Oil Spill Cake

posted at 8:21 pm on June 3, 2010 by Laura Curtis

One of the reasons I love living in New Orleans is that this town has a very well developed sense of humor.  As the 1991 Governor’s election approached, cars started sporting bumper stickers that read, “Vote for the crook.  It’s important.”  In the days following Hurricane Katrina, we took comfort in reading a local news website where comments included fishing reports on Claiborne, Esplanade, and Canal Street, with high tide, low tide, and recommended bait.   The Chocolateville song. And a Christmas village in 2005 at a local mall included blue roofs, debris, and a helicopter rescue.

In the headlines post, Buzz grows: Is it time to nuke the oil leak? jake-the-goose made this comment:

I was down in New Orleans yesterday – the fear and anxiety down there is off the charts on this whole subject. For any of us living across the U.S. – unless you are down there – you simply cannot imagine the state of fear that exists.

Wetlands will literally sink under this oil attack – and that will lead to unimaginable consequences.

The fear is unreal – you have to be there to appreciate it.

jake-the-goose on June 3, 2010 at 9:49 AM

And that’s true.  There is no part of our local economy which will go unaffected by this oil spill.  It’s hard to imagine, looking at the current circumstances, that this isn’t going to take a decade or more to get over.  And it’s going to have serious effects nationally.  Louisiana is the second largest fishery in the country.  Louisiana supplies 80% of the United States offshore oil production – and unlike other energy producing states, we do not receive 50% of federal royalties for that.  We’ve just undergone a battle royale to get to 37.5%, and even that doesn’t start until 2017.   Oil companies have dredged over 10,000 miles of canals in our wetlands over the years, causing a great deal of damage and making us more vulnerable to hurricanes.  We lose about a football field’s worth of wetlands every 45 minutes.

The upside to this unpleasant situation is that we at least had jobs, not just working on the rigs, but in all the support industries.  Now we stand to lose that too, with the upcoming shutdown of at least 33 deep water rigs, and rumors of closures of even rigs closer in to shore.  It’s going to absolutely devastate our economy.  So yes, people are worried and scared.  But we haven’t lost our sense of humor.  Breaux Mart has a new product in the bakery:

That’s New Orleans for you.

And related – this isn’t from New Orleans, but a whole lot of us here found it amusing; it’s been making the email rounds:

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