Tuesday, June 7
June 7, 2011
Economic life of LA1 businesses in limbo
June 9, 2011Lafourche Parish Government banned the sale and use of fireworks through the Fourth of July, a cautious decision prompted by a record-level drought in southeastern Louisiana.
Last month, Lafourche enacted a burn ban, and the state followed with a ban of all non-agricultural fires last week. On Monday, LPG ended the legal sale of fireworks for one of the industry’s two seasons due to the concern of the illuminations potentially sparking a fire.
“We understand the seasonal nature of the fireworks business, and therefore, we wanted to issue the ban as soon as possible recognizing the probability of these conditions continuing through the holiday,” Parish President Charlotte Randolph said.
The parish’s fire chiefs requested the ban on fireworks, Randolph said. It is currently scheduled to run through Independence Day, and it won’t be lifted unless the parish gets “an awful amount of rain,” she said.
The sale and use of fireworks in St. Mary and Terrebonne parishes is illegal.
In Galliano, only 0.45 inches of rainfall have been recorded since April 1, according to the National Weather Service, making it the driest period ever recorded over that timeframe. Historically, Galliano averages 10.5 inches of rain from April 1 to June 5, the NWS said.
The second-driest year during that period was in 2001, when the Galliano gauge recorded 1.35 inches, almost a full inch more than the 2011 total.
Bob Wagner, a forecaster at the NWS Slidell office, said he doesn’t expect “widespread relief” from the drought this week.
“Any relief from those is probably going to be localized to small areas,” Wagner said. “To say that Houma is definitely going to break the drought or New Orleans is definitely going to break it, we can’t see that far out. We can just say some areas will get some relief but defining those areas is difficult.”
Tri-parish natives accustomed to afternoon thunderstorms can expect to see the usual scatter of summer rain in the coming weeks, Wagner said, but that doesn’t equate to the offset of “unseasonably dry” conditions.
“[The drought] could conceivably be going on past this week,” he said. “We’re not seeing any real long-range changes in the pattern that would put us into a wet regime.”
Aside from inhibiting the business of firework stands and provoking a burn ban, the drought does have a positive impact, the parish president said.
“It’s helped us in that we’ve been able to really move fast track on a lot of projects,” Randolph said. “We haven’t been delayed by weather. We’ve gotten some levees built and things like that.”
