Carnival season hailed despite final frigid Fat Tuesday

As the spirited Mardi Gras winds down into the solemn Lenten season, residents reflected on the six Tri-City area parades.
Denise Bostic, chairman of the Krewe of Hephaestus, said the parade went off without a hitch, despite the dreary weather on Fat Tuesday.
“We were very pleased with how it went. There were people out on the street who braved the stormy, cold weather,” Bostic said, adding that they enabled the riders, king, queen and captain to have a good Mardi Gras season.
“We certainly would have preferred a beautiful, sunny day. The krewe came together and … made it as comfortable for the riders as possible,” she said.
All of the children scheduled to ride did so, with the krewe checking on them frequently to make sure they weren’t too cold, she said. Even a couple of bands arrived from Baton Rouge to march, but the krewe told them they didn’t have to in light of the weather conditions.
“It’s amazing how people pulled together and made the best of a situation that wasn’t ideal,” Bostic said.
Morgan City Police Chief Mike Banks said that crowds were well-behaved during the five-day stretch of carnival with no major incidents along the parade routes. Crowds were light Tuesday because of the inclement weather, he added.
The Siracusa-Greenwood Parade was canceled due to the bad weather Tuesday. Instead, parade organizers hosted a barbecue chicken meal for about 20 to 30 people inside the Siracusaville Recreation Center.
Ideal weather greeted the Krewe of Adonis Friday night in Morgan City and continued through the weekend for the krewes of Dionysus in Berwick on Saturday and Galatea and Nike in Morgan City Sunday.
This year’s popular trinkets at the different parades included stuffed animals and other toys, glow-in-the-dark items and Saints footballs, along with the standard cups and beads.
The crowds were orderly with a solid contingent of police on hand just in case things got unruly.
Berwick Police Chief James Richard said, “There were no complaints during the parade time, no arrests, no criminal activity of any kind. I was very pleased to see everything went well ... Typically we have some complaints after the parade, but we had nothing. It went well.”
At Galatea, the color guard of the U.S. Coast Guard in Morgan City marched with flags near the head of the parade Sunday afternoon. Marching bands from Glen Oaks High in Baton Rouge and Central Magnet High in Beaumont, Texas, were among the performers marching with the krewe. The bands’ percussions could be heard blocks away heralding the approach of the krewe as it made its way through Morgan City.
Louis Tamporello, a Morgan City councilman, was a driver for the Krewe of Galatea. This year’s parade “was one of the biggest if not the biggest in quite some time … It was a good two-hour parade,” he said.
At Patterson’s Krewe of Amani parade the floats were joined by fancy cars, four-wheelers and even a horse-riding contingent from New Iberia toward the rear.
There was no shortage of beads, with some floats throwing entire packages of beads in the direction of the crowd. While there did not appear to be as many stuffed animals as were thrown in earlier parades in Morgan City and Berwick, some were tossed that were as big as the children pleading for them.