Pray for New Orleans

If the worst happens, that city will be under twenty to thirty feet of water by the end of today.

Steve puts yet another facet on the news regarding how Katrina could effect your life.

Most people have never heard of Port Fourchon, but it is the nation's premiere oil and gas support services facility--and right now it lies within 12 miles of Hurricane Katrina's CAT-3 or CAT-4 bullseye. Over 600 platforms and 75% of the Gulf’s deepwater projects lie within a 40-mile radius of Port Fourchon. Unfortunately, Port Fourchon is a Louisiana island. An island that is connected to the mainland by a single two lane bridge...an old, single two lane bridge. This bridge is the only means of getting cargo and supplies to the Port. More than 1,000 cargo trucks go across this bridge each day, delivering materials to the Port for Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) drilling rigs. If there’s no bridge, there’re no drilling parts and supplies.

Do you see where this is going? When people say our infrastructure is vulnerable, they are not kidding—and not all of it is about terrorism.

The Port is crucial to our national security—for a number of other reasons. While the Persian Gulf provides around 23% of the U.S. oil supply, Port Fourchon supports the offloading of over 18% of all domestic oil and gas and 13% of all oil imports. Port Fourchon is the site of the enormous booster pumps that carry crude oil from the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) to underground salt dome storage areas in Galliano. The LOOP is the first and only offshore oil terminal operating in the United States. It's located less than 20 miles south of Port Fourchon in the Gulf of Mexico and allows the off-loading of oil from supertankers into special pipelines that connect directly to more than 30% of the nation’s refining capacity. The LOOP takes in about one million barrels of foreign oil and 300,000 barrels of domestic crude from Gulf of Mexico OCS each day. Loose that capacity and you've got big trouble.

Put another way, there is no other dot on the map that is more important to the nation’s energy supply, yet it’s connected to the mainland by an obsolete bridge and highway and it has a possible CAT-4 hurricane bearing down on it. It’s not a good situation and Port Fourchon authorities have been warning government officials about it for years.

Since the eco-freaks have been blocking the building of refineries in this country for the past three decades, I think it's only appropriate that we find an alternitive fuel source that works by burning hippies. The grease from their hair could last for months. Then we wouldn't be so dependant on a port in Louisiana.

Seriously folks, the biggest source of damage to this country right now is us. We're the ones allowing a group of brain-dead fuckwits to set our policy. We're the ones who allow feces-flinging monkeys to be in charge. And we're the one who has to live with the consequences. Since this government has bowed to the environmental groups extremist movements for decades, we are now in a position where one hurricane hitting one port in one state can screw our oil production and refinery capability straight to hell.

Gee, I hope it's worth it.