Tomorrow we celebrate the beginning of Hurricane Season

As many of you are aware, there are four seasons in New Orleans.  They are Carnival, Festival, Hurricane, and Football.  Tomorrow we transition from the second into the third.  Halfway through 2012 already and all we've lost is a head coach, a quarterback, a newspaper, two councilmembers, and the concept of public education.  Oh and, I guess, we're down one Nacho Mama's too.

The point is we're about on par in 2012 as far as horrible thing generation is concerned, so I'm expecting this year's storms to inflict only a normal amount of damage.  Likewise, the official forecasters are expecting a normal-to-"below average" amount of activity this year.  In other words, if you're not sure you remember your strategy for coping with "floating balls of fire ants" now would be a good time to freshen up.

Meanwhile, NOLA.com is celebrating the change in season with a new color scheme. Because, of course, that was the number one thing everyone was so upset with them about.  Still it might be fun if they kept changing colors with the seasons like this.  At that pace, we could expect a new NOLA.com palette for every 6th or 7th Gambit Dining Guide issue published each year. There are worse ways to mark the days, I guess.

Anyway, what was I even talking about here?  Oh yeah, Hurricane Season.  Perhaps it's a sign of our complacency as of late, but it isn't getting much play in the news this week.  Maybe our local editors need to check with BCG before publishing anything that might negatively affect the brand. Oh well, since Fridays are still on the Times-Picayune print calendar, I guess we'll find out tomorrow what they've got planned.

Meanwhile we'll have to make do with some uplifting words of encouragement from Tulane geologist Torbjörn Törnqvist.  

Louisiana is now moving to the point that it recognizes that there is no way we can save the coast, even as it is today. You know, we don't even talk anymore about restoring what we had, say a century ago. But even what we have today is not, it's not going to be possible to keep, keep it the way it is. So we're going to have to make very difficult choices and focus on trying to restore certain portions of the coast, which inevitably will go on the expense of other portions of the coast. And that's, that's a very difficult political problem. But it is one that has to be addressed, and it has to be addressed very soon. Because the longer we wait, the less we will be able to do.

And now, as a bonus, Floating Balls of Fire Ants!








Update: Ah here's today's T-P editorial

Scientists and public officials in Louisiana and other parts of the Gulf Coast have been sounding the alarm about coastal erosion for decades, urging Congress to dedicate the tens of billions of dollars needed to restore and protect Louisiana's wetlands.

But efforts to get more federal aid have been hampered because potential economic losses haven't been clearly quantified, according to King Milling, chairman of America's Wetland Foundation. That's why a new study by Entergy Corp. aiming to provide some answers is an important development -- and policymakers need to heed its dire projections. 

David Hammer wrote about the Entergy report in detail earlier this week. 

Entergy spent $4.2 million to conduct coastal restoration research for the whole region. The researchers looked at 800 coastal Zip codes across 77 parishes and counties from Texas to Florida.

The study assumes a major storm like Katrina, which used to hit a community once in the average lifetime, will hit twice per lifetime by 2030. Estimating wind damage, storm surge and sea-level rise, Williams estimated that total losses for the whole Gulf Coast region would reach $350 billion by 2030 if nothing is done to make the area more resilient.

The story was given equal emphasis on NOLA.com with the face-eating guy in Florida, various mugshots from Northshore DWI arrests, and, of course, the very active Kitties-in-peril beat.