Tagged: disaster preparedness

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser is upset that the parish wasn't notified before an apparent drill for pilots who spray oil spills dispersants. And he doesn't believe that the planes used in the drill were spraying only water, as he was told.

Parish official P.J. Hahn says fishermen called him June 13, saying low-flying planes sprayed something that turned to foam on the water and made their skin itch or burn.

Hahn says the Coast Guard told him it was a drill by the oil industry's Marine Spill Response Corp and that only water was being sprayed.

The National Weather Service has issued a weather alert this evening for parts of four parishes, in advance of a cluster of strong thunderstorms approaching the region.

The storms, which are moving north at about 5 mph, may produce one to two inches of rain in a short period of time, says the Weather Service. That much rain may result in the ponding of water around low-lying roadways.

The alert covers upper Jefferson, Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes, as well as New Orleans and New Orleans East.

BATON ROUGE — The board governing Louisiana's property insurer of last resort has agreed to drop rates by 10 percent across a dozen south Louisiana parishes, with the rate cut retroactive to June 7, when the reduction was signed into law.

The $16 million annual rate cut is for customers of the Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corp.

Citizens customers won't likely see a change on their bills until November, after the process for changing rates is complete. They'll get rebates for any money they paid above what they should have.

The Army Corps of Engineers says it's scrapping plans to build a levee system to protect a large area of south Louisiana against hurricane flooding on the Barataria estuary southwest of New Orleans.  The corps says the project wasn't economically feasible.

The National Weather Service has discontinued a tropical storm warning for Louisiana after forecast models indicated that the state is under less of a threat from Tropical Storm Debby than initially thought.

Parts of Alabama and Florida remain under a tropical storm warning, however. Storm paths are generally hard to predict days in advance, and forecasters say they've been comparing several models to compile the official forecast. As of late Sunday, though, they believe the storm was less likely to make a westward turn toward Louisiana. 

Forecasters dropped storm warnings for southeastern Louisiana Sunday afternoon and said the threat from Tropical Storm Debby had decreased.

National Hurricane Center forecasters backed away from an earlier projection that Debby might strike southeast Louisiana as a Category 1 hurricane. Instead they said they didn't expect it to turn west from its northward path that has it aimed at Florida and Alabama.