Support for Louisiana, the state we're in is provided by.

Every day I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen.

Together.

Together.

Together.

We power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.

And we have a lot of our outdoor ventures that are open.

And have been open.

For a while now.

I think that as time progresses, we're going to see people return to Lake Charles.

The anniversaries of Laura and Ida, and their toll on our state.

It's something that that we have at LSU, which is absolutely unique.

LSU campus mounts likely the oldest in North America.

Some are cheering it, while others are jeering it.

Student loans have been forgiven, at least partially.

The Biden administration announced a sweeping effort to forgive $10,000 in federal student loans and 20,000 for Pell.

Grants is a huge thing that's been talked about for decades.

But for Louisianans, more than 650,000 of them are buried in loans totaling about 22 and a half billion dollars in debt.

But not everyone qualifies for this forgiveness plan.

That's right.

It only covers federal loans, not private ones.

And it's limited to people who make less than $125,000 a year and households that bring in less than $250,000 a year.

So one of the huge stories of the week.

And now to other news headlines from this week across our state might want to keep an eye on the rise in West Nile virus.

Health Department leaders are reminding people to take precautions against mosquito bites.

We are entering the peak time for transmission in Louisiana.

Since 2018, 14, people have developed dangerous infections of the brain or spinal cord.

And two of those have died.

LSU achieved another record breaking year, securing research, grants and contracts for the 2020 122 fiscal year, which closed just June 30th.

As a whole, LSU campuses pulled in more than $324 million in research funding.

A Shreveport police officer is accused of turning in overtime reports for times he was out of state or working off duty in a restaurant.

A federal grand jury this week indicted officer James Cisco on six counts of wire fraud.

The New Orleans City Council may stop issuing new short term rental licenses like you'd have with VRBO or Airbnb.

This after a federal court struck down a key provision of current city law.

Council members say the proposal won't affect residents short term operators who have a current license.

Moving forward for those hit hardest by two years of hurricanes is a daily grind.

We're at the anniversary for the two Cat four powerhouses, Laura and Ida.

They're the two of the three most powerful storms to ever strike our coast.

It's been one year since Ida.

More on that recovery in a moment.

A part of it anyway.

But first, my sit down with Lake Charles Mayor Nick Hunter.

Two years after Laura blew it.

Mayor, it is always great to see you and your always spirited, resilient and moving forward.

And two years removed.

Where is Lake Charles today from Laura and the other storms.

Andre, good to see you as well.

Thanks for the opportunity.

It doesn't feel like two years.

It certainly feels like a lot longer.

And I will tell you, if you had asked me that question a year ago, I would have put on a very brave front.

I would have had a very stoic answer.

But today, I just feel so much better.

And I feel so, so much more positivity around our recovery than I did even a year ago.

God.

And we've still got some of the best people in the world that will never change.

We've got a beautiful culture and an economy and just a wonderful community atmosphere in southwest Louisiana.

But we didn't have a year ago was supplemental disaster aid from the federal government.

And that finally did come through.

Right.

And so I think you got to admit, some wins when you get them.

And we got a big win with.

That and there's more to come.

But there is redevelopment, rebuilding actually tangibly happening that people can see, which is inspiring.

There is there's the vast majority of businesses are reinvesting back in the community.

In fact, we're seeing a lot of businesses take this as an opportunity to really grow and expand their footprint.

The major employers have all come back or are coming back.

That's remarkable.

Well, it is.

And and I'll tell you, there were some moments after the storm when we were concerned about very simple things like electricity and utilities and and population.

We didn't know if some of these major employers were going to come back.

And to a T, every one of them has said, yes, we are coming back.

And some even coming back.

Stronger has been you heard they've been a body of people that's come together to make sure that these businesses, the industry that it comes back.

In is absolutely the people in southwest Louisiana.

It's our population.

It is their grit, their tenacity.

We have some of the best people in the world in southwest Louisiana.

And I just don't think there was ever a question that we were going to do everything humanly possible to help each other.

Now, there are some some limitations to what you can do.

I mean, it does.

And these things do take money.

So that's why when you take that tenacity and grit and resilience coupled with the supplemental disaster aid, I just think we have the resources and the people in place right now like we didn't have in the past.

And I just feel really good about the future.

Let's touch on just some of the things that are being rebuilt, renovated, some shopping plaza, some other buildings, perhaps some of those things that people see every day.

But now they see work happening.

Yeah.

So I never thought I would be excited about seeing a building demolished or torn down.

And we have seen some of that in the last few months.

And quite frankly, it needed to happen.

I mean, there were some buildings that were lingering after the storms that were really eyesores to the community.

And I'm happy to see some of those buildings come down.

But we've also seen some shopping centers that are coming back alive.

And again, those were some retail customers and some tenants in some of those shopping centers that we were unsure if they were going to return.

When they come back.

And so they come back.

And I was I was thrilled to receive several calls the last few weeks that said, hey, these were owners of the development saying, hey, we're announcing this tenant's coming back.

Would you care to participate in announcement?

And I can't tell you.

Some of the most popular announcements we've made in the last few months was to tell people that a popular retail tenant was coming back to a shopping center.

One thing I want to touch on that's still not finalized is your tower, the bank tower boarded up.

Some work, I understand, is being done on some of the exterior, but there is legal legal matter still to go through before all the moneys are in place.

So a rebuild could happen.

That's right.

And the owners of that building are in litigation against their insurer.

And what I am comfortable saying about that is that the city would love nothing more than to see the building rehabilitated.

But we are mindful of the way that building looks right now, and that is something that we are very passionate about as a city.

We don't want to see that building continue to look in its current state for an extended period of time.

And we're going to do everything we can legally to protect the interests of the city of Lake Charles.

And I would just point to kind of an example in New Orleans, I think it's called the Plaza Tower that was damaged after Katrina and really kind of, you know, lingered and festered.

And now it's quite a conundrum of what to do with that building.

And I will just say that we are using that as a case study of what we will not allow to happen.

And that building, which used to be the tallest building in Louisiana, has been vacant and vacant for decades.

Let's take you back right before Laura.

Lake Charles was a destination place.

Jobs for plentiful, high paying a lot of them LNG boom.

And it was one of the most desired places to move to because the jobs were great then.

Laura Head Now two years later.

Where does that stand with making sure that industries here.

And you said it we were one of the fastest growing cities in the country.

Between 2010 and 2020, we had a 12% population increase, which is monumental for cities, especially compared to, I think, say, Louisiana.

It's like 2.5 or 2.7% increase.

Lake Charles was 12%.

So we we did have a lot of really good things going for us.

And it wasn't only Laura, it was COVID as well.

So COVID and then Laura, Delta, Winter Freeze, a 1000 year flood event.

It's been a lot of last couple of years and and.

Not getting the money.

And by the time it's coming time line it was there.

So it is difficult because when employers are trying to attract people to a community, they're interested in quality of life or interest in the way the community looks.

They're interested in schools.

We have a lot of our schools right now that are still tattered and torn up and our school board, God bless them, they're working with FEMA the same way that everyone is.

But that that timeline, that process is just so long.

It's really a system that needs some reformation.

It is a challenge, however, I will say again, I am much more optimistic on where we're going to be tomorrow and years from now today than I was a year ago.

We have the resources.

We have the people in place.

There's a lot of blue tarps out there.

There's a lot of blighted buildings.

But I believe those things will be remedied.

And I think that as time progresses, we're going to see people return to Lake Charles.

Quicker than not.

And the wheels are in motion to make things whole and better.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I feel good about it.

All right, Mayor, it's great to see you.

Thanks, Andre.

Good to see you.

Kids visiting LSU have memories of running up and down the mound, sitting across from the Huey Long Field House.

But it's a little known fact exactly how all these mounds are.

A team at LSU, led by Brooks Elwood, excavated the mounds dirt just to find out exactly how old these mounds are.

His findings were extraordinary.

All LSU grads have passed these structures.

It's almost a rite of passage to stop and marvel at these 20 feet grassy hills.

But while they're just two of nearly 800 manmade structures in the Americas, it's likely that these are the oldest.

I did get permission from the state, too, but there's no special title, title or anything like that.

I got permission from the state to drill two cores, one from the Southern man, which is the B mound, one from the Northern Mound, which was the amount we extracted those cores.

And we also then later on got permission to do a small excavation on the crest of this one and on the side of that one.

BROOKS Elwood is a professor emeritus at LSU.

He led a research study to uncover the true age of the LSU mounds.

What he found was astounding.

Originally, indigenous peoples likely started constructing the first mound dubbed Mound B by Alberts team.

A little over 11,000 years ago.

The second mound was built shortly afterward.

The oldest date we have from that mound, the B mound, is 11,300.

And then as you go up in the mound, that is as you take additional samples at higher and higher elevations in the mound, the ages get younger and younger and younger in a nice linear trend, which is what you would expect if you went into your backyard and dumped dirt one year and then came back a year later and dumped another load of dirt and then a year later dumped another load of dirt.

And then if you were able to date.

The bottom.

Layer.

And then the.

Next layer up and then the next layer up, you would find that it got younger as.

You went.

Up.

That's a no brainer, right?

And so that's what the trend is in these in this mound.

Elle Woods team use the sediment they found at the core of the mounds to estimate their age.

They found ash burned reed cane and burned mammal bones, which Elwood hypothesizes were used for ceremonial purposes.

He also found that the people who constructed these mounds used mud from an estuary that used to flow where Tiger Stadium sits.

Now they piled all of it together to create Mound A.

If you look closely when you pass it, you can see dents in the sides which indicate that it was built with a substance that holds water.

But that's not the most interesting part.

It appears that the alignment of the two crests of the mound, that alignment was done at about 6000 years ago.

And that alignment was basically aligned towards the Red Star in the sky at night, Arcturus and both Mounds.

When you take the crest of both mounds and be and you draw a line through them, it's about 8 to 8.5 degrees east of north that line, and that's where Arcturus was located.

Elwood study was published in the American Journal of Science by Yale University, where all of his findings show that these mounds are the oldest American manmade structures ever recorded.

It's something that that we have at LSU, which is absolutely unique.

And the fact that we have saved them.

And didn't bulldoze them.

Like up at Monsanto, where the other two mounds were.

We really need to take our hats off to the folks that have worked hard to keep LSU a beautiful campus.

In this story, we showed older pictures of the mounds, but if you pass by today, you'll see a fence surrounding them.

And that's because the school is trying very hard to preserve these structures.

Elwood says that all the running and sliding is actually damaging the dirt underneath.

So if you happen to visit, please be respectful.

And now a preview of Monday night's presentation of Louisiana Spotlight, formerly known as Public Square.

In it, we explore population loss in our state and ask the question, is it more than a troubling trend?

I spoke with a panel of politicians, data scientists and community organizers from across the aisle and the state.

We also talked with Insurance Commissioner Jim Donlin about an industry turned upside down after all the disaster claims.

I'm Jim Donlin and I'm the commissioner of insurance for the state of Louisiana.

Well, we're in a crisis.

There's no question about it.

And some of it is beyond our control.

Laura 150 mile an hour winds.

IDA 150 mile an hour winds.

Those 2/2 most powerful storms in our state's history, and that resulted in 800,000 claims being filed over the past two years and companies paying or reserving to pay a total of $22 billion.

Huge amount of money that has had a devastating effect on our market.

The insurance companies that failed, that was on them and it was on them because they did not adequately reinsure themselves for the exposure that they had taken on.

All six were re insured based on the most liberal of projections from cat modelers.

There are three major catastrophe modelers that all the insurance companies use to evaluate their coastal exposure.

All six of the failed.

Use the same CAT modeler.

And they missed it by a lot.

They missed it by six.

By $600 million.

$100 million each on average in not 2020.

Not Laura, Delta and Zeta, but Ida, which hit a more expensive, more populated part of the state.

These seven companies left $100 million of unpaid claims behind when they fail.

It's a challenging part of our job.

It's the most important part of our job to monitor for solvency, because we're here primarily to protect consumers of of insurance products.

And the first thing that they owe their policyholders is enough resources to fulfill the promises they make to their policyholder owners when they take their premium.

And in this case, those three companies in my state did not meet that obligation.

Now, we're always going to be more expensive.

We've always been one of the three most expensive states for homeowner's insurance.

We're at greater risk than I think anywhere else in the United States.

Below I-10 i 12.

We are the bull's eye for hurricane landfall.

That's part of the cost of living where we do.

And a lot of folks want to live their own bayous in in communities that they've been in for generations.

And and and they can be done.

And it falls to us, the regulators and policy makers, to see to it that the stock of construction in homes and commercial buildings are built strong enough to make it withstand these horrific hurricane events when they do come.

And that will make affordable insurance available for for those policyholders.

Some very interesting and troubling insight from Jim O'Donnell in there.

For more on this topic, please join us for the full episode of Spotlight this coming Monday night on August 29th at 8 p.m.. And finally, we dragged videographer for Rescue Fortenberry in front of our camera tonight.

Because, Rex, you've been with Lvb for 30 years, almost to the day.

You have a very unique personality, but also a style of excellence in everything you've done since you've been here.

Do you retiring, however, and a couple of things.

It's got to be wild to look through this.

And what everybody may not know is that the pictures you've seen over the years, Rex, has shot most of them, I would say.

Right.

Good.

Many of them for many, many, many, many, many, many years.

Going back to you, the story that stands out that you've done that has not been in the past few years.

Oh, there's just so many memories.

Yeah, so many things.

So many stories.

One of the very first things that stand out stands out to me.

A story I did for SWI State Run is the 1993 Hurricane Centennial on the Grand Isle.

So we did the 100 years of Jeff doing, and I did that in 93.

Yeah.

You've worked with many anchors, many reporters through the years.

I still have the press kit.

Oh.

You'll look through it.

Sure.

What's in this?

That's the paperwork, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it's interesting when.

When I said, Hey, Rex, we want to talk to you for this to close our segment you completely appeared on ready to do this and not prepared.

And yet when he came out here, he has a script and he's got a scrapbook of all the memories.

So I'd say you are prepared.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, over the years, I've made my own little museum of this, that and the other.

I've got nails from the Bollinger shipyards.

I've got pieces of helicopter from some of the crash stories we've done and from a Nazi U-boat that they brought up from the Gulf and we did stories on that.

And a lot of this was lost Louisiana older show we did yeah some other stuff programs over the years you also were traveling a great bit right around 911 of all times to travel, ironically, so we didn't plan it that way.

But, um, yeah, right before 911, I flew in and out of Boston like two or three days before 911.

Okay.

On a documentary, you were going up there about schools and.

Yeah.

That we went through that and 911 happened.

Then I went on at what we call the environmental tackle boxes of the kid science show that we used to do went on a shoot to both Mount Rainier and Washington State and San Francisco.

And it came back.

And then right after that, they said, is your passport good?

Is it?

Yeah, I.

Okay, you're going to Paris this weekend.

So I flew to Paris, France that weekend for the Jo Josephine exhibit.

We don't do that quite as much anymore.

Travel like that.

That was.

Yeah.

And I was in, I was thinking on my mind, my last leg back from from Paris.

I was on 47 different aircraft.

You're in the last month and a half.

So hey, before we go to a time, I wanted to I just mentioned one thing you've done that I've seen has been you've taken over your decision on how things would look.

The stories we did with Kathleen Peugeot, you're using, what, five cameras, a drone, all sorts of things that you typically do not ever see in television news.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I try to make it more of a kind of a feature news magazine type thing.

And it's you know, it's more interesting when you're doing those kind of things to have the interaction between the reporter and whoever you're asking questions to.

And just just try to fill out the story that you're you're excellent at what you do.

It's been great to work with you.

Thank you.

And you have always been prepared and rescue for very great things ahead for you in retirement but will be quiet and in a rocking chair.

And I will definitely miss you here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'll miss being around everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything else anytime, wherever you are with our live PBS app.

You can catch Lvb News and Public Affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

For everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, including Rescue.

I'm Andre Moore.

And I'm care saints here.

Until next time that's the state grand.

Support for Louisiana.

The state we're in is provided by every day.

I go to work for Entergy.

I know customers are counting on me.

So Entergy is investing millions of dollars to keep the lights on and installing new technology to prevent outages before they happen together.

Together, together, we power life.

Additional support provided by the Fred B and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.