Today, GRN’s Scott Eustis and I conducted a flyover to survey damage to communities and the environment in the aftermath of Hurricane Isaac. Thank you to Josephine Billups for making this flight possible and Southern Seaplanes for accommodating us. I took over 2000 photos and video today so the slide show below is only meant to be a general update of some of the places we surveyed and the damages we encountered and documented. You can expect to read and see more from Scott and I in the coming days about specific issues and more detailed analysis after we have had time to harvest and process the information.
In the meantime, please be sure to enlarge the slideshow on your screen and click on Show Info on the images so that you can see a brief description of what you are looking at as well as date, time, and GPS data. And please be sure to share them far and wide.
In the interest of getting images to our readers and supporters as quickly as possible, I will post another blog tomorrow detailing the second half of our flyover including some of Louisiana’s barrier islands and other points of interest. I will also be heading down to the coast by boat to assess any resurgence of BP's oil.
Today, we began our journey at Southern Seaplanes in Belle Chase, Louisiana and flew over the following (but not limited to) heavily impacted communities, industrial facilities, oil and gas infrastructure, barrier islands, and other locations:
Over the course of this evening and tomorrow, we will be filing reports with the National Response Center due to leaking oil and other potentially hazardous materials from several locations we documented on our flight. We will continue our monitoring of the ongoing impacts and will do our best to keep you updated. Please be sure to share this blog with your networks and please make a donation to GRN to help keep us in the fight for a healthy Gulf!
Jonathan Henderson is the Coastal Resiliency Organizer for the Gulf Restoration Network.
