Rec district audit nearly public
September 5, 2018
Week 1 proves fruitful for local teams
September 5, 2018
Tropical Storm Gordon’s approach toward the Louisiana coast – although taken quite seriously by local officials – did not appear to significantly raise hackles.
With good advance notice from federal weather officials while Gordon was still in its infancy above northeastern Cuba, officials expressed confidence that local responses and equipment were ready for any challenges ahead, beginning Saturday and then throughout the day Sunday and Monday.
All sandbag stations for self-service and one for elder and disabled residents were operational just after Noon Monday, well ahead of a 5 p.m. deadline imposed by Parish President Gordon Dove.
Floodgate systems administered by the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District also appeared to be working in good order, said levee district director Reggie Dupre.
“It’s not going to go above a trop storm status,” Dupre said Monday afternoon. “But I think he level of protection we have now, certainly we can withstand everything up until it would go beyond, even more than that so we are in very good shape.”
With twelve navigable floodgates and other structures built through joint efforts between the levee district and Terrebonne Parish, Dupre said “drills” like the coming of Gordon “make our jobs easier in the long run.”
Preparation for less-cataclysmic events helps to create situations where people and systems are tested, he explained.
All floodgates except the Houma Navigation Canal’s Bubba Dove gate were closed by Monday afternoon. Dupre noted that closures were attended to even with the limited staff available on a holiday weekend.
Closing the Bubba Dove takes extra time, Dupre said because the HNC is a federal waterway and as such a lot of networking is required in advance of action.
“We do more of a formalized procedure,” Dupre said. “We have a conference call on what we are doing to make it ready, and we have to send out 24-hour notices. The analogy would be a small municipal police department shutting down a major interstate highway. You have to look at the conditions to see if it is warranted.”
A change in the path of Gordon — once a Bubba Dove closure was in effect — could result in a reversal so that marine traffic can resume back to normal more quickly.
A free web-based application for monitoring of floodgate openings and closures is getting a good response, Dupre said, and more than 1500 people have registered on the site.
Info and instructions are available at http://www.tlcd.org/mobile/
“It’s working well,” Dupre said. “Every time we have these little events we have more peope registered. They can see what flood levels are, how high the water gets, and what we are looking at coming in at low tide.”
A low tide arrival of any issues connected to Gordon, Dupre said, was likely to cut down on difficulties encountered locally. But that far ahead of the storm’s final course, Dupre and other leaders well-schooled in the fickle nature of hurricanes, predictions could still be written off as mere speculation.
