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Organizers have announced the lineup for Party in the Park, set for July 4 at Morgan City's Lawrence Park. People who go to the event can look forward to live music, barbeque and burgers, and fun especially for kids.

Nowadays there is a mass exodus out of the Gulf when tropical weather threatens, but that wasn’t always so. It took a little while, and a few bad experiences, for oilmen to begin to figure out how to handle hurricanes. They’re still working at it.

Thumbing through back issues of the Monthly Weather Review (of course you’ve kept your subscription current), it appears that 1948, when the offshore industry was in its infancy, was the first time storms and rigs tangled. A small hurricane at the beginning of September did relatively little damage inland, but, according to the storm experts of the day, “the heaviest damage occurred near Grand Isle, when immovable oil-drilling rigs and equipment in the Gulf of Mexico were demolished by heavy seas.”

A year later, in October 1949, 40-foot waves generated by another minor hurricane wrecked a drilling platform off the Texas coast.

Those two early storms demonstrated one of the big problems facing the engineers who designed the first platforms: They knew how hard hurricane winds blew and could design for that, but they could only guess how high hurricane waves might grow. The best guess was that they might get as big as 20 feet, which was way wrong.

For example, the platform on the Freeport rig was only 26 feet above the water, no match for a 40-foot wave. The engineers raised the platforms and made some other design changes, but their rigs were not really tested by a substantial storm until Flossy blew through the Gulf in 1956.

Flossy “battered 40 persons stranded on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico with 75 mile-an-hour winds,” according to a United Press International report. An oil industry study found that the storm “provided the ‘first real hurricane’ test for offshore operators since drilling ... began in 1947.” That storm changed thinking not only about design of the rigs, but also the safety of the people working on them.

As they had in 1948, many men “rode out” Flossy on rig tenders, but this time a Calco tender broke loose with 25 crewmen aboard. They fought high seas from one direction, then floated serenely in the eye of the storm before 100-mile-per-hour winds hit them from the opposite direction. They made it through, but it was touch-and-go for a while.

Until then, offshore operators took a calculated risk that their men would be safe. They were proud that there had been no storm-related deaths over the years, but a post-Flossy study suggested, that the safety record was “not exactly guaranteed by asking workers to ride out storms in clumsy converted LSTs.”

That insight probably saved lives when Hilda brought 150-mile-per-hour winds into the Gulf in October 1964 and did more damage to the offshore industry than any previous storm, and in 1956, when Betsy broke Hilda’s destructive record. By that time, designers were getting better at what they were doing, but still “Maverick,” a state-of-the-art jack-up rig owned by George H.W. Bush’s Zapata Corp., simply disappeared during Betsy. So did a Shell platform near the mouth of the Mississippi River.

This caught the eye of the rig owners, but also of the insurance companies. They demanded a complete review of platform design. That idea was reinforced in 1969 when Camille generated a 70-foot wave in the Gulf and some of the newest and most modern platforms were demolished.

Since then, huge platforms have moved into deeper and deeper waters, meaning that physical damage to them is enormously expensive. Even when there isn’t a lot of damage, the cost of shutting down operations and moving men to safety has grown to be almost as significant as what the winds and waves can do.

Federal regulators estimate, for example, that more than 3,000 of the 4,000 platforms in the Gulf in 2005 were in the direct paths of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. All 3,000 had to stop production for weeks. In addition, Katrina and Rita caused the largest number of destroyed and damaged platforms and pipelines in the history of Gulf of Mexico operations, and also set a record for the highest number of mobile rigs set adrift.

That cost the industry billions of dollars, but there was no loss of life. One lesson has been learned well. Nobody is asked any more to ride out even little storms aboard tenders made on the cheap from surplus World War II LSTs.

A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.

Thursday was a night to recognize success in education in St. Mary Parish. The St. Mary Parish Chamber of Commerce hosted its annual “Top of the Class” Education Banquet in Patterson.
The annual banquet is a time that the Chamber of Commerce honors Teachers and Student of the Year as well as recognizes recipients of the St. Mary Parish Chamber Scholarship Award and Art & Humanities Council Scholarship winners.
St. Mary Parish 2017 Teachers of the Year are Jenny Williams of Bayou Vista Elementary and Dru Hebert of Berwick Junior High School. The 2017 Student of the Year is Jennifer Tran of Morgan City High School.
The St. Mary Parish Chamber Scholarship Award is given to a senior at each high school in the parish. This year, each senior will be given a $1,000 award.
The 2017 winners are Grace Rentrop of Ber-wick High School, DaJia Phillips of Central Catholic High School, Slade Saintes of Centerville High School, A’Lyrah Jones of Franklin High School, Meghan Baham of Hanson High School, Caylee Deshotel of Morgan City High School, Monica Barajas of Patterson High School, and Kennedy Abney of West St. Mary High School.
The Arts & Humanities Council Scholarship winners were Olivia Orlando and Maddi McGonagill of Berwick High and Chris Ibert of Hanson High.
Dr. Willie Smith, interim director, and Anthony Baham, campus dean, of South Central Louisiana Technical College accepted a $1,000 donation from the Chamber in recognition for the local community college efforts to keep up with the educational demand with the demands of the evolving workforce.
The banquet is also a fundraiser for the Chamber’s scholarship program. During the banquet, the Chamber hosted both a silent and live auction in which all proceeds went to the scholarship program. During the live auction alone, the Chamber raised over $2,500 with items for bids such as gift packages to hotels, various gift certificates to local restaurants and a 50-inch Vizio television.

Much of St. Mary Parish escaped Tropical Storm Cindy without the saturating downpours of rain initially predicted.

“We just kind of waited and watched, and ... it just never came. Thank goodness for that,” said Duval Arthur, parish emergency preparedness director.

Though the region did get periods of steady rainfall, it was much less than expected. Wind gusts didn’t get higher than 31 mph at Harry P. Williams Memorial Airport near Patterson.

“We were anticipating 3-foot storm surge, 3 to 5 inches of rain,” Arthur said.

St. Mary Parish had minimal damage and only tree branches that fell on power lines, but those lines were repaired quickly, he said.

Cypremort Point and Burns Point on St. Mary Parish’s coast did experience a fairly substantial amount of street flooding due to storm surge, Arthur said. But further inland, areas of the parish had few problems.

Areas further east of the storm were expected to get the most rain. Projections initially showed Houma could get up to 10 inches of rain from Cindy, he said.

“Anytime a storm is shown to be going in the direction that that one was going to go, it’s major concern for us, because of the angle, it would push a lot of water into our parish,” he said.

When officials first noticed the “very unorganized” system in the Caribbean off the Yucatan Peninsula, forecasters predicted it had the potential to develop into a storm, Arthur said.

In 2005, both hurricanes Ike and Rita brought tremendous amounts of rain due to their similar tracks as to the one initially projected for Tropical Storm Cindy.

The parish has many improvements to its levees since those hurricanes 12 years ago.