Summer Story... pt. 1

While in class today, I thought of an idea for my blogs. This summer, I was hired as a junior geologist for a company called Highland Geo Solutions, which is based out of Fredericton. Though I had anticipated on working in Fredericton for the summer doing sedimentary work on various local rivers, a week into the job my boss informed me that he had landed a contract with a company in Louisiana and that my collegue and I were going to be working in the south for the remainder of the summer. At the time, I was unsure of what was going to happen or what type of work we were going to be doing. It turned out that the company I was working for was called C & C Survey Technologies, a rather large Geophysical and Marine Survey company based out of Lafayette, La. There are several divisions in the company. I was working in the NOAA division. A few months before I arrived in Louisiana, C & C and NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) signed a contract for a continental shelf survey project of which I worked on all summer. The contract was worth upwards of 100 million dollars, and as the summer progressed, I became more aware of how important the work we were doing actually was to many groups of people. Basically, we had several mapped blocks of water that were within 500m-20km away from continental United States and Mexico, and we were performing both a Side Scan Sonar survey, as well as a multibeam survey. The port of Fourchon, which is located almost directly south of New Orleans on the Gulf Coast, is one of the largest and most trafficked ports in the Gulf. Directly south of Fourchon is one of the most congested areas of the gulf with the extremely high frequency of traffic as well as hundreds to thousands of oil rigs and satellite gas platforms (I remember one morning I went on the top deck and counted 110 platforms/rigs that I could see within view of our boat). When Hurricane Katrina ran its course towards New Orleans, many of these platforms and rigs were damaged. Since the petroleum companies were aware of the impending storm, all of the platforms and rigs were turned off and evacuated, however many of them were damaged and there was debris that had sunk to the bottom and was proving to be hazard to boats going in and out of Fourchon. As well, the water within a few km was very shallow (usually between 20-35m), so if there were pipes or other material on the ocean floor, it was very possible for the boats to be struck. Anyway, my idea for my blog was to divide the many different parts of my summer, as well as what I learned while living on the boat, and write several blogs detailing several individual topics. I think that it will be a good way for me to write down my memories from the summer, as well as allow readers to gain an understanding of what life is like on a boat, and how different technologies are advancing in the field of oceanography and marine survey. As well, I think it is important for people to understand how greatly the people of Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, etc, were affected by the storm. The one thing I learned this summer that I find the most valuable is how ineffective CNN is at depicting events such as the Katrina disaster, Hurricane Rita, etc. Perhaps it isn't that CNN is no effective, but that we as a society as so used to watching television that it almost as if we watch the events occur on the screen, but since we are not there to experience them, it does not really hit home. I was able to meet many people that lost their home, every belonging that they had to their name, and were only left with their wives and children and the hope that one day things would be alright. (The picture at the top is in Cameron, a port town just south of Lake Charles and about a 45 min drive from the Texas/Louisiana border)