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Feb 16, 2021
Today's Tweet
Kind of a golden oldie - still great - Road Warrior.
He got it! pic.twitter.com/R1FH8KoILG
— David Beckham 🌊🌊 (@Fake_Beckham) February 16, 2021
Energy
But you know what? I think it's a pretty good bet that we won't be faced with quite the shit-pile clean up that we have to deal with here at the end of the carbon-driven economy.
I remember very distinctly, back when I was a travelin' man, driving up I-95 approaching Philly from the south, and the smell - especially in the humidity of the summer months - was unbelievable. And it didn't stop at Philadelphia. The stench seemed to follow me all the way up the petro-chemical corridor thru New Jersey.
Once we get our heads a little farther out of our asses, we just might see some big leaps forward.
In the meantime, I can be optimistic about this, with that famous caveat from Mr Nixon: "Don't count on the fella that makes the mess to stick around and clean it up."
Other laborers ripped asbestos from the guts of an old boiler house, part of a massive demolition and redevelopment of the plant, which closed in 2019 after a series of explosions at the facility.
Plans call for the nearly 1,400-acre site to be transformed into a new commercial hub with warehousing and offices. All it will take is a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars, and confronting 150 years’ worth of industrial pollution, including buried rail cars and a poisonous stew of waste fuels poured onto the ground. A U.S. refinery cleanup of this size and scope has no known precedent, remediation experts said.
It’s a glimpse of what lies ahead if the United States hopes to wean itself off fossil fuels and clean up the toxic legacy of oil, gas and coal.
President Joe Biden wants to bring the United States to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to fight climate change through a shift to clean-energy technologies, while reducing pollution in low-income and minority neighborhoods near industrial facilities.
It’s a transition fraught with challenges. Among the biggest is what to do with the detritus left behind. The old PES plant is just one of approximately 135 oil refineries nationwide, to say nothing of the country’s countless gas stations, pipelines, storage hubs, drill pads and other graying energy infrastructure.
In recent months, at least six other large U.S. oil refineries - from New Jersey to California - have announced they will close or cease oil refining as the coronavirus pandemic has sapped global fuel demand.
“The energy transition will require massive attention to both new infrastructure and addressing aging or outdated systems,” said Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne School of Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines.
In Philadelphia, a private-sector company is taking the lead. Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a real estate firm that specializes in renovating old industrial properties, bought the PES refinery out of bankruptcy for $225.5 million in June.
Asbestos abatement alone will require four years to complete, said Roberto Perez, chief executive of the Chicago-based company.
“There’s enough pipeline to connect you from here to Florida, and the majority of that pipeline today is wrapped in asbestos,” Perez said.
The full extent of the pollution won’t be understood for years. Also uncertain is the ability of the refinery’s previous owners to pay their share of the cleanup. The facility has had multiple owners over its lifetime and responsibility has been divided between them through business agreements and legal settlements.
A lot is riding on the outcome. Transformation of the refinery, the oldest and largest on the U.S. East Coast, could bring jobs to a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood that needs them.
But residents also want a say in how the work proceeds after enduring the brunt of the refinery’s pollution. Some complained about feeling shut out of the process during a recent virtual public meeting organized by companies involved in the cleanup.
The refinery’s previous owner, Sunoco Inc, had gone years without holding city-mandated public meetings about pollution at the site.
Evergreen Resources Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Sunoco’s parent company, Energy Transfer LP, which is in charge of managing a share of the cleanup, declined to comment on the lapse in meetings. It pointed to a website it launched last year to engage with the public about the project.
Hilco’s Perez has no illusions about the work ahead.
“This is a very heavy lift,” he said. “It’s probably one of the most complicated things I’ve ever done.”
SURPRISES IN A TOXIC SOUP
Oil refining at the Philadelphia site began in 1870, 100 years before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Gasoline, once a worthless byproduct of heating oil, was routinely dumped by the refinery into the soil, according to historians and researchers. Leaks and accidents spewed more toxins. The June 2019 blasts alone released 676,000 pounds of hydrocarbons, PES said at the time.
The Philadelphia site is not unique. About half of America’s 450,000 polluted former industrial and commercial sites are contaminated with petroleum, according to the EPA.
“That’s one of the reasons that a lot of these refineries have been kept going for such a long time,” said Fred Quivik, a Minnesota-based industrial historian. “They’re so contaminated, it’s hard to figure out what else to do with them.”
Cleanup in Philadelphia will be painstaking. After asbestos abatement comes the demolition and removal of 3,000 tanks and vessels, along with more than 100 buildings and other infrastructure, the company said.
Then comes the ground itself. Hilco’s Perez said dirt quality varies widely on the site and will have to be handled differently depending on contamination levels. Clearing toxins like lead must be done with chemical rinses or other technologies, said Charles Haas, professor of environmental engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The site also has polluted groundwater and giant benzene pools lurking underneath, according to environmental reports Sunoco filed over the years with the federal and state governments.
Perez, Hilco’s chief executive, said clean energy will be a centerpiece of the final project. The warehouse complex, for example, will aim to feature charging stations for a fleet of electric delivery vehicles, he said.
The company is also considering a hotel, residential homes, and a restaurant on the site, two people familiar with the plans said.
The project is expected to take 10 to 15 years to finish. Cleanup and construction are projected to create about 13,000 jobs, the company said, with another 19,000 jobs tied to warehousing, offices and transporting goods.
PICKING UP THE BILL
The final price tag is unclear.
The development’s fate hinges on previous polluters paying their fair share. The site, founded by the Atlantic Refining Company, later known as ARCO, has cycled through several owners.
Sunoco, which owned the refinery for about two decades, sold its majority stake in 2012 to Carlyle Group Inc, which later formed PES. That deal stipulated that Sunoco assume all environmental liabilities dating to the plant’s inception in the 1800s. Energy Transfer, which bought Sunoco the same year as the refinery sale, now shoulders that burden.
Dallas-based Energy Transfer has $205 million in insurance to cover all of Sunoco’s decommissioned sites, including PES, according to the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Amanda Goodin, a lawyer with the environmental group Earthjustice who has litigated major environmental cleanup cases, said comparable projects, such as clearing shuttered mining operations, can run into the billions of dollars.
“These cleanups are just enormously expensive, and companies basically never set aside enough money to fully remediate a site,” Goodin said.
Energy Transfer would not say how much it expects its share of the PES refinery cleanup to cost, but spokeswoman Vicki Granado said it is “fully funded”.
Hilco, as part of its 2020 purchase of PES, assumed liabilities tied to the last eight years of the refinery’s life, a tab it estimates will amount to “hundreds of millions” of dollars. The company declined to be more specific, but said it believes it has the funds for the job.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said it has consent orders against Sunoco and Hilco that enable the regulator to sue the companies if they attempt to walk away, spokeswoman Virginia Cain said.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Abdul Muhammad, 34, who lives near the Philadelphia refinery, says life has improved since it shut down. His asthmatic baby son now sleeps through the night, while his wife’s chronic headaches have become less frequent.
“I just don’t want chemicals and environmentally contaminated things going in and out of there,” he said of his wishes for the site.
Philly Thrive, a community activist group, has been pressuring Hilco and city officials to ensure that neighborhood residents have a say in the cleanup and redevelopment.
Some of their hopes rest with the Biden administration, which has committed to direct 40% of any federal clean-energy investment to communities most impacted by industrial pollution.
But whether climate legislation emerges from a divided Congress remains to be seen.
Philadelphia officials hope PES can become a model for refinery cleanups elsewhere. Kenyatta Johnson, a city councilman who represents neighborhoods surrounding the facility, sees a healthy, more prosperous community emerging from its toxic shadow.
“Some may deem the site a health hazard and eyesore, but nevertheless it’s an opportunity,” Johnson said.
Our willingness to re-invent ourselves is a real strength. It's not uniquely American, but we've gotten pretty good at it.
To reiterate my position on "blessings in disguise" or "look for the silver lining":
Maybe we should try to figure out how to get to the blessing part without all the shit we put ourselves through on the front end.
- and -
I'd be a lot more cheery about the whole thing if that silver lining didn't always come wrapped in a dark cloud of fucked-up-edness.
Anyway, maybe things get better from here for a while.
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
Covid-Linked Syndrome in Children Is Growing and Cases Are More Severe
The condition, which usually emerges several weeks after infection, is still rare, but can be dangerous. “A higher percentage of them are really critically ill,” one doctor said.
Fifteen-year-old Braden Wilson was frightened of Covid-19. He was careful to wear masks and only left his house, in Simi Valley, Calif., for things like orthodontist checkups and visits with his grandparents nearby.
But somehow, the virus found Braden. It wreaked ruthless damage in the form of an inflammatory syndrome that, for unknown reasons, strikes some young people, usually several weeks after infection by the coronavirus.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles put the teenager on a ventilator and a heart-lung bypass machine. But they could not stop his major organs from failing. On Jan. 5, “they officially said he was brain dead,” his mother, Amanda Wilson, recounted, sobbing. “My boy was gone.”
Doctors across the country have been seeing a striking increase in the number of young people with the condition Braden had, which is called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children or MIS-C. Even more worrisome, they say, is that more patients are now very sick than during the first wave of cases, which alarmed doctors and parents around the world last spring.
“We’re now getting more of these MIS-C kids, but this time, it just seems that a higher percentage of them are really critically ill,” said Dr. Roberta DeBiasi, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. During the hospital’s first wave, about half the patients needed treatment in the intensive care unit, she said, but now 80 to 90 percent do.
The reasons are unclear. The surge follows the overall spike of Covid cases in the United States after the winter holiday season, and more cases may simply increase chances for severe disease to emerge. So far, there’s no evidence that recent coronavirus variants are responsible, and experts say it is too early to speculate about any impact of variants on the syndrome.
The condition remains rare. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 2,060 cases in 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, including 30 deaths. The median age was 9, but infants to 20-year-olds have been afflicted. The data, which is complete only through mid-December, shows the rate of cases has been increasing since mid-October.
While most young people, even those who became seriously ill, have survived and gone home in relatively healthy condition, doctors are uncertain whether any will experience lingering heart issues or other problems.
“We really don’t know what will happen in the long term,” said Dr. Jean Ballweg, medical director of pediatric heart transplant and advanced heart failure at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, Neb., where from April through October, the hospital treated about two cases a month, about 30 percent of them in the I.C.U. That rose to 10 cases in December and 12 in January, with 60 percent needing I.C.U. care — most requiring ventilators. “Clearly, they seem to be more sick,” she said.
Symptoms of the syndrome can include fever, rash, red eyes or gastrointestinal problems. Those can progress to heart dysfunction, including cardiogenic shock, in which the heart cannot squeeze enough to pump blood sufficiently. Some patients develop cardiomyopathy, which stiffens the heart muscle, or abnormal rhythm. Dr. Ballweg said one 15-year-old at her hospital needed a procedure that functioned as a temporary pacemaker.
Hospitals say most patients test positive for Covid antibodies that indicate previous infection, but some patients also test positive for active coronavirus infection. Many children were previously healthy and had few or no symptoms from their initial Covid infection. Doctors are uncertain which factors predispose children to the syndrome. Dr. Jane Newburger, associate chief for academic affairs in Boston Children’s Hospital’s cardiology department, who is a leader of a nationwide study, said patients with obesity and some older children seem to fare worse.
Sixty-nine percent of reported cases have affected Latino or Black young people, which experts believe stems from socioeconomic and other factors that have disproportionately exposed those communities to the virus. But Omaha’s hospital, where early cases were largely among children of Latino parents working in the meatpacking industry, is now “seeing a much more broad spectrum and every ethnicity,” Dr. Ballweg said.
Jude Knott, 4, was hospitalized in Omaha for 10 days after developing a headache, fever, vomiting, red eyes and a rapid heart rate.
“It was just a roller coaster,” said his mother, Ashley Knott, a career coach at an Omaha nonprofit helping low-income teenagers.
To explain to Jude the infusions of intravenous immunoglobulin doctors were giving him, she said they were “‘putting Ninjas in your blood so they can fight.’” For blood thinner injections, which he hated, she said, “‘Buddy, they’re making your blood go from a milkshake to water because we need it to be water.’ Anything to help him make sense of it.”
Jude recently returned to preschool full time. He has some dilation of a coronary artery, but is improving, his mother said.
“He’s definitely experiencing some anxiety,” Ms. Knott said. “I just worry that he’s kind of been saddled with some adult worries at 4.”
Doctors said they’ve learned effective treatment approaches, which, besides steroids, immunoglobulin and blood thinners, can include blood pressure medications, an immunomodulator called anakinra and supplemental oxygen. Some hospitals use ventilators more than others, experts said.
But though doctors are learning more, pediatricians can miss the syndrome initially because early symptoms can mimic some common ailments.
On New Year’s Day, Mayson Barillas, 11, of Damascus, Md., started feeling sick. “My stomach started hurting, and then I went to my soccer game and then I got a fever,” he said.
His mother, Sandy Barillas, a medical assistant at a women’s health practice, gave him Alka Seltzer, Pepto Bismol and Tylenol. Several days later, he developed shortness of breath and they went to an urgent care clinic.
There, a rapid Covid-19 test was negative, as were evaluations for strep, influenza and appendicitis. Ms. Barillas said she was told, “It was just like a stomach flu.”
But the next day, Mayson had swollen eyes and lips with red blisters. “He started developing really bad body aches and he couldn’t walk anymore,” she said. She took him to an emergency room, which transferred him to Children’s National Hospital, where doctors said he exhibited cardiogenic shock.
“It was very scary,” Ms. Barillas said. “I’d never heard of this syndrome before.”
Mayson spent eight days in the hospital, four in the I.C.U. Since leaving, he has seen a hematologist, a rheumatologist and a cardiologist and is on blood thinners for now. The hardest part, said Mayson, a star local soccer player, is being temporarily sidelined from sports, as doctors advise for most patients for several months.
“It was very shocking for everybody in the community: ‘Wow, how did this happen to someone very healthy?’” Ms. Barillas said.
At a memorial service on Feb. 5, Braden Wilson was remembered as a kindhearted, creative teenager who loved filmmaking and fashion. His color-splashed oil paintings were displayed.
His mother read a poem he wrote that hangs on the refrigerator of his grandparents, Fabian and Joe Wilson, with whom he was close: “Hold fast to dreams/ for if dreams create/ life is a beautiful canvas/ a masterpiece painted great.”
It’s unclear why the syndrome hit Braden so hard. Ms. Wilson said he did not have serious health issues. She said he was overweight but active, swimming three times a week and taking dance and yoga at his arts-and-science high school.
Symptoms started New Year’s Eve, when he began vomiting and spiking a fever. Ms. Wilson took him to an emergency room, where he tested positive for the coronavirus, received treatment that included a new monoclonal antibody drug and was sent home.
But his fever persisted and two days later, he developed diarrhea and his lips and fingers turned blue. Ms. Wilson called 911. When paramedics arrived, she said, he was “lying in his bed, like almost lifeless.”
At the hospital, he was hooked to a ventilator and transferred to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which like several hospitals has established a MIS-C clinic with various specialists.
“Braden was one of our most ill patients,” said Dr. Jacqueline Szmuszkovicz, a pediatric cardiologist there.
Doctors placed him on the heart-lung bypass machine, put him on dialysis and performed a heart procedure to relieve pressure. “He had what we would term severe multisystem organ failure: his lungs, his heart, his kidneys,” Dr. Szmuszkovicz said.
Through tears, Ms. Wilson said that after a few days, Braden began bleeding from his mouth, eyes and nose, and doctors ultimately could not detect brain activity. “I asked them specifically: ‘Is there any chance for him to recover from this?’” she recounted. “And they said no.”
Family members FaceTimed to say goodbye before life support was withdrawn. Ms. Wilson gave consent for doctors to take blood samples from his body for research studies.
Ms. Wilson had never written poetry before, but since Braden’s death, it has spilled out of her:
New Cases: 264,883 (⬆︎ .24%)
New Deaths: 6,640 (⬆︎ .28%)
USA
New Cases: 52,785 (⬆︎ .19%)
New Deaths: 954 (⬆︎ .19%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 38.8 million
Total Priority Population: 31.8%
Total Population: 11.7%
Q:
How shitty has it been for the last 4 or 5 months?
A:
"Only about a thousand" Americans were killed by the Rona yesterday.
On the other side of this shit-brick mess, I hope we can look back at "conservatives" who played it all down, and insisted that kids be back in school, and it's not all that bad, and kid's can't get the Rona anyway, and even if they do they'll be OK cuz they're young and strong, and and and - let's just say I intend to shove this in their faces for a good long time.
NYT: (pay wall)
Covid-Linked Syndrome in Children Is Growing and Cases Are More Severe
The condition, which usually emerges several weeks after infection, is still rare, but can be dangerous. “A higher percentage of them are really critically ill,” one doctor said.
Fifteen-year-old Braden Wilson was frightened of Covid-19. He was careful to wear masks and only left his house, in Simi Valley, Calif., for things like orthodontist checkups and visits with his grandparents nearby.
But somehow, the virus found Braden. It wreaked ruthless damage in the form of an inflammatory syndrome that, for unknown reasons, strikes some young people, usually several weeks after infection by the coronavirus.
Doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles put the teenager on a ventilator and a heart-lung bypass machine. But they could not stop his major organs from failing. On Jan. 5, “they officially said he was brain dead,” his mother, Amanda Wilson, recounted, sobbing. “My boy was gone.”
Doctors across the country have been seeing a striking increase in the number of young people with the condition Braden had, which is called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children or MIS-C. Even more worrisome, they say, is that more patients are now very sick than during the first wave of cases, which alarmed doctors and parents around the world last spring.
“We’re now getting more of these MIS-C kids, but this time, it just seems that a higher percentage of them are really critically ill,” said Dr. Roberta DeBiasi, chief of infectious diseases at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. During the hospital’s first wave, about half the patients needed treatment in the intensive care unit, she said, but now 80 to 90 percent do.
The reasons are unclear. The surge follows the overall spike of Covid cases in the United States after the winter holiday season, and more cases may simply increase chances for severe disease to emerge. So far, there’s no evidence that recent coronavirus variants are responsible, and experts say it is too early to speculate about any impact of variants on the syndrome.
The condition remains rare. The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show 2,060 cases in 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, including 30 deaths. The median age was 9, but infants to 20-year-olds have been afflicted. The data, which is complete only through mid-December, shows the rate of cases has been increasing since mid-October.
While most young people, even those who became seriously ill, have survived and gone home in relatively healthy condition, doctors are uncertain whether any will experience lingering heart issues or other problems.
“We really don’t know what will happen in the long term,” said Dr. Jean Ballweg, medical director of pediatric heart transplant and advanced heart failure at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Omaha, Neb., where from April through October, the hospital treated about two cases a month, about 30 percent of them in the I.C.U. That rose to 10 cases in December and 12 in January, with 60 percent needing I.C.U. care — most requiring ventilators. “Clearly, they seem to be more sick,” she said.
Symptoms of the syndrome can include fever, rash, red eyes or gastrointestinal problems. Those can progress to heart dysfunction, including cardiogenic shock, in which the heart cannot squeeze enough to pump blood sufficiently. Some patients develop cardiomyopathy, which stiffens the heart muscle, or abnormal rhythm. Dr. Ballweg said one 15-year-old at her hospital needed a procedure that functioned as a temporary pacemaker.
Hospitals say most patients test positive for Covid antibodies that indicate previous infection, but some patients also test positive for active coronavirus infection. Many children were previously healthy and had few or no symptoms from their initial Covid infection. Doctors are uncertain which factors predispose children to the syndrome. Dr. Jane Newburger, associate chief for academic affairs in Boston Children’s Hospital’s cardiology department, who is a leader of a nationwide study, said patients with obesity and some older children seem to fare worse.
Sixty-nine percent of reported cases have affected Latino or Black young people, which experts believe stems from socioeconomic and other factors that have disproportionately exposed those communities to the virus. But Omaha’s hospital, where early cases were largely among children of Latino parents working in the meatpacking industry, is now “seeing a much more broad spectrum and every ethnicity,” Dr. Ballweg said.
Jude Knott, 4, was hospitalized in Omaha for 10 days after developing a headache, fever, vomiting, red eyes and a rapid heart rate.
“It was just a roller coaster,” said his mother, Ashley Knott, a career coach at an Omaha nonprofit helping low-income teenagers.
To explain to Jude the infusions of intravenous immunoglobulin doctors were giving him, she said they were “‘putting Ninjas in your blood so they can fight.’” For blood thinner injections, which he hated, she said, “‘Buddy, they’re making your blood go from a milkshake to water because we need it to be water.’ Anything to help him make sense of it.”
Jude recently returned to preschool full time. He has some dilation of a coronary artery, but is improving, his mother said.
“He’s definitely experiencing some anxiety,” Ms. Knott said. “I just worry that he’s kind of been saddled with some adult worries at 4.”
Doctors said they’ve learned effective treatment approaches, which, besides steroids, immunoglobulin and blood thinners, can include blood pressure medications, an immunomodulator called anakinra and supplemental oxygen. Some hospitals use ventilators more than others, experts said.
But though doctors are learning more, pediatricians can miss the syndrome initially because early symptoms can mimic some common ailments.
On New Year’s Day, Mayson Barillas, 11, of Damascus, Md., started feeling sick. “My stomach started hurting, and then I went to my soccer game and then I got a fever,” he said.
His mother, Sandy Barillas, a medical assistant at a women’s health practice, gave him Alka Seltzer, Pepto Bismol and Tylenol. Several days later, he developed shortness of breath and they went to an urgent care clinic.
There, a rapid Covid-19 test was negative, as were evaluations for strep, influenza and appendicitis. Ms. Barillas said she was told, “It was just like a stomach flu.”
But the next day, Mayson had swollen eyes and lips with red blisters. “He started developing really bad body aches and he couldn’t walk anymore,” she said. She took him to an emergency room, which transferred him to Children’s National Hospital, where doctors said he exhibited cardiogenic shock.
“It was very scary,” Ms. Barillas said. “I’d never heard of this syndrome before.”
Mayson spent eight days in the hospital, four in the I.C.U. Since leaving, he has seen a hematologist, a rheumatologist and a cardiologist and is on blood thinners for now. The hardest part, said Mayson, a star local soccer player, is being temporarily sidelined from sports, as doctors advise for most patients for several months.
“It was very shocking for everybody in the community: ‘Wow, how did this happen to someone very healthy?’” Ms. Barillas said.
At a memorial service on Feb. 5, Braden Wilson was remembered as a kindhearted, creative teenager who loved filmmaking and fashion. His color-splashed oil paintings were displayed.
His mother read a poem he wrote that hangs on the refrigerator of his grandparents, Fabian and Joe Wilson, with whom he was close: “Hold fast to dreams/ for if dreams create/ life is a beautiful canvas/ a masterpiece painted great.”
It’s unclear why the syndrome hit Braden so hard. Ms. Wilson said he did not have serious health issues. She said he was overweight but active, swimming three times a week and taking dance and yoga at his arts-and-science high school.
Symptoms started New Year’s Eve, when he began vomiting and spiking a fever. Ms. Wilson took him to an emergency room, where he tested positive for the coronavirus, received treatment that included a new monoclonal antibody drug and was sent home.
But his fever persisted and two days later, he developed diarrhea and his lips and fingers turned blue. Ms. Wilson called 911. When paramedics arrived, she said, he was “lying in his bed, like almost lifeless.”
At the hospital, he was hooked to a ventilator and transferred to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, which like several hospitals has established a MIS-C clinic with various specialists.
“Braden was one of our most ill patients,” said Dr. Jacqueline Szmuszkovicz, a pediatric cardiologist there.
Doctors placed him on the heart-lung bypass machine, put him on dialysis and performed a heart procedure to relieve pressure. “He had what we would term severe multisystem organ failure: his lungs, his heart, his kidneys,” Dr. Szmuszkovicz said.
Through tears, Ms. Wilson said that after a few days, Braden began bleeding from his mouth, eyes and nose, and doctors ultimately could not detect brain activity. “I asked them specifically: ‘Is there any chance for him to recover from this?’” she recounted. “And they said no.”
Family members FaceTimed to say goodbye before life support was withdrawn. Ms. Wilson gave consent for doctors to take blood samples from his body for research studies.
Ms. Wilson had never written poetry before, but since Braden’s death, it has spilled out of her:
Now your heart no longer beatsAnd I can’t hold you in my arms,But I remember back to those daysWhen my womb protected you from harmYou lived a life of beautyOf laughter, and of graceI hold you now inside my heartWe’ll always share that space.
The Scam
I smiled, and said, "You're rich - why ain't you smart?"
Like many Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight.
Fred Eshelman - Gullible Rich Guy
The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first conversation, Eshelman was sold.
“I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.
“$200,000?” one of his advisers on the call asked.
“$2 million,” Eshelman responded.
Over the next 12 days, Eshelman came to regret his donation and to doubt conspiracy theories of rampant illegal voting, according to court records and interviews.
Now, he wants his money back.
The story behind the Eshelman donation — detailed in previously unreported court filings and exclusive interviews with those involved — provides new insights into the frenetic days after the election, when baseless claims led donors to give hundreds of millions of dollars to reverse President Biden’s victory.
Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party collected $255 million in two months, saying the money would support legal challenges to an election marred by fraud. Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress also raised money off those false allegations, as did pro-Trump lawyers seeking to overturn the election results — and even some of their witnesses.
True the Vote was one of several conservative “election integrity” groups that sought to press the case in court. Though its lawsuits drew less attention than those brought by the Trump campaign, True the Vote nonetheless sought to raise more than $7 million for its investigation of the 2020 election.
Documents that have surfaced in Eshelman’s litigation, along with interviews, show how True the Vote’s private assurances that it was on the cusp of revealing illegal election schemes repeatedly fizzled as the group’s focus shifted from one allegation to the next. The nonprofit sought to coordinate its efforts with a coalition of Trump’s allies, including Trump attorney Jay Sekulow and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), the documents show.
Eshelman has alleged in two lawsuits — one in federal court has been withdrawn and the other is ongoing in a Texas state court — that True the Vote did not spend his $2 million gift and a subsequent $500,000 donation as it said it would. Eshelman also alleges that True the Vote directed much of his money to people or businesses connected to the group’s president, Catherine Engelbrecht.
Asked about the shifting focus from allegation to allegation, Engelbrecht said, “A good thorough investigation takes the course it takes, and we were not going to expose whistleblowers to make a quick headline.” She said that the group’s investigation “is ongoing even now.” In court documents, True the Vote says Eshelman’s money was spent properly.
True the Vote’s lawyer, James Bopp, said that no conditions were attached to Eshelman’s donations and he is not entitled to the return of his money just because he didn’t like the outcome.
The court documents and interviews show how quickly Eshelman and his allies became disillusioned with True the Vote.
“We were just not getting any data or proof,” said Tom Crawford, who had worked for Eshelman as a lobbyist and served as his representative on the True the Vote effort. “We were looking at this and saying to ourselves, ‘This just is not adding up.’ ”
Search for a 'smoking gun'
True the Vote was formed in 2010 by Engelbrecht, a Texas-based tea party activist. Engelbrecht, 51, came to prominence during the Obama administration partly for accusing the Internal Revenue Service of improperly targeting True the Vote and other conservative nonprofit groups.
True the Vote has spent the past decade aggressively promoting claims of voter fraud and pushing for voter-identification laws. The group has established itself as a hub for training volunteer poll watchers to monitor voters for their eligibility. Democrats have accused it of trying to intimidate minorities and other low-participation voters.
As a nonprofit, True The Vote is required to be nonpartisan, and Engelbrecht has said that its mission has nothing to do with party politics. But it has worked with Republicans on other campaigns — for instance, partnering with the Georgia GOP on a “voter integrity” effort for last month’s Senate runoffs in that state.
Eshelman, 72, was not familiar with True the Vote before Election Day. A drug company founder turned financier whose Wilmington, N.C.-based firm invests in health-care companies, he had previously donated largely to initiatives and groups that championed free-market principles and attacked Democratic candidates.
But after Biden jumped ahead — a shift election experts had expected as mail-in ballots were tallied — Eshelman asked Crawford for advice on funding an operation to determine if widespread fraud existed. Crawford agreed to help as an unpaid, informal adviser.
“I thought about the range of possibilities around vote fraud,” Eshelman said in an interview with The Washington Post. “There was already noise around cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”
He added: “I wanted to determine if this was legit. Can we find a real smoking gun?”
Eshelman’s Nov. 5 donation was easily the biggest gift True the Vote had ever received, according to a person familiar with its operations, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters in litigation. True the Vote had never raised more than $1.8 million in a single year, its tax returns show.
The windfall propelled the nonprofit into action.
That evening, Engelbrecht sent Crawford a one-page summary of the group’s ambitious new “Validate the Vote 2020” campaign. It included a budget of $7.3 million and envisioned plans to set up cash rewards for whistleblowers, analyze voter data to identify “patterns of election subversion” and file lawsuits to “nullify the results” in seven battleground states.
In a news release announcing the whistleblower program the next morning, Engelbrecht said: “Unfortunately, there is significant tangible evidence that numerous illegal ballots have been cast and counted in the 2020 general election, potentially enough to sway the legitimate results of the election in some of the currently contested states.”
But over the following days, in federal lawsuits True the Vote filed in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the group said the evidence for its claims was still being developed.
The suits, filed by Bopp, said True the Vote would use “sophisticated and groundbreaking programs” to show that enough illegal votes had been cast — by noncitizens, felons, fake voters and others — to swing the election to Biden. “This evidence will be shortly forthcoming,” each complaint said.
Bopp, whose firm received a retainer of $500,000 for its work on the lawsuits, told The Post that there was “tons of evidence” of voter fraud but that it was “anecdotal, circumstantial.”
Drawn in deeper
True the Vote and Eshelman believed that finding people in swing states with vivid tales of voter fraud would be a crucial part of the project’s success, according to emails. Crawford gave Eshelman regular updates about True the Vote’s progress on that front.
“We need [True the Vote] to get whistleblowers vetted and ready and to get their data teams beefed up,” Crawford told Eshelman in a Nov. 10 email.
Later that day, Crawford reported to the financier that a man in Yuma, Ariz., had come to True the Vote with allegations of large-scale “ballot harvesting” by Democrats in the region. “Please God let his story pan out,” Crawford wrote.
“Sensational,” Eshelman replied, adding that he was “still committed to putting in big money” if progress was made.
While it scrutinized the accounts of purported whistleblowers, True the Vote also sought to prove fraud through data analysis. Bopp’s lawsuits promised “expert reports” comparing vote tallies with registration databases and other records. True the Vote, he wrote, had “persons with such expertise and data-analysis software already in place.”
Engelbrecht’s Validate the Vote plan, an exhibit in the lawsuit, budgeted $1.75 million for “data and research” work. It was to be led by a company whose name evoked the shadowy world of intelligence operations: OPSEC Group LLC.
Records show that OPSEC had been formed less than two months earlier in Alabama by Gregg Phillips, a former True the Vote board member whose 2016 tweet was the source of the false claim that Trump would have won the popular vote that year but for millions of fraudulent votes by undocumented immigrants.
Phillips, 60, and Engelbrecht are business partners in a health-care company. Eshelman alleges in a legal filing — without providing evidence — that the two are also lovers.
In an interview, Phillips denied any such romantic relationship. Engelbrecht declined to comment on the allegation, which was first reported by the Intercept in partnership with the website Type Investigations.
On Nov. 12, Eshelman and Crawford joined a conference call with Engelbrecht and Bopp to hear an update on the data analysis and other aspects of the legal plan. “I was encouraged,” Eshelman wrote in an email to Crawford a couple of hours later, but noted: “You did not really give details on whistleblowers. Where are we on that?”
Crawford replied that three whistleblower complaints, including the Yuma allegation, had survived initial screening.
The following day, Eshelman wired another $500,000 to True the Vote.
'We cannot get ANY information'
On that day, Nov. 13, Engelbrecht received a bill for a $1 million publicity campaign from Old Town Digital Agency, an online advertising firm whose founder, Dikran Yacoubian, has worked in Republican politics on and off since the 1990s. Yacoubian had worked with Eshelman and helped introduce him to True the Vote. Eshelman and Crawford then brought Yacoubian on to help plan a publicity campaign.
Most of the money was to cover the upfront costs of online ads to trumpet True the Vote’s fraud findings, according to Yacoubian. The rest, he said, was to be spent on retainers for Republican consultants who would push the project’s findings through political and media channels.
Yacoubian said he had already begun securing the services of these consultants, including Robert Heckman, a longtime strategist for Graham. Yacoubian hoped Heckman would pass the group’s findings on to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham then chaired.
But Engelbrecht didn’t pay the $1 million bill, saying later in an email to Eshelman’s handpicked firm that it had no contractual agreement with True the Vote and had not provided “any services.”
Her refusal to pay contributed to an emerging rift between Engelbrecht and Crawford, who at the same time was growing frustrated by what he described as the group’s vague and ever-shifting leads.
“There was a guy in Georgia who claimed to be the bagman for Stacey Abrams,” Crawford told The Post. “It was, ‘We’re getting an affidavit,’ and then it was, ‘He ran away and we can’t find him.’ ”
The “ballot harvesting” whistleblower in Yuma turned out to have already contacted law enforcement, according to the person familiar with the group’s operations. Two people were later indicted on a charge of submitting votes for other people — but during August’s primary, not the general election.
Yacoubian, too, was frustrated that True the Vote’s whistleblowers were not materializing. “I really didn’t get to do, on the promotion side, anything — because there wasn’t anything to promote,” he said in an interview.
At one point, a publicist working for Engelbrecht instead sent Yacoubian an eight-minute video titled “Who Is Catherine Engelbrecht?” that she wanted posted online.
Engelbrecht continued to make promises about whistleblowers, claiming in a Nov. 14 email to Eshelman: “We are writing up the briefs on these individuals now to give Senator Graham and Cruz.”
Heckman, the veteran Graham consultant, said he listened to a pair of conference-call presentations from Engelbrecht and Phillips but came away so unimpressed that he never even mentioned the effort to Graham. “I was asked to determine whether there was any legitimate evidence there,” he told The Post. “My conclusion was there wasn’t.”
In an email, Engelbrecht said the group shared promising early leads with Heckman while it continued to gather information. She acknowledged that her publicist sought help in posting the video.
She denied that True the Vote gave Yacoubian and Crawford nothing to work with, saying that the group’s own publicists were “working non-stop” at the time to issue news releases on its activities. “The fact is that [neither] Dikran nor Tom seemed interested in actually doing anything,” she wrote.
In any case, Crawford’s exasperation was growing.
“We cannot get ANY information from her or her team,” he wrote in a Nov. 15 email to Eshelman. “It goes on and on like this.”
Abandoned efforts
As True the Vote struggled to produce solid whistleblower accounts, its lawsuits also failed to gain traction. Bopp, who serves as the group’s general counsel, told The Post that he reached out to Trump and his legal team with a proposal: that they join forces.
In phone conversations with Sekulow and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorneys, Bopp said he urged the Trump legal team to adopt True the Vote’s legal strategy, which hinged on persuading a federal judge to open up access to voter rolls.
“It was becoming clear to me that the lawsuits we filed were not getting the attention they needed” from judges, Bopp said in an interview. “And the Trump legal effort was a disaster, both their strategy and the tactics.”
Bopp said Sekulow and Giuliani supported the proposal and told him they would recommend it to Trump.
Bopp said that, at Sekulow’s request, he briefed a group of Trump allies in a phone call that included Sekulow, Graham and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for Graham and Hannity declined to comment. Sekulow wrote in a text message: “I do not disclose discussions that I may have had on legal matters on behalf of a client.”
Bopp said that on the morning of Nov. 15 he spoke to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, and sent him a written proposal about True the Vote’s legal approach. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.
According to Bopp, Meadows said he would speak to Trump and get back to Bopp by 3 p.m. that day. But the call never came.
The following day, Bopp decided to abandon all four of True the Vote’s lawsuits, concluding that without the campaign’s involvement the suits had little chance of advancing before the election was to be certified in December. The lawsuits were just one component of the operation Eshelman was funding, but True the Vote had pitched them as critical to overturning the election results.
Bopp told Eshelman about the decision that day, during a tense phone call.
Eshelman was furious, according to court documents and interviews.
On Nov. 17, he sent Engelbrecht an email demanding the return of his money. True the Vote offered on Nov. 23 to return $1 million to settle the matter. Eshelman filed his first lawsuit two days later, saying the group had failed to provide an accounting of how the remainder of his money had been spent.
He withdrew the federal lawsuit on Feb. 1 and filed the suit in Texas state court.
None of Eshelman’s money has been returned, court documents show.
Bopp told The Post his firm ultimately billed True the Vote roughly $300,000 — more than half its retainer — for its work on the four lawsuits. He said he withdrew them because he “could see they were not going to accomplish anything.”
Overall, the experience left several people who were involved in the effort unconvinced that there ever was evidence of voter fraud to be discovered.
Even Phillips, the former True the Vote board member, said he has doubts about the impact of any irregularities. “I don’t know if there was enough to make a difference in the presidential election,” he said.
Crawford said: “I believe very much that Biden won and that anything we saw in terms of irregularities was not widespread enough to have changed the outcome.”
Eshelman said he still believes there was “some misbehavior” in the election. “But do I believe it might have risen to a degree that would change the electoral outcome?” he said. “I don’t know.”
True the Vote and Eshelman believed that finding people in swing states with vivid tales of voter fraud would be a crucial part of the project’s success, according to emails. Crawford gave Eshelman regular updates about True the Vote’s progress on that front.
Catherine Engelbrecht - SmarmSpace native
Later that day, Crawford reported to the financier that a man in Yuma, Ariz., had come to True the Vote with allegations of large-scale “ballot harvesting” by Democrats in the region. “Please God let his story pan out,” Crawford wrote.
“Sensational,” Eshelman replied, adding that he was “still committed to putting in big money” if progress was made.
While it scrutinized the accounts of purported whistleblowers, True the Vote also sought to prove fraud through data analysis. Bopp’s lawsuits promised “expert reports” comparing vote tallies with registration databases and other records. True the Vote, he wrote, had “persons with such expertise and data-analysis software already in place.”
Engelbrecht’s Validate the Vote plan, an exhibit in the lawsuit, budgeted $1.75 million for “data and research” work. It was to be led by a company whose name evoked the shadowy world of intelligence operations: OPSEC Group LLC.
Records show that OPSEC had been formed less than two months earlier in Alabama by Gregg Phillips, a former True the Vote board member whose 2016 tweet was the source of the false claim that Trump would have won the popular vote that year but for millions of fraudulent votes by undocumented immigrants.
Phillips, 60, and Engelbrecht are business partners in a health-care company. Eshelman alleges in a legal filing — without providing evidence — that the two are also lovers.
In an interview, Phillips denied any such romantic relationship. Engelbrecht declined to comment on the allegation, which was first reported by the Intercept in partnership with the website Type Investigations.
On Nov. 12, Eshelman and Crawford joined a conference call with Engelbrecht and Bopp to hear an update on the data analysis and other aspects of the legal plan. “I was encouraged,” Eshelman wrote in an email to Crawford a couple of hours later, but noted: “You did not really give details on whistleblowers. Where are we on that?”
Crawford replied that three whistleblower complaints, including the Yuma allegation, had survived initial screening.
The following day, Eshelman wired another $500,000 to True the Vote.
'We cannot get ANY information'
On that day, Nov. 13, Engelbrecht received a bill for a $1 million publicity campaign from Old Town Digital Agency, an online advertising firm whose founder, Dikran Yacoubian, has worked in Republican politics on and off since the 1990s. Yacoubian had worked with Eshelman and helped introduce him to True the Vote. Eshelman and Crawford then brought Yacoubian on to help plan a publicity campaign.
Most of the money was to cover the upfront costs of online ads to trumpet True the Vote’s fraud findings, according to Yacoubian. The rest, he said, was to be spent on retainers for Republican consultants who would push the project’s findings through political and media channels.
Yacoubian said he had already begun securing the services of these consultants, including Robert Heckman, a longtime strategist for Graham. Yacoubian hoped Heckman would pass the group’s findings on to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham then chaired.
But Engelbrecht didn’t pay the $1 million bill, saying later in an email to Eshelman’s handpicked firm that it had no contractual agreement with True the Vote and had not provided “any services.”
Her refusal to pay contributed to an emerging rift between Engelbrecht and Crawford, who at the same time was growing frustrated by what he described as the group’s vague and ever-shifting leads.
“There was a guy in Georgia who claimed to be the bagman for Stacey Abrams,” Crawford told The Post. “It was, ‘We’re getting an affidavit,’ and then it was, ‘He ran away and we can’t find him.’ ”
The “ballot harvesting” whistleblower in Yuma turned out to have already contacted law enforcement, according to the person familiar with the group’s operations. Two people were later indicted on a charge of submitting votes for other people — but during August’s primary, not the general election.
Yacoubian, too, was frustrated that True the Vote’s whistleblowers were not materializing. “I really didn’t get to do, on the promotion side, anything — because there wasn’t anything to promote,” he said in an interview.
At one point, a publicist working for Engelbrecht instead sent Yacoubian an eight-minute video titled “Who Is Catherine Engelbrecht?” that she wanted posted online.
Engelbrecht continued to make promises about whistleblowers, claiming in a Nov. 14 email to Eshelman: “We are writing up the briefs on these individuals now to give Senator Graham and Cruz.”
Heckman, the veteran Graham consultant, said he listened to a pair of conference-call presentations from Engelbrecht and Phillips but came away so unimpressed that he never even mentioned the effort to Graham. “I was asked to determine whether there was any legitimate evidence there,” he told The Post. “My conclusion was there wasn’t.”
In an email, Engelbrecht said the group shared promising early leads with Heckman while it continued to gather information. She acknowledged that her publicist sought help in posting the video.
She denied that True the Vote gave Yacoubian and Crawford nothing to work with, saying that the group’s own publicists were “working non-stop” at the time to issue news releases on its activities. “The fact is that [neither] Dikran nor Tom seemed interested in actually doing anything,” she wrote.
In any case, Crawford’s exasperation was growing.
“We cannot get ANY information from her or her team,” he wrote in a Nov. 15 email to Eshelman. “It goes on and on like this.”
Abandoned efforts
As True the Vote struggled to produce solid whistleblower accounts, its lawsuits also failed to gain traction. Bopp, who serves as the group’s general counsel, told The Post that he reached out to Trump and his legal team with a proposal: that they join forces.
In phone conversations with Sekulow and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorneys, Bopp said he urged the Trump legal team to adopt True the Vote’s legal strategy, which hinged on persuading a federal judge to open up access to voter rolls.
“It was becoming clear to me that the lawsuits we filed were not getting the attention they needed” from judges, Bopp said in an interview. “And the Trump legal effort was a disaster, both their strategy and the tactics.”
Bopp said Sekulow and Giuliani supported the proposal and told him they would recommend it to Trump.
Bopp said that, at Sekulow’s request, he briefed a group of Trump allies in a phone call that included Sekulow, Graham and Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment. Representatives for Graham and Hannity declined to comment. Sekulow wrote in a text message: “I do not disclose discussions that I may have had on legal matters on behalf of a client.”
Bopp said that on the morning of Nov. 15 he spoke to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, and sent him a written proposal about True the Vote’s legal approach. A spokesman for Meadows declined to comment.
According to Bopp, Meadows said he would speak to Trump and get back to Bopp by 3 p.m. that day. But the call never came.
The following day, Bopp decided to abandon all four of True the Vote’s lawsuits, concluding that without the campaign’s involvement the suits had little chance of advancing before the election was to be certified in December. The lawsuits were just one component of the operation Eshelman was funding, but True the Vote had pitched them as critical to overturning the election results.
Bopp told Eshelman about the decision that day, during a tense phone call.
Eshelman was furious, according to court documents and interviews.
On Nov. 17, he sent Engelbrecht an email demanding the return of his money. True the Vote offered on Nov. 23 to return $1 million to settle the matter. Eshelman filed his first lawsuit two days later, saying the group had failed to provide an accounting of how the remainder of his money had been spent.
He withdrew the federal lawsuit on Feb. 1 and filed the suit in Texas state court.
None of Eshelman’s money has been returned, court documents show.
Bopp told The Post his firm ultimately billed True the Vote roughly $300,000 — more than half its retainer — for its work on the four lawsuits. He said he withdrew them because he “could see they were not going to accomplish anything.”
Overall, the experience left several people who were involved in the effort unconvinced that there ever was evidence of voter fraud to be discovered.
Even Phillips, the former True the Vote board member, said he has doubts about the impact of any irregularities. “I don’t know if there was enough to make a difference in the presidential election,” he said.
Crawford said: “I believe very much that Biden won and that anything we saw in terms of irregularities was not widespread enough to have changed the outcome.”
Eshelman said he still believes there was “some misbehavior” in the election. “But do I believe it might have risen to a degree that would change the electoral outcome?” he said. “I don’t know.”
Sometimes the "smart money" leads to some pretty stoopid places.
And not that I expect anything to come of it, but given the investigation launched by DA Fani Willis in Georgia, Lindsey Graham could be in bigger trouble than previously thought. That one bears watching.
Feb 15, 2021
COVID-19 Update
World
USA
Vaccination Scorecard
Mardi Gras is canceled, so residents are making their homes into floats: ‘New Orleans doesn’t know how to do anything halfway’
Megan Boudreaux was feeling down three months ago after she learned that New Orleans wasn’t going to issue Mardi Gras parade permits for 2021 because of the pandemic.
The annual holiday wouldn’t be the same, she said, without the elaborate floats made months in advance of Fat Tuesday’s 50-plus parades.
“I decided, ‘Well, okay then, I’m going to decorate my house instead, pull some beads out of the attic and throw them at the neighbors,” said Boudreaux, 38, who works as an insurance agent in New Orleans.
She posted her idea on Twitter, thinking that she might inspire a few of her friends to do the same for this year’s Mardi Gras on Feb. 16.
“Last year, I made a bunch of origami flowers that kiddo and I passed out to people while we wandered around the French Quarter,” Boudreaux wrote on Nov. 17. “Tempted to continue the theme, turn the whole house into a flower float and pass out flowers to the neighbors while I drink all day.”
A few hours later, she posted an update:
“It’s decided. We’re doing this. Turn your house into a float and throw all the beads from your attic at your neighbors walking by. #mardigras2021.”
Boudreaux also posted her plans on her Facebook page. Two days later she had 1,000 new followers.
“Everyone loved the idea and wanted to jump in to make their own house floats,” she said. “A shop owner decided to call her theme Yardi Gras, and it just exploded from there.”
Boudreaux became the Mardi Gras house float coordinator overnight, she said. More than 3,000 homes are now decked out for the parade-at-home holiday, and local hip-hop and rap legend Big Freedia has signed on as grand marshal.
Boudreaux has a webpage, Krewe of House Floats, where people can keep up with it all and donate to the Greater New Orleans Foundation to help restaurant and hotel employees affected by the pandemic. With Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s recent announcement that all bars will be closed for Mardi Gras weekend, people in New Orleans are relieved to have an outlet for their celebratory spirit, she said.
“A lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this. New Orleans doesn’t know how to do anything halfway,” noted Boudreaux, who lives in the city’s Algiers Point neighborhood near the French Quarter with her husband, Allen, and 6-year-old daughter, Adela.
Last year, the city’s Mardi Gras parades became coronavirus superspreader events when 1.5 million people showed up to party and made the city an early hot spot, Boudreaux said.
“Two weeks after Mardi Gras, we were all in lockdown,” she said.
There’s an online map so people can drive by the house floats, which “helps us to keep our traditions going but makes sure it’s safe,” she said.
Boudreaux spent weeks with a glue gun and paint brush to deck out her own house to resemble a ship she christened the USS House Float. Other themes include life-size dinosaurs, a tribute to “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek and a home decorated with a festive squid and octopus.
Zac Hobbs and his wife, Gail Gainey, are the creators of the squid display, which they titled “Mystic Moai and the Escape From Kraken Coven.”
“My wife is a biologist who loves squid, and I love tiki stuff, so we decided to tie them in together,” said Hobbs, 43, who works as a graphic designer — a perfect occupation, it turns out, for creating a Yardi Gras house float.
“It took us a month and a half to get it done, and we’ve been fighting windstorms and rain and had to rebuild a few things,” he said. “Our squid is now wearing a ‘Karate Kid’ headband because his head blew off in the wind.”
In the Bayou St. John neighborhood, speech pathologist Victoria Gilberti decided to make a monarch butterfly theme, while Meghan Davis, a military contractor in the Old Aurora community, went with a Queen of Hearts motif.
Davis, who supplemented her income as a Mardi Gras body painter before the pandemic, decided to use her talents to paint a giant deck of cards this year.
“It’s been really uplifting to see how many people are cheering us on,” Davis, 35, said. “Next year, I hope to be back to body painting, but this is a great way to celebrate without pouring our energy into the usual parades and marathon drinking.”
Fred and Kristina Teran decided to make a giant yellow rubber duck for their front porch to replicate one of the floats they had helped build for a past parade. Their theme this year is: “It’s Mardi Gras Time and We Don’t Give a Duck!”
“We were mourning the ability to embrace who we are when we heard about Krewe of House Floats and got to work,” said Fred Teran, 49, a doctor who works with covid-19 patients.
Many of the house floats have musical themes to tie in with the traditional Mardi Gras arts scene.
The St. Roch neighborhood decided on the theme “Roch and Roll,” and resident Tara Jill Ciccarone quickly went to work on her “Remember Rock and Roll Radio?” display.
Using her picket fence as a canvas, she scoured her house for whatever she could find to create gold records as float “wheels,” then crafted some boomboxes out of plastic foam. She finished up her house float with a few mannequins and twinkling lights.
“I was getting depressed about everything being shut down for the pandemic, so this has been a wonderful thing to be involved in,” Ciccarone, 45, said. “It’s all so organic and spontaneous — just like the spirit of New Orleans.”
Nicki Gilbert settled on a “Purple Rain” theme in honor of Prince, her favorite pop star. Her house was already painted purple, so she simply added some life-size cutouts, silver doves, shiny purple and gold trim and a bubble machine.
“It really pops in the evening when the music is blaring,” said Gilbert, 40, who works for an online concert venue.
“They can take our Mardi Gras parade away, but they can’t keep Mardi Gras from beating in our hearts,” she said.
In a normal year, Terri Bird and Kessinger Valente said they would dress up as Elvis and Priscilla Presley and join the crew of the Rolling Elvi on a parade route. Not to be deterred in the era of covid, they gave their house an Elvi theme instead.
“We usually have a crew of about 150 Elvi and a Priscilla float with around 30 Priscillas,” said Bird, 57, who works as a waitress in the French Quarter.
She and Valente now plan to throw pink Cadillac beads, fuzzy dice and Elvis voodoo dolls to people who come by their house this year.
“We have an attic filled with Mardi Gras ‘throws’ that we’ve collected over the years,” Bird said. “This is the perfect excuse to use them. I even have some blowup guitars to throw to people who are really dressed up in the spirit of Mardi Gras.”
Boudreaux said it would be fine with her if the Yardi Gras spirit continues year after year, even after regular festivities hopefully resume next February in New Orleans.
“At this point, it’s my baby,” she said. “We might not get thousands of house floats, but I think it will continue. My feeling is, ‘Why not pull out all the stops?’”
New Cases: 292,613 (⬆︎ .27%)
New Deaths: 6,910 (⬆︎ .29%)
USA
New Cases: 64,297 (⬆︎ .23%)
New Deaths: 1,111 (⬆︎ .22%)
Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 38.7 million
Total Priority Population: 31.7%
Total Population: 11.6%
Some semi-dandy news - the Rolling 7-day Average for both Daily New Deaths and Daily New Cases is down significantly from last month (not quite 30 days ago).
⬇︎ 25%
⬇︎ 64%
Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.
Mardi Gras is canceled, so residents are making their homes into floats: ‘New Orleans doesn’t know how to do anything halfway’
Megan Boudreaux was feeling down three months ago after she learned that New Orleans wasn’t going to issue Mardi Gras parade permits for 2021 because of the pandemic.
The annual holiday wouldn’t be the same, she said, without the elaborate floats made months in advance of Fat Tuesday’s 50-plus parades.
“I decided, ‘Well, okay then, I’m going to decorate my house instead, pull some beads out of the attic and throw them at the neighbors,” said Boudreaux, 38, who works as an insurance agent in New Orleans.
She posted her idea on Twitter, thinking that she might inspire a few of her friends to do the same for this year’s Mardi Gras on Feb. 16.
“Last year, I made a bunch of origami flowers that kiddo and I passed out to people while we wandered around the French Quarter,” Boudreaux wrote on Nov. 17. “Tempted to continue the theme, turn the whole house into a flower float and pass out flowers to the neighbors while I drink all day.”
A few hours later, she posted an update:
“It’s decided. We’re doing this. Turn your house into a float and throw all the beads from your attic at your neighbors walking by. #mardigras2021.”
Boudreaux also posted her plans on her Facebook page. Two days later she had 1,000 new followers.
“Everyone loved the idea and wanted to jump in to make their own house floats,” she said. “A shop owner decided to call her theme Yardi Gras, and it just exploded from there.”
Boudreaux became the Mardi Gras house float coordinator overnight, she said. More than 3,000 homes are now decked out for the parade-at-home holiday, and local hip-hop and rap legend Big Freedia has signed on as grand marshal.
Boudreaux has a webpage, Krewe of House Floats, where people can keep up with it all and donate to the Greater New Orleans Foundation to help restaurant and hotel employees affected by the pandemic. With Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s recent announcement that all bars will be closed for Mardi Gras weekend, people in New Orleans are relieved to have an outlet for their celebratory spirit, she said.
“A lot of blood, sweat and tears has gone into this. New Orleans doesn’t know how to do anything halfway,” noted Boudreaux, who lives in the city’s Algiers Point neighborhood near the French Quarter with her husband, Allen, and 6-year-old daughter, Adela.
Last year, the city’s Mardi Gras parades became coronavirus superspreader events when 1.5 million people showed up to party and made the city an early hot spot, Boudreaux said.
“Two weeks after Mardi Gras, we were all in lockdown,” she said.
There’s an online map so people can drive by the house floats, which “helps us to keep our traditions going but makes sure it’s safe,” she said.
Boudreaux spent weeks with a glue gun and paint brush to deck out her own house to resemble a ship she christened the USS House Float. Other themes include life-size dinosaurs, a tribute to “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek and a home decorated with a festive squid and octopus.
Zac Hobbs and his wife, Gail Gainey, are the creators of the squid display, which they titled “Mystic Moai and the Escape From Kraken Coven.”
“My wife is a biologist who loves squid, and I love tiki stuff, so we decided to tie them in together,” said Hobbs, 43, who works as a graphic designer — a perfect occupation, it turns out, for creating a Yardi Gras house float.
“It took us a month and a half to get it done, and we’ve been fighting windstorms and rain and had to rebuild a few things,” he said. “Our squid is now wearing a ‘Karate Kid’ headband because his head blew off in the wind.”
In the Bayou St. John neighborhood, speech pathologist Victoria Gilberti decided to make a monarch butterfly theme, while Meghan Davis, a military contractor in the Old Aurora community, went with a Queen of Hearts motif.
Davis, who supplemented her income as a Mardi Gras body painter before the pandemic, decided to use her talents to paint a giant deck of cards this year.
“It’s been really uplifting to see how many people are cheering us on,” Davis, 35, said. “Next year, I hope to be back to body painting, but this is a great way to celebrate without pouring our energy into the usual parades and marathon drinking.”
Fred and Kristina Teran decided to make a giant yellow rubber duck for their front porch to replicate one of the floats they had helped build for a past parade. Their theme this year is: “It’s Mardi Gras Time and We Don’t Give a Duck!”
“We were mourning the ability to embrace who we are when we heard about Krewe of House Floats and got to work,” said Fred Teran, 49, a doctor who works with covid-19 patients.
Many of the house floats have musical themes to tie in with the traditional Mardi Gras arts scene.
The St. Roch neighborhood decided on the theme “Roch and Roll,” and resident Tara Jill Ciccarone quickly went to work on her “Remember Rock and Roll Radio?” display.
Using her picket fence as a canvas, she scoured her house for whatever she could find to create gold records as float “wheels,” then crafted some boomboxes out of plastic foam. She finished up her house float with a few mannequins and twinkling lights.
“I was getting depressed about everything being shut down for the pandemic, so this has been a wonderful thing to be involved in,” Ciccarone, 45, said. “It’s all so organic and spontaneous — just like the spirit of New Orleans.”
Nicki Gilbert settled on a “Purple Rain” theme in honor of Prince, her favorite pop star. Her house was already painted purple, so she simply added some life-size cutouts, silver doves, shiny purple and gold trim and a bubble machine.
“It really pops in the evening when the music is blaring,” said Gilbert, 40, who works for an online concert venue.
“They can take our Mardi Gras parade away, but they can’t keep Mardi Gras from beating in our hearts,” she said.
In a normal year, Terri Bird and Kessinger Valente said they would dress up as Elvis and Priscilla Presley and join the crew of the Rolling Elvi on a parade route. Not to be deterred in the era of covid, they gave their house an Elvi theme instead.
“We usually have a crew of about 150 Elvi and a Priscilla float with around 30 Priscillas,” said Bird, 57, who works as a waitress in the French Quarter.
She and Valente now plan to throw pink Cadillac beads, fuzzy dice and Elvis voodoo dolls to people who come by their house this year.
“We have an attic filled with Mardi Gras ‘throws’ that we’ve collected over the years,” Bird said. “This is the perfect excuse to use them. I even have some blowup guitars to throw to people who are really dressed up in the spirit of Mardi Gras.”
Boudreaux said it would be fine with her if the Yardi Gras spirit continues year after year, even after regular festivities hopefully resume next February in New Orleans.
“At this point, it’s my baby,” she said. “We might not get thousands of house floats, but I think it will continue. My feeling is, ‘Why not pull out all the stops?’”
Today's Tweet
Mike van der Veen defends his lord and master from the evil hordes of Democrats bent on defiling our beloved democracy (by expecting everybody to play by the fucking rules), and then helps himself to a few souvenirs.
Trump's impeachment lawyer steals coasters from the Senate chamber pic.twitter.com/JAbXjKBxBf
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) February 15, 2021
Feb 14, 2021
How It Should Be
How it was once, and how it can be again.
Carson McKee - Covering Jesse Collin Young - Sunlight
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