04/04/2017

"Situational awareness is critical in any stressful environment, but particularly so in the midst of disasters. Knowing how events — manmade or natural — are unfolding can be the difference between life and death. Are you fleeing toward flood waters, or away from them? Are you moving toward a plume of toxic gas, or away from it?

During the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, communications in New Orleans broke down. The floods that followed the federal levee collapse made things worse.

There was a large communications project in post-Katrina New Orleans that sought proposals to unify all public safety and first responder communications in the city going forward. I knew some of the people on one of the teams that worked to win the contract. Their effort ultimately floundered over an intellectual property dispute.

Since 2005, Louisiana has been hit by an inordinate number of disasters since 2005's deadly duo of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Gustav and Ike. The BP Gulf Gusher. Isaac. The great floods of 2016 ranging from Shreveport river flooding to Monroe storm flooding, to two severe hits in the Florida Parishes (spring and August) and then the great August floods that ranged from Lake Arthur to Kentwood, and all points in between.

Ezra Boyd has a Ph.D. in geography from LSU. He's worked for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation on a number of projects, including one on storm surge that is ongoing. The state is committed to spending $50 Billion trying to save Louisiana's coast and coastal communities from the ravages of rising seas, sinking land and climate change.

There will be more natural disasters in our future, not fewer. Rising temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and in the atmosphere mean more moisture in the air. The floods of last August had all the earmarks of being the product of climate change.

Nearly 12 years after Katrina and Rita, disaster responders still work under data handicaps that limit the effectiveness of their work, particularly in the immediate wake of the event.

Boyd's DisasterMap.Net is moving towards remedying that situation. In our conversation, he explains how he's pulled data from a variety of sources into his DisasterMap website to enable near real-time data of the situation on the ground before responders can get out onto the ground.

He's invested a lot of time and effort doing this. First, identifying the sources, then teaching himself JavaScript so that he could write the code that enables him to add layers of data to his site. Traffic from Google. Weather-related data from the National Weather Service and other sources. Information on shelters from the RedCross and official sources like the Governor's Office of Homeland Security.

During the August floods, Boyd identified a potential niche for his firm — helping guide people from harm's way to places of safety. He the experience of helping family, friends and even total strangers last August as waters rose opened his eyes to the need. He's still working on how to get there.

In addition to DisasterMap.Net, Boyd puts his geography, cartography and data skills to work on individual projects for NGOs working on things like mapping petrochemical accidents to working on community planning for storm surge events.

With disasters appearing to be a growth industry in Louisiana, Boyd sees his work gravitating more toward disaster response, which is what led him to form DisasterMap.net back in 2011.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserApril 4, 2017Comment

03/28/2017

A funny thing happened on the new way to repealing the Affordable Care Act. It fractured conservatism.

House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled the bill rather than face a humiliating defeat. The awful, hastily written American Health Care Act would have eliminated coverage for 24 million Americans and driven up the costs for those still able to buy coverage. Not one of Louisiana’s five Republican members of our congressional delegation came out in opposition to the bill which would have cost more than 300,000 Louisiana residents their health insurance coverage.

The bill was killed by the conservative House Republican faction known as the Freedom Caucus. That group based its opposition on the fact that the Trump/Ryan bill was not market based, conveniently forgetting the fact that it has been a series of healthcare market failures that have led the federal government to intervene in healthcare.

Prior to the enactment of Medicare in 1965, more than 30% of seniors lived in poverty primarily because of the cost of paying for their healthcare.

In 2008, a national consensus had emerged that the health insurance system was broken and that only the federal government would be able to fix it. Republicans agreed.

When Barak Obama became president and congressional Republican leaders decided on the night of his inauguration to fight him on every initiative in an attempt to make Obama a one-term president, they focused on thwarting the administration’s push to respond to the national need. That decision marked the end of traditional politics in the United States. This was not about governing and policy. It was strictly about politics and posturing.

Some conservatives saw the folly in this. The true cost of it was shown when Ryan pulled the bill from consideration for the second time last Friday.

In the wake of the political wreck, uncertainty prevails. President Trump has been all over the map. He’s said he wants Obamacare to implode. Fine talk from the leader of the country when the result would be to put healthcare beyond the reach of people who now have it. Alternately, he’s hinted about talking with Democrats about striking a deal on healthcare, although Democrats are not interested in repealing the Affordable Care Act. Getting bi-partisan agreement on such a major issue would herald a new era of politics here, one that had been written off by the right as dead and buried as they stood in locked-step opposition to all things Obama.

The lesson of the failure of House Republicans to rally around Trump/Ryan Care is that opposition alone leaves you wildly unprepared to govern if you have not done the serious work of thinking through and providing workable alternatives. During the Obama years, House Republicans voted 50 or so times on bills or resolutions to repeal the ACA. During the seven years since passage of the bill, Republicans could not write a bill that their caucus could agree on. So, they just kept throwing rocks.

My guest on this week’s podcast, Col. Rob Maness, counts himself among the allies of the Freedom Caucus. He opposed the Trump/Ryan Bill because it wasn’t market focused enough, yet he also opposed it because it denied healthcare to so many people. Clearly he’s torn.

He also now questions whether President Trump has the skills and patience to execute the kind of delicate diplomacy needed to rein in North Korea using deterrence similar to that used in the Cold War – targeting the opponent and making it clear to them that an attack on the U.S. or its allies would be fatal. Neither Trump nor North Korean leader Kim Jung Un appear to have the ideal temperament to be the players in a game of nuclear chicken.

Maness has just begun studying Louisiana’s coastal and climate issues, but says he believes the federal government owes Louisiana help in meeting the challenge of restoring and protecting our coast in exchange for the decades of energy production we have allowed here when other states were not willing to endure the resulting damage.

Maness believes part of the challenge of dealing with North Korea now is that we live in a multi-polar world, meaning there are no longer two great powers as there were during the Cold War. With the shattering of the Republican political monolith in Washington, we need to start thinking about what could be an emerging new multi-polar political order in the U.S. But that will be somewhere beyond the chaos that is likely to prevail for a bit.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserMarch 28, 2017Comment

03/21/2017

We live in a world of constant change. Everything we do changes the world that existed the moment before we did it. That includes flood plains, which people across south Louisiana have learned a good bit about over the past year as a result of flooding that has affected us.

The recorded rainfall across south Louisiana and Mississippi on the first day of the Great August Flood of 2016.
The big one was the August flood of last year that wreaked havoc from southwest Louisiana into southeast Mississippi. We quickly learned that we were not prepared to deal with the effects of years of rapid growth and decades of thinking about flood control in terms of keeping water in rivers.

The hardest hit areas in that flood were the areas that had experienced the most growth. In hindsight, it seems so logical. After all, early settlers and development in regions took place on the high ground, particularly in low-lying southwest Louisiana. Development that followed was toward those low areas where those before them had opted not to settle or build.

When the deluge struck in August, we learned hard lessons about hydrology and construction. Water not only finds its level, it finds its way. It is indifferent to what may stand in the way of it getting there.

Flood protection strategies that focused on keeping river water out of communities were revealed to be traps that kept rain water in those same communities, particularly in the Baton Rouge region. People whose homes and/or businesses were hit by the floods in Louisiana last year (the Shreveport/Bossier area was hit by Red River flooding in the first part of the year and the Monroe area was hit by flood producing storms in the spring) now have an idea of the ordeal that those driven from their homes by Katrina and Rita went through just over a decade ago.

Flooding in northwest Louisiana, spring 2016.
This is not the end of it.

As the atmosphere continues to warm, the air holds more humidity. The seas are warming, as well, meaning more moisture is evaporating into the atmosphere. It’s a recipe for more severe weather like we experience in 2016.

On the other hand, some of the post-flood recovery has involved repeating the very mistakes that made the floods so devastating. Since the floods in the Lafayette area, more ‘slab on grade’ homes have sprung up many in or next to subdivisions that flooded last year.

Flooding in south Louisiana, August 2016.
Just because an area did not flood last year does not mean that it won’t flood next year. The basic rule of flood plains is that everything built in them — from parking lots to homes to commercial developments — changes them because each structure or project alters the ability of the ground to absorb water. And when wanter can’t get into the ground, it’s going to move to a point where it can.

For decades the efforts in south Louisiana has been to quickly move the water out. As we learned last year, sometimes there is too much water to move out. We also learned that there is nothing you can do to speed the removal of the water when the ground is flat and saturated. Water from the Vermilion River in Lafayette stayed in some homes and subdivisions for weeks after the rains stopped.

Grasshopper Mendoza

Steve Picou
Steve Picou and Grasshopper Mendoza have first-hand experience dealing with the impact of water. Their New Orleans home flooded after the federal levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They’ve been part of the great conversations that sprang up in New Orleans about how to rethink the city’s relationship with water. It’s a conversation that should be taking place all across south Louisiana as we confront the elements of climate change — warming temperatures, sea level rise, land subsidence, increased severity of severe storms.

In the face of this existential threat to life as we have known it in south Louisiana, as Steve says in the interview, “we must must adapt or move, or both.” The status quo is not an option. It’s already gone.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC’s Community Programming Director for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserMarch 21, 2017Comment