Category Archives: Safety
It was a terrible week on Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” This narrow strip of the bayou country between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is home to more chemical plants and refineries than just about any area in the world, let alone the United States. Over the decades, these plants have been a source of both jobs and income for a state in desperate need of both. But as the nickname implies, [...]
Read More »You don’t need to be a rocket scientist — or a top geologist, or that matter — to understand that fracking for natural gas is not only a highly risky but a poorly thought-out process. In the half-dozen years since the boom in drilling for shale gas spread from the oil belt of Texas to new regions like the Marcellus Shale underneath Pennsylvania, we’ve watched poorly designed fracking rigs pollute [...]
Read More »Did you hear about the latest iPhone app? It alerts you when you find yourself under aural assault, when the decibel level where you’re at reaches the point where it could actually damage your hearing, or worse. If you’ve been paying attention to the posts here about noise pollution over the last couple of years, you probably won’t be surprised at all where the inventors headed to test their creation: [...]
Read More »Last weekend Bonny Schumaker from On Wings of Care — a tireless advocate who’s been our not-so-secret weapon in the war for salvation of the ecology of the Gulf Coast — went up in the skies over Bayou Corne, the small Louisiana town that’s been ravaged by a sinkhole caused by a collapsing sinkhole, an epic tale of neglect. The latest news from there is not good. The sinkhole, which was already [...]
Read More »Nobody likes being a guinea pig. But apparently that’s what happened in Pennsylvania and some of the other places where the boom in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, first hit in the late 2000s. Thousands of acres were leased — often by farmers and other property owners in economically depressed areas — and then rigs began to dot the rolling hillsides, But all of this happened before the key regulators — [...]
Read More »Earlier this month I told you about the ill-conceived plan racing its way through Baton Rouge to impose a new tax on tourists visiting New Orleans and to use the money not to address the burning problems in our neighborhoods — high crime and lack of code enforcement — but on an amorphous tourism slush fund. Although our arguments have gained some traction, so far common sense has not been [...]
Read More »This past weekend’s Memorial Day ceremonies were a special time for remembering the many men and women who were called to serve and who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. The troops who have fought for our country are truly special — and yet at the same time they embody something more fundamental about the American character. There is a deep instinct among so many citizens — not just [...]
Read More »We’re now roughly five years into the surge on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas that has been trapped under shale formations, deep below the earth. The sharp rise in this fairly new type of drilling has overwhelmed states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, formerly coal states where intensive drilling for fossil fuels hadn’t taken place for generations. One important consequence is that state regulators have been totally unprepared [...]
Read More »As I’ve noted several times recently, the tide has changed when it comes to public perceptions of the Gulf of Mexico, more than three years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. For a while, the mega-millions that BP had spent on slick marketing, and bland pronouncements from public officials, had lulled not only the public but even journalists to sleep. But now, good science and some old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting has changed [...]
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A sound plan to protect eardrums, peace and quiet — and music — in New Orleans
There’s a welcome new sound in New Orleans — the sound of citizens banding together to fight for positive change, to make America’s most colorful city a better place to live, and to visit. In recent months, I’ve told you frequently about a kind of pollution here that doesn’t get its due: Noise pollution. The problem — I must once again reiterate — is not the city’s iconic, long-established music [...]
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