Louisiana

Louisiana is one of the southern states of the United States; Baton Rouge is its capital, and New Orleans is its largest city. Louisiana is the only U.S. state to refer to its political subdivisions as parishes instead of counties. Named after Louis XIV (king of France 1643–1715), the state was once part of the French colonial empire. The state consists of an upland region and an alluvial region of low swamp, coastal marsh, beaches, and barrier islands, which lie principally along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The state is frequently subjected to tropical cyclones and vulnerable to major hurricane strikes. The New Orleans area was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the federal levee system failed, the worst civil engineering disaster in U.S. history. Over 1,500 people died, and 80 percent of the city was flooded. New Orleans remains one of the largest and busiest ports in the world, the region is key to the U.S. oil refining and petrochemical industries and is a corporate base for onshore and offshore petroleum and natural gas production. Concerns over water contamination from the petroleum industry produced regulations ranging from [Page 483]a state law in 1910 to forbid discharges of oil that might damage rice crops to coordinated efforts by several federal agencies in 2010 to remediate damage to the state's coastline by oil spilled in British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon disaster. The state's main agricultural products include seafood (Louisiana supplies most of the world's crawfish) and other land-based staples—the seafood industry directly provides around 16,000 jobs.