Hello and Welcome on Sagaplanet.com,

This site will help you discover the regions of the world, their history, and their nature through women and men who created it. You'll discover people who fought for projects, ideas: they built cities, universities, and institutions. They are Presidents, directors, artists, inventors ... Their paths may sometimes be subject to controversy, but they managed to build the unimaginable.

Louisiana, whose inherent wealth is linked to its culture and to the development of jazz, is once again the site of grave affliction. Hurricane Katrina devastated whole neighborhoods in New Orleans. Poor districts whose population in crisis had no time to flee to avoid the worst of the devastation were left wide open and vulnerable for the whole world to see.

Louisiana has taken another blow. This time, man is directly to blame. What’s worse, this is an entirely capitalistic enterprise. Millions of barrels of oil are pouring into the bayous, bogging down flora and fauna. The wings of the  pelican, a symbol of the region, are glued clumsily to its body. The bird can hardly breathe under a layer of crude oil.

Entire swaths of the local economy will be devastated. Fishing and shrimping, tourism…again, the inhabitants of Louisiana will have to start over from scratch.

20,000 people are desperately working to try to contain this oil spill. 17,500 national guard troops are working on the clean up of the coasts and 1,900 boats have been dispatched to help. This is the largest assistance effort ever sent by the United States to address an ecological disaster.

The spill has already cost BP a billion dollars, and the company has only barely begun to pay the American government’s bills.

Of course, one can calculate the millions of dollars in economic costs. But what about prevention measures?  What about putting into place better security measures on oil drilling platforms? What about placing bans on drilling too close to the coastline? How is it that so many platforms have been allowed so close to shore?

And what’s more, this is hardly the first major oil spill. Human beings have an awfully hard time remembering the consequences of their errors. What a pity.

Let this not be a reason to cease our travels. Let’s continue to discover the world and to protect our planet’s treasures.

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