The city just keeps racking up the awards from travelers.   New Orleans is not just a hot spot for vacations, as it’s now been named “Best Day Trip” destination in a new poll as readers chose New Orleans as the top weekend getaway.

Kelly Schultz with the New Orleans Convention and Visitor’s Bureau says marketing for the city is working and “the experience of visiting New Orleans is better than it’s ever been before.”

And if you are a local looking for the best day trip around, you don’t have to look any farther than your own backyard. New Orleans offers many historic neighborhoods, a huge variety of music venues, some of the best cuisine in the country and weekend festivals throughout the year. Schulz says “maybe taking a riverboat tour, riding on the streetcar or getting some of our famous dishes like gumbo…Things that you can only get as good as they are in New Orleans. That’s what I recommend as a start.”

This award is from Festival South’s Signature Magazine and their reader’s poll ‘2011 Best of the Pine Belt’.

But that’s just one award that the city has earned in the past week or so. Travel and Leisure readers now rank the city as the #6 destination in the U.S. and Canada, up from #7 last year. AAA South readers also named New Orleans ‘Best Weekend Getaway’ and ‘Best Guys and Girls Getaway’.

Schulz says 2010 set a record for visitors and 2011 has the potential to be another record breaker.

From WWL

Standing atop the parapet of the new 26-foot-high surge barrier overlooking Lake Borgne, it’s easy to understand the record-shattering accomplishments of the Army Corps of Engineers that will provide “100-year” protection to New Orleans area parishes on the southern side of Lake Pontchartrain in time for the 2011 hurricane season.

The 1.8-mile-long castle-toothed wall sits atop a row of 66-inch-wide, 144-foot-deep concrete columns that are strengthened by 250-foot-long pilings driven diagonally at a 40-degree angle.

The $1.1 billion structure is designed to block the crashing arrival of hurricane surge water and waves from the Gulf of Mexico through Lake Borgne that would otherwise stab two miles west through the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Industrial Canal into the heart of New Orleans.

The barrier runs from a new 32-foot-high combination T-wall and earthen levee in St. Bernard Parish, cuts across the now-abandoned Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet navigation channel, and then runs across the Golden Triangle wetlands patch to another combination T-wall and levee in eastern New Orleans. “We’ve been able to pull (the levee system) from people’s back yards,” corps New Orleans District commander Col. Ed Fleming said.

As amazing as that accomplishment is, it doesn’t mean residents living behind the new system are not at risk from hurricanes, emergency preparedness officials warn.

“If we have a Category 3 or higher storm with a high probability of the area getting hit, we are going to order a mandatory evacuation because of the risk involved with a storm of that magnitude,” said Lt. Col. Jerry Sneed, New Orleans deputy mayor for public safety.

Continue at the TP

The New Orleans area added 4,500 jobs in April as several industry sectors, most notably construction, health services and hospitality hired furiously, according to data released Friday by the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

t was the fourth straight month of job gains for the seven-parish metro area, which added more jobs than each of Louisiana’s seven other metro areas in April.

“In New Orleans, the employment has been so steady month-to-month and over the year,” said Patty Lopez Granier, a research analyst for the commission. “Once again, New Orleans led all (metropolitan areas).”

The largest month-to-month job gains were in the leisure and hospitality and education and health services sectors, which added 1,500 and 1,000 jobs, respectively. Most of the additional hospitality jobs were in hotels and restaurants, while the health services job gains were concentrated in physicians offices and home health care operations.

Additionally, the construction sector added 700 jobs in the month, largely in the specialty trades like plumbing and pipe fitting, Granier said.

“All of that is good, strong private sector job growth,” Granier said.

Continue at the TP

NEW ORLEANS — When the Morganza spillway was opened on May 14, diverting an enormous volume of Mississippi River water to reduce pressure on levees downstream, the thousands of people living in the Atchafalaya River Basin were bracing for the worst.

Flood-estimate maps showed water reaching depths of up to 20 feet and pooling out into every part of the floodway within eight days.

A week and a half later, those maps appear to have been a bit pessimistic. The water has taken an unexpected trajectory as it moves out into the floodway, and some areas will probably be spared significant flooding. The flooding has also moved more slowly than anticipated, forcing local officials to recalibrate by the day.

Mandatory evacuation orders have been lifted and then reinstated in some areas, and lifted altogether in others. At least one shelter has closed for lack of evacuees.

The promising outlook does not mean that all is clear. The water is rising, if slowly, and in some places is spreading over roads and moving toward homes. Backwater flooding, which occurs when tributaries, bayous and small bodies of water overflow, is a concern throughout the basin, and there is still an enormous amount of water that must funnel out into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Morgan City and the other communities at the basin’s spout.

A barge that was sunk in a bayou just outside of Morgan City in an effort to protect populated areas from an influx of backwater appears to be working for the most part, said Bill Pecoraro, a member of the Morgan City port commission.

But the crest of the flood is not expected to reach Morgan City until Monday, and water will stay high for some time. It remains to be seen how well the barge, a temporary fix, will hold up over several weeks, Mr. Pecoraro said.

He added, however, that it appeared the flooding would not be as significant as some had feared. “It looks like it’s going to be anticlimactic,” he said.

It is too early to tell with any certainty why the flood projections in south Louisiana have diverged with reality, officials said.

“There’s probably not going to be one definitive answer to that,” said Jeff Graschel, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service.

Continue at NYT

The levees and spillways have held back most of this year’s floods – but how should they be adapted for an eroding coastline and a changing climate?

IT IS being called a spectacular success – but also a lost opportunity. With floodwaters rising to record levels along the Lower Mississippi river, the system of levees and spillways that protect the low-lying cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans faced an unprecedented test.

In terms of protecting human life and preventing catastrophic property damage, the defences have so far done an admirable job. “The system was designed in the 1920s,” says Mike Petersen, a spokesman for the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for its management. “We owe credit to those engineers now.”

But that is not the whole story. The diverted water making its way to the Gulf of Mexico carries with it a massive quantity of sediment, which the region’s eroded coastal marshes badly need. Coastal restoration should be added to the existing priorities of navigation and flood defence, says Natalie Snider, science director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a non-profit group based in Baton Rouge. It’s the missing “third leg of the stool”. Snider is one of many specialists in ecological restoration calling for re-engineering of the Lower Mississippi.

Since 1928, under the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, the Corps of Engineers has been building levees, floodways to divert excess flow, weirs and revetments to constrain the wandering Lower Mississippi. But for all its strengths, the system has interrupted the natural deposition of sediment that sustained the coastal marshes south of New Orleans. They are now receding at an alarming rate, undermining the city’s protection against the storm surges that threaten its survival each hurricane season.

With climate change threatening to increase river flows, New Scientist looks at the arguments for re-engineering the system.

Continue at New Scientist

New Orleans residents can track crime near their homes using the NOPD’s new crime map, which allows users to plug in an address to see crime within a two-mile radius.

The crime map, which was announced Tuesday, can be found on the department’s website:www.nola.gov/government/nopd. The crime map section is in the middle of the page.

The NOPD’s crime map historically has been an inconsistent resource, typically posting crimes after a delay of at least several days and sometimes longer.

The new system will be updated automatically every 24 hours at 4 a.m., said Remi Braden, an NOPD spokeswoman. The program used by the department is called Omega Crime View, bought with money from the city and the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation.

Continue at the TP

STEPHENSVILLE, La., May 17 (Reuters) – For the Cajun folk who have for generations lived a stone’s throw from Louisiana’s swamps and bayous, resiliency is a thing borne in the blood.

The people of this disaster-prone state on the U.S. Gulf Coast have faced it all — devastating floods and hurricanes that drown cities, backwater swamps and everything in between.

Now the Atchafalaya River is rising again, threatening to submerge everything in its path: houses, docks and farmlands.

Yet the Cajun people love their homes, the lush trees, fertile crops, even the snakes that occasionally show up in the kitchen after a heavy rain.

On Saturday the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened a major spillway to divert Mississippi River floodwaters into the Atchafalaya River basin to protect the state’s two largest cities from catastrophic flooding.

The move to protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge came at the expense of more rural haunts like Stephensville, about 46 miles south of Baton Rouge, where a tiny elementary school has a bayou in back and the Atchafalaya River levee in front.

“When you have a swamp at your back door and the Atchafalaya levee at your front door, you really are between a rock and a hard place,” said Dan Rawls, principal of Stephensville Elementary School, just north of Morgan City.

And that’s the dilemma facing many who live in the basin. While levees along the Atchafalaya River are expected to hold, water in tributaries and bayous like the waterway behind the Stephensville school can’t flow into the larger swollen river, causing “backwater” flooding.

But rather than give up, school staff, disaster response crews and the National Guard spent the last two weeks building a dirt levee behind the school.

Rawls, sweaty and red-faced, said he expects the school to flood, but hopes to mitigate the damage.

“We have no guarantees, just prepare the hardest you can and the best you can,” he said. “We were identified as one of the first sites to go under. At least we had two weeks — people hit by tornadoes might not even have a few minutes.”

Continue at Reuters

Mike Sims heads in from the family fishing camp with furniture as he prepares for the onslaught of water from the Morganza Floodway in Butte LaRose Wednesday May 11, 2011. If the floodway is opened, the small community can expect water ranging from 5 to 25 feet according to the Army Corp. (Times-Picayune photo by David Grunfeld)

From TP photo essay on flooding of the Mississipi