Tab's Comments - Re-Entry

We did have a lot of widespread tree damage, and in particular, Entergy is telling us more poles have fallen than in Hurricane Katrina. And that’s due to the wet soil and rain that lead up to Hurricane Gustav.

Right now we are monitoring the water levels very carefully. They are coming up, but it’s one of those things we think cannot sustain itself, because we’re looking at tide gauges in the lower Barataria Basin, and we’re just not seeing numbers to support a surge higher than we’re already experiencing.

We’re asking citizens to be patient with us. It’s not the perfect scenario. The tropics are still very active right now; there’s a number of different systems we’re tracking and monitoring, and we’re going to be real busy in the next couple of weeks. There’ll be a lot of sleepless nights.

We’re gonna get through this thing. We’ve been here before. There’s been a lot of good cooperation between all the governmental agencies.

We look forward to getting our residents back in and getting the recovery underway.

Medical services are better than what we had post-Katrina. In Katrina we did have to evacuate the hospital, this time we made the decision not to evacuate the hospital. So we do have medical services as far as emergency medical. But we don’t have our normal networks of clinics and outpatient services. That’s just not available.

Power just drives a lot of things at this point.

But a lot of our major industries want to get back up and operating.

Most of the refining facilities are at complete shutdown, and they’re making preparations to get going again. But right now as of this press conference, I don’t know of any facilities that are operating.

Schools are closed through Friday… What the superintendent and the school board members don’t want to do is say school is closed for the next two weeks and then have things come along and we’re able to go back earlier. They’re going to assess over the weekend and if they need to closed school for additional days, that’s what they’ll do.

There are about nine power lines down in front of IMTT on our East Bank, on Paul Maillard Road there are lines down. That’s a difficult thing, and because some of the lines are charged, it’s a very dangerous situation. So you’ve got to be careful.

This Sheriff’s made it very clear, this is not an ideal situation, but it’s a balancing act between people’s property rights and getting things up and going again.