Infrastructure

Okwata Meant Wide Water. Louisiana Has Spent a Century Engineering an Estuary It Calls a Lake.

Before it was Pontchartrain, the water north of Nola was Okwata, the Choctaw word for wide water. The name described an estuary, not a lake. A century of engineering the basin as if it were a contained freshwater lake is now colliding with a dissolving coast and more frequent spillway releases.

Sep 22, 2026 5 min read

Local Government

What Is a Servitude? Eight of Them Reached the New Orleans Council Agenda at Once

At the August 20 Council meeting, eight ordinances turned on a single word: servitude. Pulled from the agreements themselves, here is what each one lets a private owner keep over public space, what it costs, and why the City has to approve it at all.

Infrastructure

Who Loses Power the Longest

Gary and Puerto Rico are 2,000 miles apart. Their grids fail along the same fault line: poverty.

Energy

Louisiana Is a Finalist to Host a Federal Nuclear Campus. One Idea on the Table: Storing Waste Under the Gulf.

Louisiana is one of five finalists for a federal Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campus, and its application floats storing radioactive waste in offshore salt domes near Port Fourchon. The concept is on paper. The locations, the landowners, and the state's own application are not

Investigations

A Plain-Language Guide to the New Orleans City Council Sewerage and Water Board Overhaul

For the first time in roughly 130 years, elected officials you can vote for, not the state legislature, will oversee New Orleans' water, sewer, and drainage. Here is what changes, measure by measure, plus one open question about how the plan was drafted.

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