Louisiana coast

Guides

Short explainers for the parts of the board that decide whether you go, for every Louisiana parish board, Cameron Parish to St. Tammany Parish. Each one links to the agency that owns the facts, and none of them go out of date on a schedule. The live readings are on the board.

• Tsunami: what to do on the Gulf
  What is actually known about tsunamis on this coast, the sea’s own warning signs, what each alert level means, your parish’s alerts, and why storm surge is the water that usually does harm here.
• Small craft advisories and the lake, bay and Gulf zones
  Which lake, bay or Gulf zone your town reads and which of two weather offices writes it, how a lake or bay forecast differs from a Gulf one, and what an advisory, gale or special marine warning means in knots.
• Reading a tide table in Louisiana
  What the zero is measured from, why the tide here is small and often once a day, which stations are live gauges and which are predictions, and why the wind and the rivers can move the water more than the tide.
• Fire: what is burning, and burn bans
  Each parish’s burn ban from the Department of Agriculture and Forestry’s map, who can order a ban, the wildfires on the national interagency list near this coast, and why that list is not every fire.
• Beach water: who samples, and what an advisory means
  The Department of Health’s swimming advisories and bacteria counts for the beaches it samples, how a beach with several stations is read, and the parishes nobody samples.