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Multiple fire departments responded to a fire Wednesday afternoon at the old Pure Oil facility, which used to be an oil field plant. The facility is located on the east side of Gueydan. While no official cause has been given, it is believed that lightning struck a battery and ignited one of the tanks. Officials on the scene were concerned about other tanks catching fire. No injuries have been reported.

CROWLEY — Elder Outreach and Team Mergist are combining efforts to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the “Longest Bingo Game” on record.
“While our application for the world record is still in the process of being approved, we are continuing to move forward like the true record-holders we are,” said Michele Veillon, program director for Elder Outreach. “At the close of our event, we are determined to declare victory.”
The event will be held in the Southwind Healthcare and Rehabilitation Activity Center beginning at 3 p.m. Wednesday, June 20. The session will end at 3 p.m. Thursday, June 21.
“We are committing to play Bingo for 24 consecutive hours to coincide with the Alzheimer’s Association’s signature event, The Longest Day,” Veillon explained. “All proceeds will be donated directly to the Alzheimer’s Association.”
The Alzheimer’s Association’s Longest Day — held on the actual longest day of the year, the summer solstice — honors the strength, passion and endurance of those living with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers.
“We will be spending the longest day of the year playing Bingo to do our part in helping to bring awareness about this disease and to find a cure for Alzheimer’s,” said Veillon.
Veillon and her co-chair, Christine Payton of Team Mergist, one of the top Alzheimer’s fundraisers in the state, are working on the logistics of the 24-hour Bingo extravaganza.
Residents of six Elder Outreach communities will be participating in the event. Those include Southwind Healthcare and Rehabilitation, Southwind Senior Living Suites and Encore Healthcare and Rehabilitation, all of Crowley; Eastridge Senior Living Suites and Eastridge Nursing and Rehabilitation, both of Abbeville; and Pelican Pointe Healthcare and Rehabilitation of Maurice.
“We’re not going to make our residents sit there and play Bingo for 24 hour,” Veillon laughed. “However, the event is not really open to the general public. To participate, you have to be either a sponsor, a volunteer or make a donation.”
Those donations can include non-cash items valued at least $10 which will be awarded as prizes for the games.
Veillon said most of the late-night and early-morning game will be played by volunteers and sponsors. “But if a (Southwind) resident can’t sleep and wants to come play, that’ll be fine,” she added.
Priority play time during the hours of 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. on June 20 and 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 21 will be given to residents of all Elder Outreach / Healthcare Partner communities, Team Mergist members, title sponsors, and “Power Hour” sponsors.
A number of “celebrity” callers will be participating and various “theme hours” will be observed throughout the event.
Twenty-five players will be scheduled to play during all hours of the event, however, players may be added if space is available.
There will be a 1- to 2-hour “playtime limit” on each player with the exception of residents and those with sponsorship benefits.
A number of different sponsorship levels are available. Anyone wanting to make a donation should contact Veillon at (337) 258-6398 or mveillon@premierafs.com; or Payton at (337) 254-8271.

The elevated span of Swamp Expressway that carries I-10 across the Atchafalaya Basin is a remarkable thing, but there were plans afoot to build an even more remarkable roadway across the huge wetland well before I-10 was even on the drawing boards.
In fact, the Sunshine Bridge across the Mississippi River near Donaldsonville was originally conceived as part of a toll road that would run from Lafayette through St. Martin, Iberville, Ascension, and St. James parishes to Lutcher, where it would cross the river and link to the Airline Highway and New Orleans.
A coalition of leaders from the parishes authorized engineers to start planning the million-dollar-a-mile highway across the Basin in early January 1953.
Ernest M. Loeb, who represented the company that would handle the bonds to finance the highway, said the project would cost so much because the road would pass through “considerable bayou country” and require a major new bridge over the Mississippi and lesser crossings over 17 other bayous and rivers.
Nonetheless, he said, it would be worth the expense because it would cut two or three hours off the driving time from most south Louisiana communities to New Orleans.
Part of the savings in travel time would come about because the toll road was to be built to Interstate standards, before Interstate standards had even been formed.
“The highway will have no grade crossings or direct traffic intersections and will bypass all towns,” the planners told the press. “Cars should be able to maintain constant speeds of 65 to 70 miles per hour.”
The late Judge Kaliste Saloom Jr. was the legal advisor for the toll road, which was to be called the Acadian Throughway. He said in an interview some years ago that the main reasons it didn’t happen were those old Louisiana bugaboos, politics and money.
“We had $110 million in revenue bonds lined up to build the road,” he recalled, “but the bond people wanted assurance that the state would not come along and build a free road close to our toll road and jeopardize its revenue. There was some history for that. In the 1930s, Huey Long built a free road next to a toll road from New Orleans to Slidell because he got into a political fight with the mayor of New Orleans. The bond people wanted assurances that there would be none of that.
“We went to visit Earl Long, who had just replaced Gov. Bob Kennon, and Earl gave us assurances that he would not build a free road. He said he didn’t have the money to do it even if he wanted to.”
But Uncle Earl wouldn’t put that down on paper. He said signing something might give the impression that he endorsed a toll road and that could cause him political trouble.
Without a firm commitment from the state, lenders were reluctant to put up the big money needed for the Acadian Throughway.
Judge Saloom thought the financial troubles could have been overcome eventually, but that the back-and-forth with the state delayed the project too long. While the squabbling in Louisiana was going on, President Eisenhower unveiled his plan to build an Interstate highway system.
That still might not have been fatal to the toll road, except for more politics and maneuvering.
Ike’s original plan was to link every community in the United States with a population of 50,000 people or more to its state capital. At that time, Lafayette had not taken off on its oil-fueled building spree and didn’t have that population. That meant it wouldn’t automatically be linked to the federal road system. The original design for I-10 followed the already existing U.S. 190 through St. Landry Parish.
That was far enough north of its proposed route that the toll road might still have been feasible.
But then congressmen T.A. Thompson and Ed Willis got the Interstate moved to the south, to its present route through Lafayette, and there was no way that a toll road that close to a major, free highway could have generated the traffic and income needed to satisfy the lenders.
Before the decision was finally made to abandon the toll road plan, however, engineers had already designed a bridge across the Mississippi at Lutcher. That was the design used when Gov. Jimmy Davis built the bridge named for his famous song, “You are My Sunshine.”
When it was built in the 1960s, that bridge was roundly criticized because it connected nothing but sprawling cane fields on either side of the river. Folks called it “a bridge to nowhere.”
But those critics forgot that the Sunshine Bridge was once a part of the first ambitious plan to span the Atchafalaya Basin with a major roadway — a plan, incidentally, very much like one that is regularly bandied about every hurricane season when evacuation planners yearn for another major road to help move traffic out of harm’s way.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.