Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Folks in Louisiana holding their breath


Just returned from Louisiana where I spent time talking to folks around St. Tammany Parish. Life isn't easy here especially now. Faced with arduous hardships and many a hurricane that have left a path of destruction, these people for the most part, have a strong resilience toward disasters and seem to dust themselves off each time they face one.

Read my story in the Philadelphia Inquirer on how they are now holding their breath over the BP oil spill.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

What's the future of Louisiana's shrimping and tourism industries?



Darren Frickey, a fifth-generation shrimper, has been out all night fishing and is now preparing for his umpteenth shrimping mission before things get real bad. Thing is he says, scooping up a handful of medium brown shrimps known as “golden boys,” this year’s yield has never been better.

“There’s so much shrimp out in those waters. I was real busy before the oil spill hit the Gulf. Now we’re trying to catch as much shrimp as we can before the oil comes,” he explains aboard his boat, the Halania Juna, docked at the Rigolets Marina about the shrimp surge in Lake Borgne.

The big question is how long will the shrimping last?

Folks along Louisiana’s Northshore in St. Tammany Parish are nervous. A 45-minute drive north from New Orleans along the Causeway Bridge, this largely bedroom community of the Big Easy ain’t so easy these days with the imminent threat of oil spilling into Lake Pontchartrain, the US’s second largest saltwater lake.


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Monday, June 21, 2010

Why tourism matters in LA more than ever


These days there’s no getting around talking about the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Mention Louisiana and you’re most likely to envision oil and gooey black tar balls making their way up the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge.

Well I can tell you it ain’t so. I just returned a few days ago from Shreveport, LA and St. Tammany Parish and the folks down there want your clients to visit.

Tourism is a big industry here, and right now this state is desperate to keep its local economies afloat.

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