By: Trevor Boyce
Today we began our day at 0745 with a brief breakfast at Tulane before we hit the road towards LSU. We had 3 pit stops in Baton Rouge.
The first stop was the Water Institute where we learned a lot about how they utilize community outreach and surveys to help better a tribe near Grand Isle! They also are working on creating tools for emergency managers that will help with their decision-making during responses to flooding.
From there we went across the street to the LSU center for River Studies where we got to take a look at their revolutionary full scale Mississippi River model. The model showed us how the Mississippi operates and how exactly it flows. You can test out how different mitigation projects, like river diversions, can impact the river. One interesting thing we learned was that the river was contained through the levee system but the river naturally wants to move around. Following our tour of the model and their exhibits we ate lunch and got ice cream at the LSU dairy store on campus.
Following our brief break we took it over to LSU’s EOC where we met with their emergency manager. We learned very valuable lessons on what exactly goes on behind the scenes for college game days such as facial recognition and plate identification cameras and just the day to day management of a big college campus. We also heard about various plans for evacuation, sheltering place, and more. After a long day in Baton Rouge we hit the road back towards Tulane for dinner and the end of our day here for day 11.
