Where we are now

 Seems about right.

RACELAND, La. —

A fire that started from a pile of Hurricane Ida debris is burning faster than firefighters can control in Raceland, according to the Lafourche Parish President.

The fire is mainly affecting areas near Highway 190 and Highway 182. 

According to Archie Chaisson, the fire has been burning for more than a week and started in a state government dump. No homes or structures are being threatened, but smoke is causing a problem. 

Actually there is some better news on the disaster relief front.  Earlier this month it looked to all the world as though Louisiana would have to forego federal help in order that the US could send more bombs to the Ukraine war zone. That turns out not to be the case, exactly.  This week they found $1.7 billion in the couch cushions somewhere.

Hopes had been all but lost in the Lake Charles area for further long-term relief after Congress approved a massive federal spending package earlier this month without it.

But given the state’s stark needs, federal officials decided to grant additional money to Louisiana out of a previously approved amount set aside for disaster relief nationwide. Ida aid was expected to eventually come from that, but at a lower amount. Graves and Kennedy criticized the allocations as taking too long.

HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge noted that a primary goal of the funding was to help low- to moderate-income families recover and rebuild more resiliently.

Keep in mind this is mostly to deal with the still un-met needs resulting from Hurricanes Delta and Laura. The Governor says they're still looking for another $2.5 billion for Ida. Until then, keep the fire going, I guess.

 

How we are buying the bombs

Joe Biden announced today that the US will contribute the following to the growing pit of death and destruction in Ukraine.

The new $800M package includes:
- 800 anti-aircraft systems
- 9,000 anti-armor systems
- 7,000 small arms
- 20 Million rounds
- Unmanned aerial systems
And more.

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2022

It surprises no one to learn that this expenditure did not immediately elicit a chorus of "BUT HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT" howls from the psychopaths who dominate American media and politics.  They do love to yell that. But only when it refers to expenditures on things like food or medicine for poor people.  It's fine when we spend the money on murder. That's what our enlightened rulers enjoy most. 

So, anyway, how will we pay for it?

Next week, the White House says it will start to wind down a COVID-19 program that pays to test, treat and vaccinate people who don't have health insurance.

It's one of several immediate impacts after Congress declined to add $22.5 billion in funding to a broad government spending bill passed last week. President Biden signed the bill into law on Tuesday, hailing it as a bipartisan achievement without mentioning the lack of COVID-19 funding.

The COVID-19 funding request met with political pushback from Republicans and concern among some lawmakers that the White House has not fully explained how trillions in COVID money has been spent so far and what funding remains. Republicans in particular have been unwilling to agree to new spending.

Ah okay we've given up even pretending to care about COVID and kicking millions of Americans off of Medicaid. That's plenty money right there. What else, though? 

The bill also does not include further Hurricane Ida aid, but time likely remains to appropriate more dollars for that storm, which hit in August and affected a range of states, including New York, whose congressional delegation holds strong sway.

Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, sought an amendment to include $3 billion for 2020 and 2021 disasters, but the proposal was rejected. He said that while he supported the billions appropriated for Ukraine, and noted aid being sent to Haiti and elsewhere, needs here should be taken care of as well.

“How do you do that and not provide aid for our own citizens, for people that are in need?” he said. “You’re treating people of other countries better than we're treating our own. I want to be clear: I'm not necessarily saying that with Ukraine. We're not under missile attack right now. But for some of these other countries, that’s exactly what's happening.”

Garret Graves isn't "necessarily saying that with Ukraine" but I will.  It is unconscionable to let people suffer the effects of multiple major hurricanes in order to send even more instruments of death into a war zone. Despite what the hunky Ukranian guy everybody loves says, the US can still choose to do some actual good things for people instead of helping him start Word War III.  But in American politics it's always easier to kill a million people in Europe than it is to figure out how to feed and clothe them here.

Colossus crawls west

Today's look has Delta coming in much stronger than we thought. And it's headed right for SW Louisiana where they're still literally picking up debris from Laura.

So that's not great.  Can still change and probably will, though.  But a shift back east is also not a great outcome.

The Friday Fizzle

It would be pretty typical for an October storm to lose strength as it crosses the northern Gulf. It's not guaranteed but it's something we've seen quite a few times. Anyway that's what this graphic seems to indicate even though the current status of the storm is freaking people out.  

The problem is, if it happens, it's all going to happen on Friday.  But if you have to decide what you are going to do before then, well, it might require a small leap of faith.

Breaking records

They're going for it. All the mud. 

The state is undertaking two “record-breaking” restoration projects aimed at reviving 7 square miles of coastal habitat and bolstering natural storm defenses east of New Orleans and near Venice in lower Plaquemines Parish.

Long planned but now funded with $215 million from money BP set aside after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the projects amount to the largest marsh restoration and the largest coastal ridge-building effort the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has ever attempted.

“The only way to describe them is 'massive,'” CPRA Executive Director Bren Haase said. “They’re both record-breaking projects."

The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened 10 years ago.  These aren't the first projects that settlement has funded but they do give some idea of how long it takes to put that money to use. Which is a maddening thing to think about when we consider just how late in the game all of this is. This, for example, is from May of this year.

 A new study says Louisiana’s coast cannot be saved.

Researchers looked at how the marshes have survived over thousands of years and concluded that they are past a major tipping point and sea level rise will eventually wash the entire coast away.

The study, published today in Science Advances, found that marshes can survive a certain amount of relative sea level rise — about a tenth of an inch per year. Sea levels are currently rising 1 to 2 inches a year in Louisiana due to climate change and subsidence.

“Previous investigations have suggested that marshes can keep up with rates of sea-level rise as high as half an inch per year, but those studies were based on observations over very short time windows, typically a few decades or less,” said Torbjörn Törnqvist, Lead researcher and Tulane University earth and environmental science professor.

He said officials have perhaps been too optimistic: “Unfortunately we have already reached the tipping point for marsh drowning in Louisiana. There is no way back anymore.”

Yeah... but you gotta do something.  And since we do have some money to throw around right now, we might as well throw at something at least a little bit useful.  And these "record breaking" projects do sound a little bit useful. One project aims to save and reinvigorate 3,000 acres of marsh around Lake Borgne. 

Restoring marshlands in Lake Borgne, actually a large saltwater bay, is part of a wider effort to rebuild wetlands in the Pontchartrain Basin for both ecological and storm protection functions. Like much of the coast, the basin has been rapidly losing land from erosion, storm surges, rising seas and subsidence, the natural compacting and sinking of the soil.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment found that boosting the marshlands in Lake Borgne could provide significant storm surge protection for New Orleans.

See, that helps. Now, if they could get all of this done by, say, Thursday evening that would be great. 

Tropical Storm Delta was strengthening in the Caribbean Monday morning and is expected to become a hurricane Tuesday on its path toward Louisiana, forecasters said.

The current track from the National Hurricane Center has Delta making landfall Friday as a Category 2 hurricane in southeast Louisiana, but the track has an average error of 160 to 200 miles this far out.

Here is Delta's track which, appropriately for something called that, is still subject to change.. but.. yikes!

We're in the Greek alphabet for only the second time in history.  That other time was, of course, the infamous 2005 season when we got all the way up to Zeta. Just a couple more to go now and maybe we can break that record too.