Weekly News Summary For June 11-17, 2007:
On the day of the official start of hurricane season, Capt. Lincoln Stroh assumed command of Coast Guard Sector New Orleans from Capt. Frank Paskewich. He will head a command that has grown from 300 to 700 personnel in just two years.
His responsibilities will include one of the busiest sectors in the Eighth Coast Guard District, which has almost 4,000 miles of coastline and 12,000 miles of navigable waterways, an area in which the Coast Guard logs about 800 search and rescue cases annually and has four of the 15 largest ports in the nation, in terms of tonnage, said Rear Adm. Joel Whitehead, district commander.
Capt. Stroh comes from Corpus Christi, where he was deputy sector commander. An engineer, he has two master’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in naval architecture and polymers.
But Capt. Stroh’s toughest assignment may be to fill the shoes of Capt. Paskewich, who retired after the change of command and 30 years in the Coast Guard.
Gen. Andrew Jackson was the hero of first Battle of New Orleans, beating back the British in January, 1815, and preserving the fledgling nation’s victory in what has become called the War of 1812. Capt. Paskewich would become the hero of the second Battle of New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina, in late August and early September of 2005….
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, AEP River Operations scrambled to restore its fleet at Convent, La., located midway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Boat crews, their lives in disarray, had scattered. The area had been decimated.
“Our ability to do business in the Greater New Orleans area drastically changed as a result of Katrina,” said Mark Knoy, president, speaking at the dedication of the company’s new multi-million dollar operations center and housing facility at Convent, May 9.
Instead of cutting his losses and starting new somewhere else, like so many other businesses, Knoy decided to “come back even stronger.” Fourteen months ago he gathered his fellow managers at AEP River Operations and hatched the idea of making Convent a center for the company’s Gulf operations, a turning point for its line boats with quarters for the crews.
“Not only was valuable infrastructure lost (after Katrina), but the ability of our local vendors to crew their vessels was lost as well,” Knoy said. “The displacement of a significant portion of the workers in this region caused an extreme labor shortage.
“We realized it was time to control our destiny and the safety of our crews, our operations and our customers,” he continued. “We needed harbor boats, (which) needed crews, (who) needed somewhere to hang their hats when off watch. And, since we knew we were going to have to recruit from a 300-mile radius around Convent, we needed to provide housing.”…
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers have issued for their field offices joint guidance designed to ensure that America’s wetlands and other water bodies are protected under the Clean Water Act (CWA).
“We are committed to protecting America’s aquatic resources under the Clean Water Act and in accordance with the recent Supreme Court decision,” said John Paul Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army (civil works). “This interagency guidance will enable the agencies to make clear, consistent, and predictable jurisdictional determinations.”
The court decision in Rapanos v. United States and Carabell v. United States dealt with the scope of the agencies’ jurisdiction under the CWA. The EPA and Corps said the guidance supports a regulatory program that ensures no net loss of wetlands, one of three key elements in the Bush administration wetlands policy. The other two elements include a program that would restore, enhance and protect 3 million acres of wetlands by 2009 and a commitment to conserve isolated wetlands.
The new guidance was immediately criticized by Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Oberstar said the guidance “doesn’t clear up the uncertainty that resulted from several bewildering Supreme Court decisions.” The congressman said that instead of clarifying the government’s authority to protect the nation’s waters, the guidance “formalizes the complexity and delays associated with the permit review process. If anything, it creates even more confusion by potentially relying on two different standards, which could lead to two different results.”…
Seven mariners have been prosecuted recently by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, according to a press release. Coast Guard offices in New Orleans and Morgan City initiated six of the prosecutions.
The six were charged with operating vessels on fraudulent licenses. The seventh, a pilot for the New Orleans-Baton Rouge Steamship Pilots Association (NOBRA) was prosecuted for failing to file federal income taxes.
U.S. Attorney Jim Letten said Michael Nance, 45, of Belle Chasse, La., was sentenced by federal District Judge Sarah S. Vance to 21 months imprisonment for failure to file federal income tax returns.
In addition, Judge Vance imposed one year of supervised release following the prison term. Nance pleaded guilty. The case was investigated by special agents of the Internal Revenue Service.
Three mariners pleaded guilty to license violations….
A lack of state funding and a shortage of space have breakbulk and container customers at the Port of New Orleans seeing red.
Conrad Appel, chairman of the Board of Commissioners at the Port of New Orleans, agreed that limited funding from the state of Louisiana has been causing problems with terminal space and that facilities are run down.
New facilities would cost in the neighborhood of $75 to $100 million, but the port has not had any luck getting it from the state.
“The state has not been a friend to us, and in turn we have not been a good friend to customers,” Appel was quoted in the New Orleans Times Picayune.
In the past 20 years, the Port of New Orleans has spent about $474 million on construction projects, 75 percent of which was generated through port revenue and the rest through state funds.
Meanwhile, Texas and Alabama have spent more than half a billion each in just the past few years to build container terminals at their leading ports….
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