The federal agency that overseas the offshore oil and gas industry has selected Lafayette as the location for one in a series of fact-finding forums on deepwater drilling safety reforms.

Input from the forums will be considered by Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEM) when recommending changes to the scope or duration of the drilling moratorium.

The forums kick off at 9 a.m. Wednesday at Tulane University in New Orleans. Other forums will be held in August in Alabama, Florida, California and Alaska. September forums are scheduled in Mississippi, Houston and Lafayette. Specific dates and locations have not been set.

“The idea is to talk about the technical issues we can do to make it safe to drill and things we really need to do to get our permits that we’re not getting,” said Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association.

On July 12, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the latest ban on deepwater drilling. The moratorium expires on Nov. 30 or earlier if Salazar decides that deepwater drilling can proceed safely.

The moratorium was prompted by the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, which killed 11 workers.

The rig sunk two days later and spewed hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, tainting beaches in every Gulf coast state. About two weeks ago, BP was finally able to cap the well head, stopping the flow of oil.

During the forums, experts from the academic community, oil and natural gas industry and environmental community are expected to brief Bromwich on technical issues regarding deepwater drilling and safety, well containment and oil spill response.

Local, state and federal leaders will be given the opportunity for input as well. The public is invited to attend and may submit comments on forms at the events, by mail or online.

Briggs said it is worth attending the forums.

“If we can do anything to move the needle a little bit, it’s worth going to,” he said.

About 11,000 people rallied in Lafayette last week protesting the drilling moratorium which already is costing jobs in the oil and gas industry, Briggs said.

The moratorium halts permits for deepwater drilling. But only four new permits for shallow water drilling were issued since May compared with 56 the prior three months, he said.

This de facto shallow water moratorium was caused when new federal regulations and guidelines were created with the moratorium, Briggs said.

“Nobody knows what they are, including the BOEM,” he said. “We’ve been trying to get permits for shallow water … In reality, we’re shut down everywhere.”

BOEM is part of the U.S. Department of Interior and was called the Minerals Management Service before it was restructured following the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Original Article

In the latest indicator of the current administration’s dedication to green technology, the White House endorsed a plan by Senate Democrats to spend $4.4 billion on natural-gas-powered vehicle technology, and another $400 million on electric vehicles.

The money will be used to offer rebates for compressed natural gas vehicles, and additional electric vehicle efforts.

During his candidacy in 2008, President Obama urged for 1 million plug-in hybrids to be on the road by 2015, and has backed a number of efforts to effectuate that vision.

The original bill only contained funding for the natural-gas program, but it was at the behest of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, that funding for electric vehicle technology was added. “Natural gas is a good short-term bridge,” Stabenow said in an interview. “When the initial bill had natural gas only, it was important to me to push to get the electric vehicle provisions in it.”

Though many details of the bill have been hashed out, it is not final and we could see a change in the split of funding between natural-gas and electric vehicle technologies. So far, the plan is to pay for the funding by increasing the per barrel fee by $.08, making the total fee $.49.

Original Article

NEW ORLEANS — Even when the oily sheen starts fading from the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, it manages to become bad news for fishermen.

Many of those whose fisheries were shut down by the oil spill have found work skimming the oil from the water through BP’s Vessels of Opportunity program. But as the crude sinks, evaporates or breaks down, they may be left with nothing to do but wait for their claim checks to arrive and for their fishing grounds to reopen.

No one knows how much longer BP plans to keep them working, and some fishermen, like Freddy Creppel, have been waiting for weeks to get a call.

“It was good work. I was making something,” said the Buras shrimper and fisherman, who joined the program and got 17 days of work using his boat to help guide workers to oiled birds stuck in the slick.

“I’m hurting pretty bad. I’m struggling,” the 37-year-old said. “Guess they’ll tell us sometime.”

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser said it’s clear the cleanup effort is being scaled back even though oil is still showing up on the coast.

He said his biggest fear is that BP and the federal government “are going to start pulling back. They say they are not but already they have canceled catering contracts, they’ve stopped production of boom at factories.”

The gusher set off by an April 20 oil-rig explosion spewed between 94 million gallons and 184 million gallons spewed into the Gulf before a temporary cap stopped the flow July 15. A permanent fix is expected to be weeks away.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s oil-spill response chief, said that once the oil is stopped for good, the cleanup effort may start ratcheting down. The work has involved 11 million feet of boom, 811 oil skimmers and 40,000 people.

Allen told reporters at least some boats may still be used in the program as the oil diminishes. He said authorities are looking at using some of the vessels to put out sensors to monitor oil as boom and response equipment is removed. He said they are trying to figure out the size of the force they need long-term.

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There were 1,584 Vessels of Opportunity in use as of Thursday, according to the Deepwater Horizon Unified Incident Command Web site. Thousands more vessels than that are under contract with the program, nearly 3,500 in Louisiana alone.

The vast majority of fishing grounds in the northern Gulf are closed because of the spill, though some in state waters have been reopened to recreational fishermen. Federal regulators have not said when fishing may open in federal waters, which span areas a few miles offshore.

Rusty Gaude, a fishery agent with the Louisiana Sea Grant, an extension of Louisiana State University, said it is likely commercial fishing in federal and state waters will reopen soon. He added that no oil contamination has been found in state and federal seafood samples.

Allen had what he called a frank and open discussion with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and coastal parish officials concerned that the Coast Guard and BP PLC will pull back from the spill response once the oil is stopped permanently.

“One of the things we absolutely wanted to get today was their commitment that they’re in it for the long-term,” added Jindal. “Look, all those (federal) people in the room, with no disrespect … they’re going to be rotated out to different jobs. Everybody here is still going to be here dealing with this oil whether it’s a year from now or years from now.”

Nungesser said reports that oil has been disappearing from the surface have been exaggerated.

“Yesterday there was a flight where no oil was seen. I don’t know how they took that flight, but they must have bobbed and weaved around the oil because in Plaquemines Parish there is oil all over,” he said.

Allen said federal, state and local officials will come up with a plan by next week for how to clean up any oil that might continue washing up on beaches and in wetlands.

Little of the oil remains on the water, but that doesn’t mean it has all vanished. Scientists are worried that much of it has been trapped below the surface after more than 770,000 gallons of chemical dispersant were used to break up the oil a mile deep. They have found evidence of massive clouds of oil suspended in the water.

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In Orange Beach, Ala., Jack Raborn said he didn’t see any tar balls when he went to the shore Wednesday with friends and family. But when they entered the ocean, he said, the water was tainted.

“It feels like you’ve got diesel fuel on you. It’s sticky,” said Raborn, 49. “I was optimistic before today. I’m really disturbed by what I found once we got in the water.”

A report by the National Resources Defense Council found oil still fouling beaches even after the gusher was capped July 15. Since the spill started, beaches from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle have been closed or slapped with health warnings more than 2,200 times, the council found.

Though the oil upended fishermen’s livelihoods, they found a lucrative substitute in Vessels of Opportunity. Oysterman Ronnie Kennair and his brother got $2,000 for each of the roughly 30 days they used their boat to help in the cleanup.

Kennair, of Empire, La., is hoping for more work, especially given the prospects for his normal job.

“I went and checked my oysters, actually, yesterday, and they’re 100 percent dead,” he said.

Fishing boat captain Duc Tran spent three months near the mouth of the Mississippi laying boom and fending off the spill, but he hasn’t been back out since Tropical Storm Bonnie forced ships off the water last week.

“We keep hearing they’re going to scale it back,” he said. On Thursday he could only lounge in a hammock on a friend’s boat, taking shelter from the steamy heat and waiting to see if there would be more work.

Even idled fishermen are getting checks from BP to compensate for work lost due to the spill, but that money has been slower to arrive than what they get for cleanup work.

Fourth-generation shrimper David Chauvin oversees his own three boats plus 22 others involved in Vessels of Opportunity. He said Thursday that he’s happy with the cleanup payments — they come every two weeks — but he’s still waiting for a check from BP compensating him for losses to his shut-down shrimp business.

Jefferson Parish Council member Chris Roberts, whose district includes coastal communities, said loss of the VO program will have “a dramatic effect” on local economies, especially while the BP claims process is still ramping up.

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Tony Jennings, harbormaster of Delta Marina in Empire, said that right now the oil cleanup industry is the only business he’s got.

“If they decide to shut that down, we would have to close the marina,” he said. “The economy hasn’t recovered enough to sustain us. Recreational fishers aren’t back either. It would be devastating.”

Barring a calamity, the oil won’t start flowing again before BP PLC can permanently kill the well.

A procedure intended to ease the job of plugging the blown-out well for good could start as early as the weekend, Allen said. The so-called static kill can begin when crews finish work drilling the relief well 50 miles offshore that is needed for a permanent fix.

Allen said crews would drop in casing for the relief well later Thursday, and that could speed up work on the static kill, though he did not say by how much. He previously said it would begin late Sunday or early Monday.

The static kill, which involves pumping heavy mud into the busted well from the top, is on track for completion some time next week. Then comes the bottom kill, where the relief well will be used to pump in mud and cement from the bottom; that process will take days or weeks, depending on the effectiveness of the static kill.

Allen also said there is now little chance that any of the spilled oil will reach the East Coast, and the odds will go to zero as the well is killed. The Coast Guard expects oil to keep showing up on Gulf Coast beaches four to six weeks after the well is killed.

Original Article

The governor and parish leaders met Thursday with BP and Thad Allen in what was described as an at-times contentious meeting over what will happen with the money, equipment and workers after BP’s ruptured well is permanently sealed.

“You know these parish presidents,” said Allen, a retired U.S. Coast Guard admiral, at a Thursday afternoon news conference.

“Nobody held anything back,” he said.

Allen called the two-hour meeting “refreshing and productive” and said a wide range of issues were discussed.

In the past few weeks, parish leaders have said they were concerned that BP and the federal government were already beginning to downsize the response effort in anticipation of the permanent sealing of the ruptured well.

Jefferson Parish President Steve Theriot said BP and Allen had never met with local leaders to find out their concerns.

“It took 101 days to get this meeting,” Theriot said Thursday in a telephone interview. “But at least it happened.”

The meeting was contentious, Theriot said, “because some of those frustrations were finally voiced.”

Theriot said he told Allen and BP’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles, who represented the company at the meeting, that he had two concerns: to ensure the parish retains or can acquire whatever equipment is needed should oil come ashore in the future; and whether there will be enough money in BP’s fund each year to cover the parish’s needs.

“We all recognize no one can say with any accuracy how much oil is still out there,” Theriot said. “It may be years that the oil affects our coastline in some form or fashion.”

While the oil stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico after a newly installed sealing cap was closed July 15, the cap is only a temporary fix.

The first step toward permanently sealing the well is expected to begin as soon as Sunday or Monday when BP starts a process called a static kill, or top kill, on the blown-out well, Allen said.

That process will be followed in about a week with a bottom kill, which will be accomplished through a relief well BP has been drilling almost since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers.

Once the top and bottom kills are completed, the well should be permanently sealed.

Allen has said, now that oil is no longer gushing into the water, that the intensive oil cleanup efforts should last about four to six more weeks — because that’s how long it took the oil to come ashore when the leak first started.

After that, he said, the response effort will end and equipment such as skimmers will no longer be needed.

Parish and state officials have argued they want more say in when and how the response effort is scaled back.

“Decisions on the response efforts should not be made from the top down by the Coast Guard and BP,” said Gov. Bobby Jindal, who attended the meeting.

Allen and Suttles apparently agreed.

“We agreed that, rather than responding to and rejecting a plan presented to the state and parishes, that it would be better for each parish to come up with their own plan,” Jindal said in a news release.

The governor said state officials will work with the coastal parishes to develop plans to be submitted Tuesday to BP and the Coast Guard.

Allen said that input “will help us develop a longer-term plan.”

Allen said they also discussed evacuating for storms, which turned into somewhat of a controversy when the Coast Guard tried to move equipment last week in preparation for Tropical Storm Bonnie.

In some cases, the Coast Guard planned to move some of the equipment hundreds of miles away, Theriot said.

“There was some suspicion, warranted or unwarranted, about whether those assets would be coming back after the storm,” he said.

Also, Theriot said, parish leaders were never consulted on where the equipment could be stored safely closer to home while the storm passed, which is something the locals know.

Allen said the Coast Guard agreed to review its hurricane evacuation plans.

He said the Coast Guard’s approach has been like an “on-and-off switch,” meaning the agency treated all evacuations as if a hurricane were coming even if the storm was much less severe — which was the case with Bonnie.

“I think we all agreed there … might be some intermediate or midlevel types of actions we can take that would not be as extreme in terms of where the equipment goes to make sure it was safely guarded but could be brought back to the scene quickly,” Allen said.

The group also discussed the Vessels of Opportunity program in which local fishermen and their crews put out of work by the oil leak were hired by BP to use their vessels for chores such as pulling skimmers and putting out boom.

Once the well is sealed, Allen said, there will still be work to do — including collecting the miles of boom put into the water to stop oil from coming ashore.

Nevertheless, Allen has said, there will be downsizing at some point.

The problem facing the vessel captains and their crews is whether the thousands of miles of state and federal fishing waters will be reopened by the time downsizing begins, Allen said.

If those areas are not reopened at that time, he said, it is unclear whether the captains and their crews would be eligible to file claims against BP.

“It’s a very, very complicated issue,” Allen said.

The group decided to come up with an employment plan for those in the Vessels of Opportunity that will be in effect until the end of August — when Ken Feinberg will be in place as head of the claims program started by BP, Allen said.

The government officials and BP also discussed funding mental health programs for “the workers and their families devastated by this spill,” Jindal said.

BP has not agreed to pay for such a program, but did say it will have an announcement regarding the issue next week.

It’s odd that the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the direct effects of which threaten Louisiana’s fragile coastline, may be the instrument that focuses our efforts on coastal restoration.

That’s the hope, anyway, after Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland visited our coastline and passed along President Barack Obama’s desire to go beyond the oil spill cleanup — to make the coast “whole.”

Environmental groups representing a range of interests and ideologies have published open letters setting out an agenda for coastal restoration, and not just in Louisiana. We hope the Obama administration’s commitment extends beyond the sound-bite stage and that Congress will embrace the steps set forth as well.

We’ve all become all too familiar with the problems confronting our coast. Since 1990, we’ve lost the equivalent of a football field every 38 minutes, according to the commonly cited statistics. That’s 24 square miles a year, or an area roughly three times the size of Opelousas or half the size of Lafayette.

When we lose land that way, we lose hurricane protection, tourism and recreational opportunities, nature’s filtering system, wildlife habitat and the hatcheries for many fish species. Worse than that, we squander the legacy entrusted to us on our children’s behalf.

Natural forces, such as hurricanes and land subsidence, have combined with man’s own attempts to reshape the coastline. We’ve built levees along the Mississippi River and prevented it from reinvigorating the Delta with new sediment. We’ve crisscrossed the coastal areas with canals and pipelines to serve the energy industry and other economic interests, too. And so we’ve allowed salt water into freshwater marsh areas. Plants die, roots release their hold on the soil, and erosion leaves expanses of open water where there was once marshland.

The plan pushed by the environmental groups includes a push for a diversion of Mississippi River water into the Delta, which has already been authorized but not funded by Congress, helpful as that might be on a morale level. It seeks to speed up payments of federal Outer Continental Shelf revenue sharing with coastal states and break the bureaucratic logjam that delays distribution of Coastal Impact Assistance funding for states.

It would dedicate a portion of the penalties paid by BP to coastal restoration. There would be a state-federal organization equipped and funded at a level adequate to move quickly, before more land is lost than we can help.

Finally, and this is the big one, the plan would establish a dedicated, reliable funding source for coastal restoration, in theory, anyway.

The Louisiana Legislature has endorsed restoration plans, but without funding. Congress had endorsed plans without actually doing anything to pay for them. Here’s a chance to bring all the plans together, coordinate them and turn them into reality. As Rahm Emanuel said in a different context, the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is a crisis we shouldn’t waste.

Original Article

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on remaking the entire offshore-drilling system, setting up a fight over how far the government should go in removing support for the industry and instituting new safeguards following the Gulf oil spill.

Democrats from outside of oil-producing states are pushing the legislation, the first chamber-wide response to the BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) oil spill. The disaster has damaged Gulf Coast tourism and fishing, and harmed wetlands and wildlife. But oil-state Democrats are breaking with their caucus to join Republicans in warning that response goes too far and will put independent oil and gas producers out of business.

“I’d like to support the bill, but I can’t do it,” said Rep. Gene Green (D., Texas). “It would stop most of our independents from being able to drill.” He said that “about 30″ Democrats are opposed.

The House Democratic caucus expects to have enough votes to pass the spill legislation even if 30 members break ranks. But the defections expose a divide within the party that could stall spill-response legislation in the U.S. Senate. Senate Democrats, who may vote next week on removing liability limits, do not have the 60 votes necessary to get around Republican procedural obstacles and must work with Republicans to pass legislation.

Eliminating the cap on damage claims that companies must pay for offshore oil spills is becoming a proxy for a broader fight about the role of government in offshore drilling. Democrats want to discard liability caps, currently set at $75 million, in order to avoid putting taxpayers on the hook for damages that go beyond the costs of cleanup. On Thursday, the White House called liability limits an “implicit subsidy” for the oil and gas industry, and said it “strongly supports” repealing the limit on economic damages claims.

But without a limit to liability, insurers have indicated that they will stop providing offshore-drilling insurance, leaving drilling to the major oil companies that are able to self-insure against disasters.

“Maybe this is a sector where you really need large companies who can bring to bear the expertise and who have the wherewithal to cover the expense if something goes wrong,” Carol Browner, special adviser to President Barack Obama on energy and climate change, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal a month ago.

Some key House Democrats say that the industry may have a point.

“Are the concerns of the small independents legitimate? Yes, I believe they are,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D., W.Va.) said. “And perhaps in the give and take that’s going on currently, we’ll find some middle ground there that will take into account their concerns.”

House Democrats are pushing to change every aspect of the offshore-drilling business, from the time a company bids on a lease to the point when it designs deepwater wells and puts safety equipment on drilling rigs. Companies with poor safety records would be banned from obtaining new leases or drilling permits, a measure that is expected to hit BP especially hard.

In order to obtain a lease or a permit, BP would have to certify that no more than 10 deaths had occurred at its facilities over the previous seven years as a result of violations. Eleven workers died when the rig BP was leasing exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April. BP has asked House leaders to soften the legislation, saying that its operations “contribute significantly” to domestic oil production.

Government-mandated safeguards, such as requiring blowout preventers to have two sets of shear rams, are also part of the legislation. Blowout preventers are supposed to shut off wells in the event of a catastrophic disaster, with the shear rams the last line of defense on the equipment. Shear rams are supposed to cut pipe and then seal off the well. But a 2004 study commissioned by the agency formerly known as the Minerals Management Service questioned whether shear rams were strong enough to cut through the thick pipes used in drilling. The joints that interconnect pipes create extra barriers.

Some drilling companies say that their rigs aren’t designed to accommodate a second set of shear rams. That raises questions about whether existing equipment could be overhauled or would become worthless.

The bill “would penalize every single well with blowout preventer standards that apply without regard to risk factors such as water depth, well depth, reservoir potential, well pressure or proximity to response equipment,” said Jim Noe, general counsel of rig company Hercules Offshore Inc. (HERO). “At some point, even the companies capable of satisfying all of the breathtaking new requirements will ask themselves, “am I willing to take this much exposure to the federal government?”

Original Article

Two crucial things to know about natural gas right now are that (1) a lot of people who live near it hate it and (2) a lot of people who live far away from it think it is the bridge to the New Energy future.

Natural gas can be used to generate electricity, to supply heat or as a transportation fuel. With the discovery of methods to obtain it from previously inaccessible shale deposits, it has become domestically abundant. And, because burning it creates roughly half the greenhouse gas emissions (GhGs) as burning coal and significantly fewer than burning oil, transitioning to it could mean replacing both the financial black hole of oil imports and the environmental degradations of coal mining with an energy source that would double the time the nation has to cope with the onslaught of global climate change.

In The Future Of Natural Gas; An Interdisciplinary MIT Study (Interim Report), scientists who previously studied the practicality of “clean” coal and “safe” nuclear as means to face the coming “carbon-constrained” world say that in the next forty years (to the middle of this century) natural gas may be the best choice there is and a “bridge” to a New Energy economy. This suggests three possibilities.

First, they may be right about the idea of using natural gas as a bridge. Or they may be underestimating what the New Energies are capable of right now. Or they may know what the New Energies are capable of but are choosing the inevitability of natural gas because they anticipated what the U.S. Senate is flagrantly displaying this week for all the world to see: U.S. fossil foolishness will only die hard, no matter how bad it is for the people of this great nation and this good earth.

click to enlarge

The paper’s “big picture” conclusions about natural gas:

(1) The new-found abundance of international natural gas supplies will drive much more extensive use, especially in electricity generation.

(2) The U.S. shale gas reserves will drive increased domestic use.

(3) The increasing pressure to reduce GhGs will force a longer-term reduction of naturl gas reliance unless the capture and sequestration of fossil fuel emissions miraculously becomes both technically feasible and price-competitive with the ever-renewable, emissions-free wind, solar, geothermal and hydrokinetic energies.

(4) The domestic and international natural gas markets are so volatile that things could change before this sentence ends.

One of the biggest reasons there is so much talk about natural gas as the bridge to a New Energy future is that the present New Energy supply and infrastructure is inadequate to take over from coal. This is quite ironic. If the nation had not dallied with the volatilities of natural gas and sharply cut back on the research, development and deployment of New Energy in the 1980s, it might now be ready to throw off its fossil foolhardiness for good.

Yet here are the big brains at MIT urging the nation to make a similar mistake yet again by turning to natural gas. It’s formulation is nuanced: Technological advance (of New Energy and Energy Efficiency, “safe” nuclear and “clean” coal) should not be crowded out while natural gas rises in demand but development of natural gas, especially the shale reserves, should not be impeded by over-investment in technological advance before the technologies are mature.

If there weren’t this small matter of global climate change, it might be fine to leave all this to the so-called invisible hand of the marketplace, though the invisibility of the oil & gas industries’ phantom lobbyists is probably not what Adam Smith had in mind when he coined the construction. Given the urgency of an all too rapidly rising global average temperature, it is patently obvious that all barriers to the development and implementation of New Energy and Energy Efficiency must be eliminated.

One of those barriers is wasting time on developing any Old Energy infrastructure. That includes the cleaner fossil fuel (and “clean” coal and “safe” nuclear). When there is enough solar energy in the Southwest and enough wind off the Atlantic coast to power the Eastern Seaboard, what is the point of building natural gas pipelines?

The use of compressed natural gas (CNG) as a heavy transport fuel may be the exception that proves the rule. Limiting its use to buses and trucks minimizes the need for a delivery infrastructure and maximizes its effectiveness as a replacement for oil. Especially as subsidized in the “no-energy” bill currently being considered by the Senate, there is merit in this limited application of the resource.

The MIT report did not take much notice CNG as a heavy transport fuel because the authors do not expect it to be a large part of the potential market. It is true that it will not be a large part of the market but it could be a significant part. Just as Boone Pickens.

MIT will deliver its full and final report on natural gas later this year but this interim paper could not be more timely

Original Article

The most popular place for lunch in Lafayette last Wednesday wasn’t a restaurant. It was the Cajundome, where 11,000 of my neighbors and I ended up for the big Rally for Economic Survival. I live only blocks away, so I thought I would stroll on over and talk to people about the experience and why they had given up their normal lunch trips for the event.

Things changed.

I’m a full-time staff photographer for The Daily Advertiser, and I was called to duty. Realizing I would have to work the rally from doors open to close, I wasn’t sure if I could squeeze in time to do this new column’s mission — capturing the mid-day sights and sounds at various locations in the parish.

I weaved among the throngs of people taking photos as they shuffled in and up into the seats. Some were in groups wearing T-shirts that said everything from “Drill, Baby, Drill” to the more tame, but to-the-point, “Let Us Work.”

Dozens of children attempted to keep warm in the chill of the ’dome by huddling in their seats with their knees tucked into the free, one-size-fits-all rally T-shirts that were handed out at the door.

I also I kept my eyes peeled for what was being served at the concession stands and chatted with Billie Goodman, an Artisan Creative Catering employee who was dishing out bowls of steamy chicken and sausage jambalaya.

She told me the Southern dish was extremely popular. The continuous lines of people at the jambalaya booths confirmed she knew what she was talking about, but I was still left wondering, “Why is there no seafood at this rally?”

I half-expected to see Gulf shrimp and oyster po’boys or at least shrimp in the jambalaya. You know, in support of the Gulf seafood industry.

I caught Greg Davis, director of the Cajundome, out in the lobby during the noon hour, and asked him, straight up, “Why aren’t you all serving seafood?”

“We wanted to come up with something that was easy to turn over because we expected a lot of people,” he said. “Our chef came up with the chicken and sausage jambalaya.” Nachos, hot dogs and other concession staples were also available. I thanked him for his time and just before he walked away, he turned back, cupped his hand around his mouth and half-jokingly whispered, “Chicken’s also cheaper.”

Goodman also told me they usually only sell seafood during the Lenten season. Since I’ve also worked in the food service industry, I understand the importance of keeping costs down and the menus consistent.

Louisiana seafood didn’t go unrepresented at the rally, however. There was a Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board booth out in the lobby, and rally-goers stopped by for books, pamphlets, stickers and to make donations.

As the rally moved into the noon hour, I had a little more free time, so I walked outside to check on the influx of people I expected to see stopping by the rally. No luck there. More people were leaving than coming in. By that time, the rally was nearly over, and I suppose even a free Sammy Kershaw concert couldn’t draw more people away from their sacred hour of rushing to the post office, quick workouts, power naps and fast food.

Which brings me to the future of this column. Where do you spend your lunch hour? I’m not looking to write about the obvious, so restaurants are out for this space. But if you go somewhere interesting or unique for your lunch break, I want to know. E-mail suggestions or stories to lwestbrook@theadvertiser.com

Original Article