Karen Savage's blog

NCAA Division I football player Deven Hammond was born with only one kidney, but that never slowed him down — until he tried to play for the University of Southern Mississippi.

Baton Rouge, LA -- TigerSwan, the mercenary firm under fire in North Dakota for using counterterrorism tactics against water protectors opposing Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, has applied for a license to provide private security in Louisiana.

While the application process does not require the firm to indicate who they will be working for, Energy Transfer Partners spokesperson Alexis Daniel said the pipeline company anticipates work to begin on the Bayou Bridge pipeline in the third quarter of this year.

New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre is hundreds of miles from the Gulf Coast and it’s been seven years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and starting one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history.  
 
But Spill, a play written and directed by Leigh Fondakowski, makes it seem like only yesterday. The play opens in small-town Texas diner, during an interview with Shelley Anderson.

“Poor people don’t stand a chance down here.”
 
LaShandra, who did not want her last name used, was standing on her porch just off of St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans’ St. Roch neighborhood. A few blocks away, the tenth annual Katrina march and secondline, billed this year as the “biggest secondline ever,” wound its way from the site of the Ninth Ward levee breach to Hunter’s Field.
 
But LaShandra wanted no part of it.  Sure, she’d made it back to the city, but she saw little reason to celebrate.
 

(photo: Evans family home in the Turkey Creek neighborhood of Gulfport, MS, by Leah Mahan)

From now through the end of August, communities across the Gulf Coast will come together in order to commemorate ten years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Below are some of the scheduled events:

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21st - SATURDAY, AUGUST 22nd

For weeks, Adam Williams had been looking forward to his son’s first t-ball game of the season.  
 
So much so, that when he had what was the latest in a long string of seizure-like episodes before the game, no one was surprised that he still made it to the park in time for the first inning.  The seizure’s after-effects left his speech slurred and his brain foggy, but even that didn’t prevent the proud father from cheering on his son on an otherwise picture-perfect day on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
 

In a segment of MSNBC’s the Ed Show focused on the ongoing human health effects of BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster,  Ed read from what he referred to as “BP’s Public Health Fact Sheet”, which states,

“In toxicology there is a saying, 'Dose is everything, ’” explained Dr. Robert Cox, expert witness for BP.

Byron Encalade grew up on the East Bank of the Mississippi River in Southeast Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, raised on a farm on land where his father still lives. He longs for the days when a guy could put in an honest day’s work and still survive. “I really can’t explain how bad it is,” he said, looking across the desolate marina.
 

Originally Posted on Life Support Project. “My husband died of renal failure, my neighbor died of renal failure, my other neighbor behind me died of cancer. The lady over there, her granddaughter’s six months pregnant, and was just diagnosed with breast cancer. They live right here at the pit.”

We’re standing in the parking lot of the Marie K. Young Community Center in the Wedgewood community of Pensacola, Florida, a quiet African-American neighborhood.