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WOMEN’S DAY
And Hat Rally at Zion Chapel AME Church, 1511 Cherry St., Patterson, 2 p.m. Sunday, May 28. Guest speaker Tamekia West. Theme: “Outfitted for Christ Celebration — Church Hats and Suits Fellowship.” Attire: women wear hats, and men suits and hats. Prizes awarded. Public invited.

Before Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida last September as the deadliest hurricane to strike the state since 1935, emergency managers across the nation turned to LSU. On a single day, LSU’s Coastal Emergency Risk Assessment website, or CERA, which maps storm surge and flood predictions, received three million internet requests as people tried to decide what to do and how to prepare. The demand got so high that it pushed CERA’s network connection to the limit.

“It’s a good problem to have, in a way, to have become such an essential resource that you’re pushed to the max,” said Carola Kaiser, CERA team leader at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT. “But it also became clear that we have to rise to the challenge of the growing demands on our systems since we always have to be able to provide first responders and decision-makers in Louisiana with the critical information they’ve come to rely on.”

With $250K in support from the state, CCT is now adding 10 times the current networking capacity for CERA, as well as extra power backups so the servers can keep working even if there’s a widespread outage, advanced cooling for the data center that houses the servers (again, despite a possible power outage), and up to two petabytes of additional data storage. All to ensure continuous and sustained operations.

“We need a lot of compute power to run our models and produce the results people see on the CERA website, and we must be able to offload and store that data quickly to get ready to run our models again,” Kaiser said.

Ahead of Hurricane Ian, CERA provided five separate track scenarios to the public and professional users, who have access to even more detailed information, in every U.S. state. New pro login requests arrived from the U.S. Coast Guard and Marine Corps, FEMA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security as well as others.

Before the storm had even reached Cuba, CERA predicted 10 feet of storm surge in the city of Fort Meyers, Florida, a prediction that was later confirmed by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, water gauges.

While CERA is LSU’s operational and public face of storm surge and flood modeling, university researchers are also advancing the underlying science that supports outputs like CERA.

Z. George Xue, associate professor in the LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences with a joint appointment in the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, recently developed a new and dynamically coupled two-way flood model based on historical data from Hurricane Florence in 2018, which caused a lot of compound flooding in the Cape Fear estuary in North Carolina. Compound flooding is when water combines from at least two different sources—in this case, storm surge from the ocean and rain, runoff and river flooding from the land. Xue was able to show 20-40 percent better accuracy than the current state-of-the-art, which is a one-way coupled model where the output of one (usually the river) is fed back into the other (usually the ocean), so the models run sequentially.

Comparison of water levels between observed, real data (red), stand‐alone flood modeling results (gray, an underestimate), linked modeling results (blue, an overestimate) and dynamically coupled modeling results using George Xue’s COAWST model (black) at a NOAA station in the Cape Fear estuary in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence in 2018.

“Our model is different,” Xue said. “We run both the ocean model and the river model in parallel to dynamically represent the exchange of water in the land-ocean interaction zone. The models talk on their boundary to continuously recreate the conditions of the compound flooding event, so there’s no set boundary condition.”

With initial support from United States Geological Survey, NOAA, and $200K from the Louisiana Legislature, Xue’s research group has become more competitive for computational grants related to floods and severe storms. Xue was recently awarded an additional $1.4 million from NASA and $343K—part of a larger project with the University of Florida—from the Office of Naval Research as part of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. The goal of these new projects is to put his team’s model, called Coupled-Ocean-Atmosphere-Wave-Sediment-Transport, or COAWST, to the test along the Gulf Coast: in Barataria Bay in Louisiana and in Galveston Bay and Port Aransas in Texas. He also plans to develop versions of the model for different parts of the Louisiana coast. His team will investigate what it would take to transform their research model into an operational model, where it could be used within the context of an active storm. As the LSU CERA team knows, this significantly raises the bar for performance.

“We don’t yet know the computational cost, how fast we can run our model, or what kind of resolution we can afford; these are big unknowns,” Xue said. “We can’t spend 10 days creating a high-accuracy forecast at the moment a hurricane is coming. But using the state funds, we’ll be able to test our model’s performance in different environments and locations in Louisiana to make it more useful.”

Xue will spend most of the money from the state to support his graduate students and a new research assistant professor at CCT, Zhengchen Zang, who was Xue’s first Ph.D. student in oceanography to graduate from LSU to then pursue a postdoc at Woods Hole, one of the world’s leading oceanographic institutions. Zang’s expertise lies in numerical modeling, primarily of sediment on Louisiana’s continental shelf, far out in the Gulf of Mexico, and further inland. He studies how hurricanes can greatly alter water depth, direction and speed by pushing sediment around and creating something called “fluid mud,” when lots of sediment gets suspended in the water and can begin to move like an underwater mudslide, with impacts on offshore energy infrastructure, such as rigs, wells and pipelines.

While Xue’s group relies entirely on NOAA data for their models and predictions, CERA relies on NOAA data combined with elevation data from Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, or CPRA, which has a contract with LSU, and input from CE Hydro, a local firm that helps CERA account for rainfall in the watersheds around Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans and east of Baton Rouge, to more accurately capture compound flooding in some of the state’s most populated areas.

Many of the decisions on how to act based on the increasingly detailed information shared by CERA are made by individual levee districts and floodgate operators, such as
Reggie Dupre, executive director of the Terrebonne Levee & Conservation District.

“In the last few years, LSU’s CERA has been an extremely valuable tool in assisting emergency managers in making critical decisions for emergencies due to hurricanes and tropical storms,” Dupre said. “CERA’s modeling information, sent to us by CPRA, not only predicts surges based on the National Hurricane Center’s predicted path, but also provides surge information based on a western, left, or eastern, right, shift in the landfall within the ‘cone of uncertainty.’ It provides us with surge modeling at several key locations along Louisiana’s coast.”

“One of these locations is the Houma Navigation Canal ‘Bubba Dove’ Floodgate in southern Terrebonne Parish,” Dupre continued. “In the past few years, we have verified CERA’s projections against the actual surge data at the Bubba Dove Floodgate. We have found that LSU’s CERA modeling, along with input from CPRA staff, is absolutely the most accurate and reliable information available to us.”

 
 
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BATON ROUGE—A House committee on crime advanced a bill 8-1 that would allow permit-less concealed carry for individuals 18 and older.

Rep. Danny McCormick, R-Oil City, brought what he said was a “constitutional carry” bill before the committee Tuesday. McCormick’s bill would amend present law that only allows concealed carry for 21 or older who undergo the proper training to receive a permit.

Rep. McCormick told the House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice that his bill, House Bill 131, would mimic current rules that allows individuals 18 and over to openly carry a firearm. His bill would allow individuals to carry a concealed weapon at the same age.

“So basically, what you’re doing with this bill is that you’re trying to get every law-abiding citizen in the state of Louisiana the same ability that every criminal does,” Rep. Raymond E. Garofalo Jr. R-Chalmette, said. “Every criminal right now can carry a concealed weapon with no permit, no training, no nothing.”

Kelby Seanor, the National Rifle Association state director for Louisiana, noted that 27 other states have similar laws in place to allow for permitless carry, including every state that Louisiana’s border touches.

Courtney Weaver, a member of the community, testified in opposition to the bill. Weaver, who was shot 13 years ago in the face and arm at point-blank distance and had 14 reconstructive surgeries as a result, said that the bill will only embolden dangerous individuals to have more access to firearms.

“I think someone who is properly trained with a firearm respects firearms more,” Weaver said about her concerns with lifting the training requirements.
Rep. Joseph A. Marino III, I-Gretna, said he was concerned with allowing individuals who might have had no background with guns to carry a gun without understanding how to use it safely.

“Personally, I’ve never seen anyone open carry that was doing it carelessly,” Rep. McCormick said in response. “I trust the people with the rights, and I think the Second Amendment gives us those rights.”

McCormick said he agrees that people who own guns should have training. But he said he does not believe that the current government-mandated training is near what you would need to carry.

“The rights and responsibility belong to the individual,” McCormick said.

The committee also passed two bills pertaining to allowing current law surrounding individuals convicted of felonies possessing firearms.

One of them, House Bill 464, proposed by Rep. Bryan Fontenot, R-Thibodaux, would extend the mandatory sentence for a felon charged with the crime of possessing a firearm from five years to 10 years, and it would require that the sentence be served consecutively.

The other, House Bill 284, written by Rep. Marino, would allow felons convicted of a simple possession crime involving a controlled substance to possess and carry a firearm after their sentence.

Present law states that individuals convicted of certain felonies, including possession of a controlled substance, cannot possess a gun for 10 years after their sentence and probation period are over.

“The law that we have right now lumps a whole lot of people together that should not be lumped together,” Marino said.

A coalition of conservative forces, ranging from the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry to the Louisiana Family Forum, is coming together to back a tax relief plan that calls for fully funding the Rainy Day Fund and paying down long-term retirement debt.

The members of the coalition, some of which met last week, are opposed to busting the state’s constitutionally created spending cap for the current fiscal year and the next.

They view this tax relief plan as a responsible alternative. 

The plan, which is expected to be released in more detail soon, doesn’t endorse any specific legislation or even a particular chamber’s ideology. 

The Senate and the administration of Gov. John Bel Edwards want to exceed the expenditure limit to spend $1.8 billion on roads, bridges, coastal work, a variety of infrastructure improvements, debt retirement payments and much more.

House conservatives, meanwhile, want to bank the money for the future.

Rather than busting the cap, the coalition plan offers three basic suggestions:

—Fill the Rainy Day Fund, which is the state’s savings account. 

—Pass a reasonable budget using money freed up from paying down retirement debt.

—Assign all available surplus dollars to one-time infrastructure needs. 

There’s a reason the business community likes this plan. Filling the Rainy Day Fund will trigger reductions in tax rates through a mechanism the Legislature created in 2021.

The corporate franchise rate, for example, would nearly vanish, dropping from 2.75% to 0.28%.

Personal income tax rates would decreases as well, but only minimally and nowhere as dramatically as the corporate rate adjustment.

The groups involved in this push so far include Americans for Prosperity, Associated Builders and Contractors, Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Louisiana Committee for a Conservative Majority, Louisiana Family Forum, National Federation of Independent Business and the Pelican Institute.

On the other side of the issue there’s the governor and Senate President Page Cortez, R-Lafayette, who’s sponsoring the legislation to spend the extra $1.8 billion. (An approving two-thirds vote is needed from both chambers, and the resolution has only made it past its initial hearing.) The Police Jury Association of Louisiana and the Louisiana Municipal Association, which represent our parish president and mayors, respectively, are supportive of lifting the spending cap as well.

With an adjournment of June 8 etched in stone, the regular legislative session is about to host a serious conversation about spending priorities — just in time for 2023 elections. 

The House-backed version of the budget cuts proposed pay increases for educators and reduces health care resources for our state’s poorest and weakest. The current version of the budget even leaves money on the table — the spending plan remains under the expenditure limit for the current fiscal year and the next by $544 million.  

That figure left many wondering why the House would oppose Edwards’ proposal to apply $52 million in state funding in the new budget for thousands of early education spots that will soon lose federal funding. 

While existing state funding for the Child Care Assistance Program is preserved in the House version of the budget, early childhood education boosters wanted the gains funded by the federal government to be preserved by Louisiana’s government. “That doesn’t change the fact that 16,000 families across the state are losing access to child care right now, and the $52 million that was in the previous version of the bill would have saved 4,000 of those seats,” said Dr. Libbie Sonnier, executive director of the
Louisiana Policy Institute for Children.

“We are hopeful the Legislature will find a way to restore that funding before the end of session.” 

The clock is certainly ticking, and the politics are intensifying. How else could early childhood education, a strong bipartisan issue in recent years, end up on the chopping block? In other states, early childhood education, as a policy issue, is treated as a moral imperative. In Louisiana, it gets lost in the politics and is allocated less than 1% of the state budget.

These are the kinds of realities facing lawmakers during the session’s final weeks. They’re also faced with extremes — either pass a budget that includes painful cuts and leaves money on the table or spend every penny, nickel and dime that’s in treasury.

Maybe there’s a happy space in the middle lawmakers can meet. If not, they may be doomed to repeat this exercise in a summertime special session.

For more Louisiana political news, visit www. LaPolitics.com or follow Alford on Twitter @ LaPoliticsNow.