Third Coast Cuisine

With regards to the Third Coast, President Obama is burning through good will at record setting pace.  The day the Deepwater Horizon explosion first occurred their was the requisite expression of remorse for lives lost and a vow to investigate the cause - then nothing.  For days the people of the Gulf region waited for the White House to address the issue again.  Three days passed, then four, then five, then a full week.  In fact it was nine days after the rig exploded and sank before the President mentioned it again, ten before he actually sent someone down to take a look.  And throughout that time Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser were patient and supportive.

The state of Louisiana had a plan to save their marshlands, the source of both ecology and industry for the region.  A man-made berm to protect both the fragile barrier islands and the even more delicate marshlands behind them could be constructed in a little over a week.  The President refused to allow the state of Louisiana to begin construction stating ecological concerns.  Jindal and Nugesser would have to seek an "emergency" permit for such a project, a process that takes two weeks just to process before the Army Corps of Engineers can begin to evaluate it.

Now nearly a month and a half since the explosion BP and the government have yet to make a dent in the oil leak and have done even less to protect the shore.  The "emergency" permit is still jumping through bureaucratic hoops and now oil is saturating those precious marshlands.  All this has prompted Jindal to tell the White House and BP to either stop the oil spill or get out of his way.  Billy Nungesser offers this candid narrative of what dealing with the Obama administration has been like.

The media coverage of the BP oil disaster to date has focused largely on the threats to wildlife, but the latest evaluation of air monitoring data shows a serious threat to human health from airborne chemicals emitted by the ongoing deepwater gusher.

Today the Louisiana Environmental Action Network released its analysis of air monitoring test results by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA's air testing data comes from Venice, a coastal community 75 miles south of New Orleans in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish.

The findings show that levels of airborne chemicals have far exceeded state standards and what's considered safe for human exposure.

For instance, hydrogen sulfide has been detected at concentrations more than 100 times greater than the level known to cause physical reactions in people. Among the health effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure are eye and respiratory irritation as well as nausea, dizziness, confusion and headache.

The concentration threshold for people to experience physical symptoms from hydrogen sulfide is about 5 to 10 parts per billion. But as recently as last Thursday, the EPA measured levels at 1,000 ppb. The highest levels of airborne hydrogen sulfide measured so far were on May 3, at 1,192 ppb.