Gutter buddies

From LaToya's pre-Carnival pep talk today:

Another new feature headed to parade routes is called a "gutter buddy," which is a sandbag placed in front of catch basins to prevent beads and other items from flowing in and clogging them.

Actually, these were a "new feature" last year along the parade routes uptown.  Here's what they look like.



Those didn't appear to be sandbags, though. Maybe they're going heavy duty this time around.  Hope it doesn't rain too hard while they're deployed. We do still have a drainage problem to worry about. And the "gutter buddies" are supposed to be good at plugging up culverts. 

Mosaic thinks so, anyway.

A fertilizer plant in St. James Parish is siphoning hazardous wastewater out of a retaining pond to try to prevent the possible collapse of a retaining wall, but also preparing to respond if it cannot prevent the failure, records show. A letter from the Mosaic Uncle Sam fertilizer plant to the Environmental Protection Agency outlined preparations to try to prevent the wastewater from contaminating surrounding wetlands if the wall collapses.

The plans include installing or staging plugs for nearby culverts to try to contain the wastewater, should it be released, according to a letter to the EPA date Jan. 30.

The waste water is sitting behind a 200 foot wall of gypsum right now.  That's a pretty big gutter buddy itself.  I'm sure some sandbags will be fine if that fails, though.

Qatar on the bayou

It's hard to crack into the WSJ archives. This was one of my very favorite op-eds of theirs that wasn't penned by Bobby Jindal.  That link runs up against the paywall, though.  I happened to pull the funny quote from it at the time. But also here is a site where the full text is preserved. Anyway, here is what I'm talking about.

So let’s put it this way: We are building a Qatar on the Bayou. From whole cloth, companies are laying new cities of fertilizer plants, boron manufacturers, methanol terminals, polymer plants, ammonia factories and paper-finishing facilities. In computer renderings, the Sasol site looks like a fearsome, steel-fitted Angkor Wat.

Now the environmental website where the text of this article is preserved has added photos, links and commentary to recontextualize things a bit. But in its original form it was pretty clear this  "Qatar on the Bayou" iteration was meant as a compliment.  Understandably, not everyone takes it as such. 

While the Sasol project described above has since been scaled back, the chemical boom in South Louisiana has nevertheless persisted... much to everyone's great excitement in St. James Parish.

CONVENT — Shouting "shut it down" on the front lawn of Mosaic Fertilizer's administrative office, a collection of St. James Parish residents, outside environmental activists and pastors called Wednesday for the state to close the Uncle Sam plant with its endangered lake of hazardous water threatening surrounding land and waterways.

Company officials and state regulators have been scrambling for several weeks to prevent a catastrophic release of more than 700 million gallons of the acidic process water held inside an enormous lake atop a 200-foot high pile of the company's waste byproduct outside Convent.

I've been watching this story all week and I'm still not sure if the "process water" threatens to contaminate the river if it slips loose.  I only ask because I am concerned it might not be so great at cooling turbines. 

More to the point, though...

More pointedly, the local group Rise St. James and other activists urged the state to halt continued permitting of any new industrial operations in St. James Parish, like the $9.4 billion Formosa complex proposed across the Mississippi River in Welcome or the $1.2 billion Wanhua complex proposed across the street from the Mosaic waste pile.

"As Rise St. James and as the residents of St. James have said repeatedly, St. James is full, and nothing shows it more clearly than this facility that needs to be shut down now," said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. "You can't handle what you got, don't bring in any more."

Gail Leboeuf, a Convent resident who grew up near the pile, said she watched the plant being built and watched the pile rise higher and higher through the years.

One could almost call it the Angkor Wat of gypsum if one wanted to keep the metaphor going.  But why would we want to do that?  It was all mixed up in the first place.  The Angkor Wat is in Cambodia and we're trying to be Qatar.. right?  Maybe we need to just stop.

The River Parish Mystery Plant

I haven't seen a print edition of The Advocate in probably 15 years or so.  I know there were some free copies available around town this week. But I didn't get a chance to snag one.  Does anyone know if they still publish a puzzle?  Because  it looks to me like they just decided to fold the brain teasers right into the reporting.

Take this story for example. It's about a "mysterious" industrial project of some sort which, according to scuttlebutt, may be sited in St. James or Ascension Parish some time in the near future.   

GONZALES — Sites in St. James and Ascension parishes are being eyed for a “large” but mysterious industrial project that some officials have described as being bigger than the $3.4 billion Nucor Corp. steel mill being built in Romeville, St. James Parish officials said.

Who is building the plant? No one can say! What will it produce? No one will tell! Obviously all of the "officials" and "stakeholders" either named or unnamed in the article know the answers to those questions and, I get the distinct impression that the reporter knows as well.  But he's not telling us either. No, I'm not sure why, but man does that make it fun.

Here's what we do know about that so far. We know it's a "large but mysterious industrial project" that might be bigger than Nucor. The article also tells us it's "tied to the energy sector," and that it is nicknamed, "Project Frontier"

There's more "what" but before we get there it's helpful to note some of the "why"s. For example, there's this sentence which appears to give us conflicting information.

A county in Texas also is being looked at for the project that appears to be tied to the energy sector and is trying to take advantage of Mississippi River access and low natural gas prices due to advances in shale exploration, parish officials said.

How is a "county in Texas" going to "take advantage of Mississippi River access"? We aren't told.  But it does raise the specter of interstate competition for an economic development project which, of course, always necessitates the following.

..the prospective facility was mentioned as part of a broader discussion on local tax incentives during a closed gathering of representatives of major St. James Parish taxing jurisdictions about a month ago at the Parish Courthouse in Convent, St. James Parish officials said.

Who is discussing tax incentives for the giant mysterious "energy sector" natural gas thingamajig on the river? Practically every elected official of consequence in St. James Parish, to start. The Advocate names several who attended this strategy meeting.

St. James Parish President Timmy Roussel said the officials had gathered to discuss “what we can live with and what we can’t live with, and we needed all of the stakeholders’ opinions.”

What can they live with? Roussel isn't ready to say.  He also isn't giving up any details about the project because, 

Roussel said he could offer few details on Project Frontier, such as what company is behind it, because he has signed a non-disclosure agreement.

The same goes, of course, for the whole of the St. James Parish  taxing authorities assembled at the meeting. The same, again, goes for Ascension Parish officials who, the reporter hints, are just as well coordinated and, of course, every bit as mum.

Ascension Parish officials had less to say. Parish President Tommy Martinez referred calls Wednesday to Mike Eades, president and chief executive officer of the parish’s chief economic development arm.

Eades declined comment Wednesday.

In all, The Advocate points to 10 Parish and State officials who have probably signed a confidentiality agreement with the major gas refinery project they're currently negotiating tax breaks with.  And now that we know that, the big "mystery" of just who they're planning to give that away to hardly seems like the most relevant fact anymore.

Note: According to The Hayride, it's probably a Gas-To-Liquid fuel refinery to be operated by either Shell or Sasol. The Advocate leaves hints that point to this as well but... for whatever reason... doesn't just come out and say it.