Where the Alligators Roam

"Angelina Iles draws out the best in people. She motivates them to accomplish more than they thought possible. She's been doing this for years in the Rapides Parish city of Pineville. Operating independently as Pineville Concerned Citizens or in concert with other organizations, she's been working to change the political culture in Central Louisiana by focusing on issues that affect the people that too many elected officials ignore — the working poor and lower middle class.

The list of projects she's led and/or worked on in the five years I've known her is longer that the life's work of many others. Defending the state workers at Huey P. Long Hospital against Bobby Jindal and from the ineffectiveness of their public employee union. Rallying Central Louisiana around Medicaid expansion even as Jindal vowed to keep hundreds of thousands of Louisiana residents uninsured. Working to revitalize the state and local Democratic Party organizations that have conspicuously failed at party building at both levels.

She's now working with Indivisible in Central Louisiana on issues ranging from healthcare to pay equity to full citizenship for women. She's working across party lines to improve the plight of the people around her.

Angelina was born in Lafayette. She attended Holy Rosary Institute for a time before moving to Rapides Parish. She was a cafeteria worker for years and a member of the Rapides Federation of Teachers. She raised a good family. She cared for her stroke paralyzed brother at the same time she was battling for the rights of others.

She brings a pragmatic touch to idealistic battles. She wins even when others say she lost. She is relentless in her efforts on behalf of others. She knows that ""No"" is the bureaucratic response to see if you'll go away.

Angelina Iles is a leader in the truest sense of the word. Ask the people who have encountered her. She is fierce but it is not done in pursuit of personal gain or advantage.

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

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

Here's a clip of her in action:"

"Liam Doyle has been had mobility issues since he was born. He used a walker to get around in elementary school, but shifted to a chair in middle school because the campus was larger and he had to get around to classes.

He graduated from Lafayette High, one of the largest high schools in the state that operates on a campus built 50 years ago to accommodate a student body about half the size of the one there now.

He's 28 now, working on an associate degree in History at South Louisiana Community College and plans to attend UL Lafayette when he finishes up his last class in the next semester. He's just passed the battery of tests needed to show he has the capacity to drive a car.

And he's got his hands full working with Lafayette Consolidated Government to improve physical access to public spaces and businesses in the City of Lafayette. He chairs the Mayor-President's Awareness Committee for Citizens with Disabilities, so is pretty officially in the business of removing barriers to access.

Even though LCG is the parish government here, because of we have semi-consolidated government here LCG has no authority in the small municipalities that remain in the parish after Lafayette lost its mayor and council to the parish. It's a complicated yet subtle form of discrimination against city residents who provide much of the funding for the parish.

In the podcast of our conversation, Doyle says he's found his voice and maybe his calling in the role of advocate for the disabled in Lafayette. It was the role that thrust him into the public spotlight just over two years ago and it's a role he's developed a comfort with in dealing with public and private entities as he has gone about the work of making Lafayette accessible for all of us.

He's got a great story! We get to a good bit of it in this interview.

The podcast also includes a segment about recent developments in connection with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's Coastal Master Plan. It was recorded before St. John the Baptist Parish became the sixth parish to file suit against oil and gas companies for damage they did to wetlands by way of exploration activities in the Coastal Zone of that parish.

If oil and gas won't pay, we can't stay in South Louisiana.

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

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

"

"I interviewed Dawn DeDeaux in 2016. The exhibit at MassMOCA she describes here is about to open. The signs of the climate crisis that propels her art are becoming more apparent. Sea level rise on the east coast is producing sunny day, tidal flooding i...

"How much is that Octopus in the parking garage?

The more important question is what will persistent exposure to tidal water do to the parking garage and the buildings around it. The octopus can probably fend for itself.

Albert Slap is a former law professor who co-founded Coastal Risk Consultants to help people understand the impact that climate change will have on where they live and work and how they live their lives.

While it is a business, it is also a compelling way to make the somewhat abstract concept of climate change very real to people who live in those areas that are likely to be affected. Slap's company is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida — just up US 1 from Miami Beach where the octopus tried its tentacles at valet parking.

In our discussion, Slap says cities on Florida's Atlantic coast have decided that they must act on their own in response to rising seas and tides where they are. Miami Beach is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise roads. New commercial construction along the shore are essentially waterproofing their bottom floors to enable them to continue operation in times of tidal flooding.

Slap's company uses laser measured elevation technology to map parcels down to nine square foot squares that give a level of accuracy and granularity far greater than available through FEMA floodplain maps. As Slap explains, FEMA floodplain maps are inherently backward looking, they cannot project what might happen.

Using the laser elevation maps and connecting that data with the latest climate, sea level rise, and geographic data, Coastal Risk Consultants can provide home and business owners much more accurate climate risk assessments than are available through trying to wade through the information being produced primarily for national, state and regional uses.

""We don't have to agree on the sources of what is driving climate change in order to recognize that it is changing and that we must figure out how to respond,"" Slap says. ""We give people actionable information on what climate change will mean for them, their homes and their businesses.""

Slap believes that private insurers will look at getting involved in the flood insurance market, even though in some areas it is not a matter of risk so much as a matter of certainty.

In the current rollout of the CPRA's 2017 Coastal Master Plan, the most encouraging development has been the recent decision to convene community conversations about climate change impact in those parishes in Louisiana that will be most affected by it. Getting those discussions down from the abstract — ""the coast"" — to the specific — your parish, your town, your street — could be the way to break the paralysis that is a byproduct of the ideological war over whether climate change is, in fact, real.

Climate change is real. It's here now. Reality is not particularly interested in whether you believe it or not.

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

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

"Harold Schoeffler is a Louisiana treasure. He has more first-hand knowledge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the river that feeds it and the coast than any other single person around today.

He has skillfully used the courts to enforce laws and change Louisiana for the better on issues ranging from shell dredging (as it scraping away protective barrier islands to be used for driveways) to protecting the Black Bear.

Schoeffler continues to be a force to be reckoned with on environmental issues in Louisiana based on his instinctual sense of right and wrong which he has used time and again to convince lawyers of the righteousness of his causes who have in turn convinced judges of the righteousness of Harold’s convictions.

Schoeffler is old enough to remember the Basin before oil & gas and flood control pushed the natural characteristics of America’s last great swamp into the background to serve what were argued to be higher interests. He remembers catching tarpon in the Basin above Morgan City. He understands that slow moving, meandering bayous are orders of magnitude better for protecting our wetlands than are box-type canals favored by oil and gas interests.

All of this has been discounted by ‘experts’ in industry who have come to own our state government.

Yet, as we have come to know early in the 21st Century, the Basin is the driver of our ecological wellbeing in south central Louisiana, just as surely as the coast itself is the driver of Louisiana’s wellbeing from Texas to Mississippi.

He has heard the fancy language and seen the pretty pictures painted by those who have no interest other than exploiting the Basin and the coast, no matter the cost. He’s gone through his life with his eyes wide open. He’s seen water quality projects used to wreck bayous and streams. He’s seen hazardous waste dumped in ditches by companies who hid behind the law to justify it. He’s watched as state government leaders have pushed restoration plans that will primarily benefit contractors while turning the Basin and the coast into artificial remnants of their greater selves.

Harold Schoeffler knows that we have spent more than half a century destroying our wetlands and the Atchafalaya Basin in a quest to save it. He knows that time is running out; that the forces that we have unleashed endanger the Basin now as never before.

With three successive governors having the state to spending $50 billion to try to preserve some of our coast, Harold Schoeffler wants those planning the effort to look a little closer at how we got here. Maybe, he figures, if they did that, they wouldn’t make things worse while they try to make things better.

Harold Schoeffler on the Atchafalaya Basin and the bogus process that wants to give Lafayette what it does not want – an elevated roadway through the heart of the city.

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

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake

"

"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.

A Foolish Game by Hans Atom (c) copyright 2017 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/hansatom/55394 Ft: Snowflake"

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 elim...

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,

The big push is on to finalize (again) a design choice for the proposed I-49 route through downtown Lafayette. DOTD and Lafayette Consolidated Government leaders along with their corporate sponsor/patrons at OneAcadiana say they’ll make a decision in the next few days.

The rush to get the project built contrasts dramatically with the same group’s aversion to determining the extent of ground and water pollution in the Union Pacific rail yard that stretches 1.5 miles from Simcoe Street in the north to Taft in the south.

The proposed I-49 road way would run right through the Union Pacific rail yard (area in yellow). Base map by DOTD.

The rail yard operated about 70 years before all but a few people appreciated the connection between industrial operations and quality of life. The long length of ground and water contamination at the site leads some local environmental activists to believe it is extensively polluted.

The road proponents don’t appear at all concerned by that.

They should be. The north end of the site is literally across Simcoe from an aggregation point for a water well field belonging to Lafayette Utilities System. The LUS wells already show the presence of trace presence of chemicals linked to the Union Pacific site.

These wells serve as the source of drinking water for most of the city of Lafayette.

I-49 through downtown poses the very real threat to speed the pollution of the LUS wells because it would run through most of old rail yard, requiring pilings to be driven. In some places in the vicinity of the yard, the Chicot Aquifer — the sole source of drinking water for Lafayette and most of south Louisiana — rises to as little as 40 feet below the surface of the ground.

Driving pilings through the pollution would drive it toward the water supply by breaking the barriers that separate the aquifer from the ground above it. The chemicals dumped in the rail yard over those seven decades might well have accomplished some of that already.

Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance.

Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance is alarmed by the folly of proceeding to disturb the site when no comprehensive assessment of the pollution there has ever been carried out. There has been some spot testing and even some spot cleanups in connection with land transactions. But, Goodell says a thorough assessment is an essential step to an effective cleanup and that has never occurred.

The LUS water well field pumps 20 million gallons a day out of the ground just north of the Union Pacific site. That pull has created a current of sorts in the aquifer — a cone of depression which draws water and whatever is in it toward the wells.

Goodell is adamant that the problem is real and that the pollution threat exists separate from the I-49 project. Her concern is that the project will make matters worse because state and local officials are refusing to acknowledge the serious nature of the threat posed by the long-term pollution at the site.

Goodell is working with community groups across the city through her WaterMark Alliance to call attention to the general need to create more citizen awareness of the pollution issue and the importance of clean drinking water to the ability to sustain life. Think Flint, Michigan. Or, closer to home, St. Joseph, Louisiana.

Proponents of I-49 say the train is about to leave the station on that project. If it does before the extent of pollution at the Union Pacific site is discovered, that train just might take our drinking water with it.

RootsCamp LA 7 is coming to Lafayette on March 18-19 and it’s a ‘must make’ event this year because of the surge of new activists that are now engaged in the political and civic process, many for the first time.

Dawn Collins, RootsCamp LA founder and chief organizer.

RootsCamp started small and has been growing organically since 2010. The first session Dawn Collins organized was in a union hall assembly room near Alexandria. It moves in two-year cycles and has been held in Baton Rouge and New Orleans since the first two events in Central Louisiana.

What’s great about RootsCamp is that the agenda is set by the attendees once they arrive. There are some panel discussions that are scheduled, but the vast bulk of the agenda is set on-site by attendees voting their level of interest.

What became starkly clear last year during the Democratic primary season – where the first wave of 2016 activists were drawn into the process – is how little understanding there is among people about how government is organized and operates, and how parties work. Progressives seem to need Civics classes. Many people couldn’t distinguish between their congressional representatives and their state legislators. Not a minor issue.

We are in a tight spot here. Those who are focused on trying to get members of Congress to respond to voters’ demands are, in many instances, engaged in futile activity. Why? Because the U.S. House of Representatives has been gerrymandered in succeeding Census cycles to lock in congressional Republican majorities in the Congress based on minority vote totals.

Oh, by the way. Those House congressional district lines are drawn by state legislatures. Look at Louisiana as an example. Louisiana has had six congressional seats since the 2010 Census. Louisiana happens to have a non-white population of 37% — about 33% African American, with the rest being Hispanic, Asian, Native Americans and others. Under the concept of one-person, one-vote, Louisiana should have two of our six congressional districts that are winnable by non-Republicans. But, we don’t. Why? Because in 2011 the Louisiana Legislature did the work of then-7th District Congressman Charles Boustany (whose district was disappearing) and carved the 3rd District in such a way as to give Boustany the advantage over then-Congressman Jeff Landry who represented the 3rd District at the time.

I’m not saying Louisiana is a progressive state. See the 2016 presidential election results to settle that. But, I am saying that congressional redistricting and redistricting of districts in the Louisiana House and Senate have been carried out in a partisan way to lock in Republican advantage and to make our state appear more conservative than it actually is.

Coming to Lafayette mid-March 2017.

For those of you whose interest is primarily at the federal issue, this is critical information. Why? Because we cannot see better outcomes in Congress unless and until we understand and change the redistricting process in Louisiana (and other states). Control of Congress, then, can be and has been affected by actions at the state level.

The next state legislative elections are in 2019. The next Census is 2020. The redistricting of the Congressional seats will take place in 2021 for the 2022 elections. The redistricting of state legislative districts will likely take place around the same time, although that work does not have to be completed until 2023.

All of these things require that citizens engage in the process and assert their ownership rights to it. That is the essential requirement of the United States’ experiment with our democratic republic. It’s gotten away from us in recent decades. The corrective is activism and engagement.

That’s why RootsCamp LA is essential.

See you there!

Register here.

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