Day 1

Greetings from Louisiana! Our entire team is all settled in our new home for the next few weeks: LUMCON! LUMCON stands for Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

Today we woke up bright and early for our first day of work with Bayou Grace Community Services. It consisted of sand fencing! Basically, our job was to insert roughly 8-foot tall wooden poles into pre-drilled 4-foot deep holes, bury the poles and make sure sand is compacted so that the poles are sturdy and can withstand harsh conditions in the future. The purpose in building a sand fence is to aid the process of the creating a sand dune. As tides roll in, water deposits sand on the other side of the fence; wind has the same effect. With time, vegetation starts to grow. The finished product looks something like this:

Dunes like the one shown in the picture above are excellent buffer systems during storm events. Therefore they can be quite beneficial for states like Louisiana, where storms and hurricanes frequently vist.

Other pictures (of LUMCON and Day 1 events) can be found here.

In other news, our team should not be affected by the Morganza spillway flooding while we continue to work with Diane Huhn and Bayou Grace Community Services the next three weeks.

Governor Bobby Jindal stated recently that floodwaters have been moving at a slower pace than previously anticipated. Northern Louisiana may see less backwater flooding than predicted. Nonetheless, flooding will still occur and impact many people. Jindal also added 11 more parishes to a list of parishes that are expected to receive federal disaster assistance.