana jobs over the next 18 months. While the spill is certain to deal a devastating blow to rig workers and others directly involved in the process, it will also affect the service companies that depend on oil and gas production for profits and income.
“The spill will affect us tomorrow, but not today because BP still needs us a little bit,” said Encore Food Services LLC vice president Kendall Craig, whose Houma company provides catering for offshore rigs and vessels. “But that doesn’t mean anything once BP leaves and they keep this moratorium, and we had three major contracts drop because we couldn’t drill.”
Craig added that Encore’s employees, which number “anywhere from a hundred to three hundred” at any given time, are already feeling the dip in business.
“We have a lot of people out of work, and when they’re drilling we’re out there with them,” he said. “They have a meal every six hours because they work twenty-four hours a day, so our people are working constantly.”
Baton Rouge economist Loren Scott says his economic outlook is based on a recent Morgan Stanley study of the moratorium that reinforces the grim picture.
“They think there’s a sixty percent chancethe moratorium will last twelve to eighteen months, and a thirty-five percent chance it will last up to four years,” Scott said. “I think those are pretty reasonable, given the makeup of President Obama’s commission.”
When it comes to the economic damage, he added, the statistics do not discriminate.
“It’s going to rain all over the place, because on the small business side you have truckers, grocery stores, car dealerships, and a big hit will go to the healthcare industry.
“If those workers do not get that $1,800-a-week paycheck, they don’t spend.”
The “cascade effect” doesn’t end there, acknowledged Lt. Gov. Angelle, who served as secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources before being appointed to his current post just 2 weeks after the explosion.
“When these folks get laid off, they tend to not have as much money to buy a new vehicle, which impacts sales tax collections for local schoolboards,” he said.
Stephen Perry, president and CEO of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, also expects his industry to sustain severe losses.
“We could have at least ten to twelve percent losses over the next year with the brand damage the spill is causing us,” he said. “The billion-dollar question for us is what unfolds over the next eight months, and if we lose that kind of business in that time frame, we’ll lose close to a half-billion dollars from the New Orleans economy, and probably seven to eight thousand jobs, so this is a very delicate moment for us.”
In the meantime, added Perry, the bureau is in the middle of a $5 million advertising and public relations campaign to preempt the cancellations happening in places like the Florida panhandle. The money comes from the $15 million checks BP gave to each Gulf Coast state last month solely for tourism market stabilization.
“We explain to our customers that the oil spill is as far away from us as Philadelphia is from New York City,” he said.
As for Louisiana’s tourism industry as a whole, Assistant Secretary at the Louisiana Department of Tourism Jim Hutchinson said that while the coastal parishes are suffering the most, the hard part is making people aware of all that the state has to offer.
“There’s a lot of things that represent a really unique culture of Louisiana, so it’s our mission right now to make people aware that there’s no reason to avoid coming down here because the strong possibility is that nothing they were planning on doing is effected by the oil spill,” Hutchinson said. “The further you get away from Louisiana, when they just watch the national media, they think that we’re all wading around in oil.”
A study that Louisiana Economic Development conducted nationwide at the end of May confirms his concerns, with 26 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed saying they have chosen to either postpone or cancel their trips to Louisiana, and 46 percent of that group believing the oil spill is as bad or worse than Hurricane Katrina.
It is therefore no coincidence, observes Greater New Orleans Inc. president and CEO Michael Hecht, that airline reservations have decreased.
“One airline reported a forty-five percent drop month-by-month that they attribute to the oil spill,” he said. “Personally, I am deeply concerned about this brand damage.”
Hotel bookings in places like Venice, La., however, tell a different story.
“They’re all fully booked by people related to oil spill cleanup,” Hecht said. “We’re seeing a bump in the near term but concerned about the midterm once cleanup ends.”
Darlene, the desk manager at the Empire Inn in near-by Buras, affirms “business is booming” because of the cleanup efforts, but doesn’t know what will happen afterwards.
“We expect a big dip,” she said about the inn’s fisherman client base. “People’s livelihood down here is fishing, so I don’t know what we’ll do.”
“The difficult times for tourism are after after the spill is stopped and hotels are vacant and restaurants lose business,” added Hutchinson. “At least the people working on the oil slick mitigate some of the financial suffering.”
Louisiana’s coastal attractions are also worried about sudden changes in business.
“Right now our attendance is better than normal, and our campsites are packed every weekend, but I think it’s because of what’s going on everywhere else,” said Tommy Jamison, who manages Bayou Segnette State Park in Westwego. “I heard that it’s [the oil slick] down in Barrataria, and that’s not too far from here, so the situation might look totally different in the next couple of weeks if we get oil in this direction.”
As the future of the state’s tourism and hospitality industries hang in the balance, United States Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke said that misperceptions are causing the greatest harm to those sectors.
“There’s no need to cancel vacations, trips, conventions, and outings, and a lot of jobs are being affected unnecessarily,” he said after visiting the Gulf Coast in June. “They are hurting a lot of people financially and affecting their livelihood and the future of their children as well.”
Misperceptions are also hurting Louisiana’s $2.6 billion-a-year commercial fishing industry, which supplies up to 25 percent of the seafood to states outside Alaska and Hawaii.
People think we’re either shut down all together, or that the seafood isn’t safe,” said Ewell Smith, executive director at the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. “I will say right now that eating seafood is being scrutinized more right now than it has ever been in the history of the state, and so far we’ve gotten a clean bill of health from state agencies.”
The Board, like the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, has also launched an intensive public relations campaign that includes running advertisements in USAToday, but the fact remains that oyster production is at 25 to 30 percent of its usual rate, while shrimp production has dropped one-third. The same LED study indicated that 86 percent of respondents either think that oyster beds are contaminated from the spill or that they are not sure, and Vicky Pacania is concerned.
“I’ve been in business twenty years and have never seen it drop off as fast as it’s doing now,” said Pacania, who owns The Galley restaurant in Metairie with husband Dennis. “I am concerned about what’s going to happen in the next three months.”
Pacania is now getting her oysters from Texas, but does not know how long she can keep serving them for. The Galley also sells softshell crabs at Jazz Fest, and Pacania is already thinking about 2011.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them, or they could be $80 a dozen by that time,” she said.
Meanwhile, the restaurant is bracing itself by adding barbecue ribs and fried chicken to its menu.
“Everything here is from Louisiana,” said Pacania. “There will never be a Chinese shrimp in this restaurant.”
Until yesterday, I had no idea that the Westbank Expressway actually became a street, since it’s mostly an overpass. I was sent mid-morning to evaluate the current status of mom-and-pop seafood stores and stands on the expressway in Westwego, only 15 minutes away from the office in Gretna, scared that no one would talk to me because I’m sure they’ve already been interviewed by media. My GPS brought me to this gravel parking lot on the side of the highway, which is essentially a cluster of stalls that all pay rent to set up there and to cover the facilities. It was close to noon, which is usually the busiest time of day for seafood vendors, but I was the only person there besides the business owners and a customer or two, just another testament to the havoc the oil spill has wreaked on the seafood industry:
First, I talked to some employees at Amy’s Seafood. They weren’t very gregarious (I’m trying to use as many GRE vocabulary words as possible without sounding pretentious), but they did tell me they aren’t getting as many customers, and that they have to buy fish from Georgia now that Lake Pontchatrain is closed since they found tar balls there. They said shrimp is 75 cents to $1.75 more per pound right now, which is expensive.
Then I went “next door” to Ruth Ann and Rob’s Seafood Unlimited, where Ruth Ann and Rob were happy to share all of the details of their story with me:
You’ll read about all of that and more in the article (below), but what really struck me was that Ruth was recently prescribed antidepressants because of the emotional repercussions of the economic hardship caused by the spill. They’ve already sold their personal vehicle, a Jeep; some of their furniture, and their house is on the market. They can’t pay the bills and they’ll have to close their doors soon. Here’s Ruth talking about the general public’s misperceptions about Gulf (and non-Gulf) seafood:
The remains of Ruth’s latest (and probably last) supply of fresh softshell crabs and lump crab meat:
This freezer would normally be filled with dozens of varieties of fresh seafood like shrimp, oysters, and crabs, but now it’s all snacks and drinks:
Another freezer was stocked with imported farm-raised shrimp and Emeril’s brand of frozen seafood. I also spoke with one of their regular customers, who was there buying shrimp as he does every week.
It was time to move on, so I went to a store called Perino’s, but the proprietor didn’t want to be interviewed because, according to him, he had been misquoted in the past. On my way back to the office I stopped at Westwego Seafood also on the expressway, but the lights were out and the doors were locked. It was clear that no one had been there for a while because a flier about USDA seafood safety measures and a packet about filing BP claims just sat on the sidewalk in front of the doors. And so I returned with not enough material, ate lunch, researched more seafood businesses to scout out, and hit the road again.
According to some men who were loading things into a truck outside Martin Brothers Seafood Co. Donna, the owner, did not really want to talk to me, but she ended up running her mouth anyway about the BP claims process, about how the people who filed immediately got their money quickly, but that she had waited since she still had some business, and is now buried in the paperwork needed to make a claim. She complained that she thought people who had gotten money from BP early on, some of her “colleagues” in the business, shouldn’t have necessarily received that money, and that the Westwego claims office is awful compared to the ones in Lafitte and Belle Chasse. However, unlike most of the other people I spoke with, she is confident that things will eventually turn around and that she will be compensated. Meanwhile, she says her freezer is stocked with things like catfish fillets imported from Vietnam (yum!). In the end, she did tell me it was a relief to be able to get all of that off her chest. The storefront, also located in a gravel parking lot:
Another closed business with an empty parking lot:
My last stop was the Pickin Box, where the owner (I forgot his name) sells mostly crawfish:
He said he’s not hurting as badly as his fellow seafood vendors because he doesn’t rely solely on shrimp and crab, but that his business is down 30 to 40 percent. He was annoyed with the recent media story about there being oil in crab larvae.
After that, it was back to the office to write the story:
With oil still pouring into the Gulf of Mexico from a rig explosion almost three months ago, a cluster of Westwego seafood vendors are facing increasingly harder times financially.
Fishing area closures have shut off fresh supplies, causing some vendors to rely on farmed and imported seafood…
Don’t forget to look at the photo credits. And that’s a wrap!
I’m going to vent and sound very whiny and complain a lot in this post, so stop reading if you don’t think you can handle that, because I’m going to sound like a spoiled brat who doesn’t feel the least grateful that she actually has a summer internship (which, in reality, I am). It all began before I left for Vancouver when someone higher up on the food chain assigned me a big something to do that was going to get really good placement. The project was supposed to be broad and cover a lot of ground, so while she went on furlough I worked my little butt off the week I got back to interview as many people as possible and do thorough research. I think I spoke with about 13 people or so. And then I wrote it up hoping it would appear in today’s nice, fat Sunday issue. It was edited, sent back to me, and I ok’d it for print. But I got a call on Wednesday that there had been some sort of mix-up where lines of communication didn’t cross and someone else was writing my story, and that what I had written would not appear in the paper. I cried that afternoon. A few times, in fact.
This is exactly why they have daily meetings where they present budgets for each issue, so that two people don’t get assigned the same thing. I was told I would still have a byline, but that most of my hard work would kind of just disappear, and no one would ever know how I had lovingly slaved over this story. And it really was a 45-inch labor of love. It was something I truly enjoyed working on. The reporter who I would share the byline with is much more seasoned than I, and he called me on Thursday. He was gracious and acknowledged how frustrating it is not to see your efforts recognized and put in print blah blah blah and how this was an awkward situation because we’ve never even met each other blah blah blah. And I really did appreciate that he called me and that he understood my plight. He said that another person higher up on the food chain wanted a totally different article from the one I had written, something more specific, but that he would try to use as much of my stuff as possible.
And so I woke up this morning and immediately went out to the front porch to retrieve today’s paper, only to find out that even the gist of the part of my original story that had anything to do with the specific story the paper ended up wanting wasn’t even in the final article. I had a lot of material on the subject that just disappeared in the bowels of the newsroom. I had a lot of good information, and the reporter who wrote the story “with me” said he was impressed with my original piece, impressed that I had quotes from 10 different people in there, impressed with my thorough job. But I guess that just wasn’t enough. Most of all, I feel bad for the people I interviewed who thought they would be in the paper, because what they told me is really important. It’s about the oil spill, of course. So I’m angry. I’m mad. But this is the way the real world works, and things happen, and I have to suck it up.
I did not nor do I intend to ever name names. Most of you know who I am, so you’ll be able to find the article for yourselves in the paper. I, however, did not truly write the piece as it is now; I only assisted in its research, so I do not think I even deserve to have a byline in this case.
Happy Fourth! For the first time ever I, my sister, and our parents are celebrating by ourselves, and we’re going to grill. This should be interesting.
The best part about being a journalist is that you wake up in the morning and you have no idea what’s in store for the rest of the day until you get to the office. Yesterday, I was met with a pleasant surprise. At about 10:30 a.m. I was assigned a fluff piece about the Gretna Heritage Festival. I picked up the phone immediately after speaking with my editor to make the necessary phone call and leave a voicemail asking for an interview. As soon as I hung up the receiver, the editor told me to pack my bags, I was going to Venice to cover Governor Bobby Jindal’s oil spill update press conference. I left the building about 5 minutes after that because Venice is about an hour and a half away from the west bank bureau in Gretna, and I had to race against the clock to make it there in time. God help me if I got lost.
Venice is in Plaquemines Parish, and the town is just as southern as Grand Isle, but on the neighboring sliver of land. Please, I beg you all to Google a map of Louisiana. It was the same thing as yesterday, in terms of the noticeable changes in landscape. At one point some chickens crossed the highway, and I saw a lot of cows. As I arrived in Venice and made my way to the Cypress Cove Marina, the site of the press conference, I saw a lot of the oil companies’ camps on Coast Guard Rd., including Halliburton, which also has its own road:
Here’s a video I took of the drive on my way back after the press conference (complete with voice-over commentary by yours truly):
I got there at 12:10 only to find out it’s not starting until 1 p.m., even though the press release said 12:30. But that was fine with me because it gave me time to eat lunch, which I didn’t do yesterday. So I waited around with the cameramen and the other few journalists. Jindal’s PR guy came up to me and introduced himself and I asked if I could have a minute with the governor after the conference. He told me the governor was on a tight schedule but asked me what my question was, and then he typed something on his BlackBerry, apparently trying to figure out how he could finagle a question, since the Times-Pic is obviously very important to the governor.
They started to set everything up on the marina:
And I saw some members of the Coast Guard getting off a boat:
Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser was also in attendance, and before the press conference started he had a bite to eat at this seafood restaurant on the marina, which is raised on stilts:
Jindal and Nungesser pre-press conference powow:
Even though I was not asked to contribute photography this time around, I did take some great stills:
As for what was actually said, you should read the article I wrote. It’s in section A of the print edition if you have access to that:
Gov. Bobby Jindal and Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser called on the federal government Friday to treat the oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico as a war.
“We saw a lot of the boom rendered ineffective, and a lot of it was washed ashore and broken apart,” said Jindal…
After both of them finished speaking, Jindal’s PR guy called on me to ask my question, which was what does the governor want to see happen now that Hurricane Alex is done and out of the way. He only answered one other question, but I don’t know who it was from. While Jindal sped off immediately, Nungesser stayed around to do interviews, and I did much better this time in terms of pitting myself against the TV reporters. Nungesser is just devastated by what has happened in his parish because of the oil spill, and during the press conference he told everyone he would try to keep his cool today because it’s the Fourth of July weekend. And he did, but you know this guy has been dealing with this 24/7 since the initial explosion back in April. I honestly don’t know how he hasn’t been hospitalized for extreme exhaustion, because he’s always either out touring the damage or being interviewed on TV, and he’s been on Anderson Cooper’s show 10 times. It was so cool to be able to talk to him one-on-one, even if it was just for a minute or two.
And that’s what goes into the making of gubernatorial press conferences. I’m so relieved to have Monday off, which I just found out about this afternoon right before leaving the office, because I know there will be another oil spill-related story waiting for me on Tuesday, and who knows where I’ll have to drive to next. But hey, I don’t know anyone else who’s ever been to either Grand Isle or Venice. This is the conclusion of another story behind the story, and I think it’s safe to say the oil spill has officially consumed my work life.
It’s been an interesting four days at the west bank bureau. So far, I’ve gone to a summer camp performance, road-tripped to Lafitte to attend a press conference in Grand Isle, and road-tripped again to Venice on Friday to see Governor Bobby Jindal. All in a week’s work.
Everyone at the bureau has been really welcoming so far. The news room isn’t that big, so we all sit within speaking range (at the Howard Ave. office everyone uses Instant Messenger to communicate), and no one even arrives until around 9:30 a.m. During weekends, the building is closed. Even though the office is smaller in size and more efficiently run, I still don’t have my own computer and telephone. I think I’m getting one next week when one of the writers leaves to move to New York, but until then I’m just being shifted around. Frankly, this is getting to be ridiculous.
I think my favorite office moment so far was Wednesday morning when two of the women were talking about “The Real Housewives of New York City,” and I chimed in because of course I watch that show, so we bonded. After talking about how Danielle on “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” is a pathological nutcase, we then proceeded to listen to LuAnn’s (“The Countess”) single “Money Can’t Buy You Class” on YouTube.
Oh, and I can’t forget the Toll Tag Saga! On Tuesday, I Google mapped NOPD’s Crescent City Connection office, which is where you get a toll tag. After spending 15 minutes trying to find it and getting turned around, I gave up and went home. On Wednesday, I used the Garmin GPS and found it, but when I got there at 4:05 it was CLOSED. My editor at the west bank had told me they stayed open until 4:30. On Thursday, there was Grand Isle, and Venice happened on Friday, so I am still without a toll tag. So here’s the public service announcement: The toll tag office is open 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Friday and stays open late on Thursdays until 7 p.m. It’s closed on weekends. And if you want to find it, you either need to go with someone who’s been there before or use an electronic GPS, because it’s probably the most confusing place to get to since it’s on the side of the tollbooths.
And I promise this is the last thing, but in yet another twist of fate I have become…a photographer! The west bank bureau is short-staffed in terms of photographers, so I’ll be racking up some photo credits.
I’m tired. Actually, physically and emotionally exhausted is more accurate. This will be my first Fourth of July weekend ever in New Orleans, so I’ll be taking it easy and gearing up for whatever comes my way next week.
