"The entire community is now a toxic waste dump"
The Gulf Coast is drowning in a poisonous stew, people are dying from
waterborne bacteria, and federal funds have been drained by years of
pro-industry policies. Katrina is one of the worst environmental
catastrophes in U.S. history.
By Rebecca Clarren
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/09/wasteland/print.html
Sept. 9, 2005 | From 500 feet in the air, Chris Wells, a geographer with
the U.S. Geological Survey, looked with dismay on the landscape pounded and
then abandoned by Hurricane Katrina. As Wells flew on Wednesday above the
Louisiana coastline, across New Orleans, the marshlands south of the city,
and over Mississippi, nearly every tree was snapped, their limbs twisted
around in a braid, the bark shredded right off the trunk. The marshland
below looked as though somebody had taken a spatula and scraped away the
marsh grasses, leaving a sea of mud. Aside from a number of shorebirds, and
one 8-foot alligator swimming about 20 miles offshore, Wells saw no
wildlife. What he did see were streaks of oil, some miles long and 200
yards wide.
"It was on any body of water of any significance," he says. Hundreds of
thousands of inland acres are covered with a spotty sheen of oil. "The
landscape right now is absolutely bizarre and unreal," Wells says, from his
home in Lafayette, La. "It's emotionally draining. Even if nobody was hurt,
it's heartbreaking to see what has happened to the environment."
Wells suspects that much of the oil has drained from thousands of boats
lying at the bottom of countless bayous, canals, and the ocean. Within the
impacted area are at least 2,200 underground fuel tanks, many potentially
ruptured, says Rodney Mallett, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of
Environmental Quality. Officials also predict that thousands of cars, lawn
mowers and weed-eaters are also submerged, leaking gas and oil into the
waterways.
In addition, tens of thousands of barrels of oil have spilled from
refineries and drilling rigs in at least 13 sites between Lake
Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico. Along the coast, Katrina damaged 58
drilling rigs and platforms in the Gulf, according to
http://Rigzone.com
http://www.rigzone.com an oil and gas industry Web site. At least one
rig has sunk and another was swept 66 miles through the gulf before washing
up on Dauphin Island. It remains unclear how badly the hundreds of
underwater pipelines connecting the oil to shore have been damaged.
Yet the destruction that Wells witnessed from the sky is only the most
visible element of a poisonous stew bubbling in Katrina's wake. On
Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that bacteria in
the water flooding Gulf Coast areas are at 10 times the agency's standard
for human health, and already four people have died from waterborne
bacteria.
Although the samples are from flooded neighborhoods and not heavily
industrialized zones, officials predict that the impact zone's water is
laced with a slew of toxic chemicals such as lead, PCBs and herbicides.
This sludge will eventually settle onto the soil and filter into the
groundwater below, says Gina Solomon, M.D., a senior scientist at the
Natural Resources Defense Council. While it may be too early to predict the
levels of total contamination, many of these chemicals are known to cause
cancer, birth defects or neurological problems.
With human life still hanging in the balance and people desperate for food,
water and shelter, public officials have understandably placed the
environment in the back seat of priorities.
Yet it's become apparent that federal and state agencies had no plans in
place to deal with the environmental impact of the storm and are now
scrambling to know where to even begin to address the catastrophe. What's
also become clear is that Superfund, the federal till for environmental
cleanup, notably for Louisiana and Mississippi, has run dry, due in large
part to anti-tax and anti-regulation policies favorable to oil and chemical
industries.
"Chemical spills that would normally seem horrible on their own are dwarfed
by the huge scale of this disaster," says Solomon. "Right now, people quite
rightly are focusing on getting food and water and shelter for the victims,
but the environmental mess and contamination could haunt this area for many
years to come."
Aside from oil spills, the list of other potentially toxic ingredients in
the water drags on and on. The floodwaters in Louisiana alone have hit
nearly 160,000 homes, most stocking shelves of household cleaning products.
In piles of debris as wide as three miles along the Mississippi coast, lead
paint and asbestos cling to the remnants of old buildings.
Louis Skrmetta runs a family business started by his grandfather in the
1920s, sailing tourists out to Gulf Islands National Seashore. He weathered
Katrina in the back bay of Biloxi in his boat, with about 500 other ships,
all trying to take shelter from the storm. Now, the 400 shrimp boats,
yachts, and workboats that survived the storm are all crammed into a bayou
250 feet wide and quarter-mile long, and it's not a pretty sight.
"All I see is filthy nasty brown water," Skrmetta says. "Everyone is
dumping raw sewage overboard. And this is only boats from the Gulfport
area. I would imagine that every city along the coast has the same
situation. It's going to be a nightmare."
In addition to raw sewage flowing from what are now makeshift houseboats,
the EPA estimates that the more than 200 sewage treatment facilities in the
impact zone are nearly all out of order, causing backed-up sewage to leak.
Test results released Sept. 7 found that levels of E. coli greatly exceed
the EPA's recommended levels. Already countless people are suffering from
diarrhea. Vibrio vulnificus, a gastrointestinal organism found in the
gulf's shellfish, has killed one person in Texas and three in Mississippi.
Those victims had open cuts or wounds that came in contact with
bacteria-laden salt water, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
The CDC is also concerned about outbreaks of leptospirosis, a bacterial
illness carried by farm animals, causing anything from high fever and
headaches to kidney damage and liver failure. Humans contract the disease
by exposure to water contaminated with the animals' urine. For those living
in shelters, the agency anticipates higher rates of infectious illness. "To
what extent we see any outbreaks of illness depends on if people are
evacuated and provided with medical care," says CDC spokesperson Tom
Skinner. "It's really important for people to leave the area if possible."
In an effort to drain New Orleans and rid it of the bacteria-laden water,
the Army Corps of Engineers has begun pumping floodwater into Lake
Pontchartrain, the huge but shallow lake on the city's northern border. Yet
this water, as it recedes past New Orleans' highly polluted areas, is most
likely laced with a frightening amount of dangerous chemicals.
From 1941 to 1986 the Thompson-Hayward Chemical Plant, near Xavier
University in the center of town, packaged and mixed pesticides such as
DDT, the herbicide 2,4,5-T (the main constituent of Agent Orange, which
contains dioxin), and the fungicide pentachlorophenal, which also contains
dioxin. While the city and federal governments launched a massive cleanup
effort throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the remediation was not entirely
successful: 2,600 tons of herbicide-contaminated soil reportedly couldn't
be removed because it was too toxic to legally dispose of in any state,
according to a 1995 article by Mark Schleifstein in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune.
At the Agriculture Street Landfill, soil and debris are laden with DDT,
lead, asbestos, and industrial waste -- ironically, everything that was
scraped from the city floor after Hurricane Betsy struck in 1965. In 1962,
reports
<http://www.solidwastemag.com/article.asp?id=47051&issue=09012005
Solid Waste and Recycling magazine, "300,000 cubic yards of excess fill
were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires. (The site was
nicknamed 'Dante's Inferno' because of the fires.)" While the EPA eventually
declared the dump a Superfund site (after the city had filled the area and
built homes and a school above the infill of trash), the only cleanup the
landfill underwent was the removal 5 inches of soil. A plastic barrier was
put down and clean soil thrown on top.
"The New Orleans area that was flooded was an industrial area where you
have all the lubricants and batteries and heavy-metal plating -- it's just
hideously dangerous," says geographer Wells. "We can't wait around to test
the floodwater before we pump it back into the lake -- people are already
dying of disease from it -- but it's a terrible thing to do. We're going to
avoid a great human disaster by doing this, but we could be creating a damn
big environmental one." Forget for a moment the scenario of a toxic lake in
the middle of a major American city; should a future hurricane breach the
levees again, New Orleans could literally be submerged in poison.
Aside from potentially poisonous floodwaters, the hurricane likely roiled
sediment from the bottoms of the lake and its surrounding canals, sediment
that is the toxic legacy of the region's century-old romance with the
chemical industry. William Fontenot, recently retired, spent 27 years
working for the Louisiana attorney general's office, helping citizens
grapple with environmental problems. His voice weary, Fontenot describes a
few of the various companies that spent much of the past century dumping
waste into Louisiana's waterways.
For 100 years, one such company, American Creosote, situated on the north
shore of Lake Pontchartrain, near Slidell, treated wood to create railroad
ties. In the 1970s, a fire ruptured a tank and creosote spilled onto the
property and into the Mississippi River. After Coast Guard divers took
sediment samples that were 8 percent creosote, the site landed on the
Superfund list in 1983. Although the EPA cleaned up the property and 1,200
feet of the river, it ignored the other 6,000 feet of waterway that was
devoid of any living organisms.
During the 1970s in Ponchatoula, north of the lake, the Ponchatoula Battery
Co. dumped between 3 and 5 million spent lead-acid battery cases onto the
ground. The waste liquid acid was directed into holding ponds that had no
containment structures. Drainage with pH levels (the acidic rate) high
enough to burn the skin off a person's hand bled from the facility into
various ditches into Selser's Creek. This mess was also declared a Superfund
site, but, says Fontenot, "when they ran out of Superfund money, the cleanup
just stopped. The EPA and the state of Louisiana don't want to put too much
burden on industry to clean this stuff up." He continues: "Just normal to a
little rainfall has an effect on all these sites. Just the sun shining on
them affects them. How do you think the storm affects all this?"
Citizens in Mississippi fear that burying toxic secrets is standard
operating procedure. Clinging to the north shore of Bay St. Louis, an inlet
just west of Gulfport that flows into the Gulf of Mexico, the DuPont
DeLisle plant, the country's second-largest titanium dioxide maker, was
slammed by Katrina. The facility produces 14 million pounds of toxic waste
per year, some of which is kept at on-site landfills. From 1999 to 2003,
the most recent figures available, 2.3 million pounds of the waste were
planted in the company's landfill.
DuPont also operates four underground injection wells, which shoot toxic
waste into the earth at a depth of around two miles. In late August this
year, a jury awarded $1.5 million to the first of nearly 2,000 local
plaintiffs who claimed that dioxins from DuPont, released into the nearby
air and water, caused their cancers.
Hurricane Katrina's storm surge overflowed DuPont's 25-foot-high levee, and
the site was buried under 7 to 9 feet of water. According to the federal
Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, a leaking pipe (now
repaired) released a pound of chlorine gas, and rail cars containing coke,
ore and chloride were tossed on their side. Despite this storm surge -- the
same one that flattened most of the bay -- DuPont claims that not a drop of
toxic waste escaped its on-site landfills. "Our current assessment is that
damage to the plant did not affect the environment and community due to the
storm surge," the company said in a statement to its employees.
"It's ridiculous for DuPont to claim that," says Becky Gillette, a Sierra
Club organizer in Ocean Springs, Miss., in an e-mail. "What planet are they
from? It is very distressing to think of all the poor people going to
destroyed or flooded houses, cleaning them out, their kids in tow, without
a clue about the poisons they may be exposed to in the cleanup."
Before Tuesday, no state or federal agency had been out to the DuPont site,
according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (the
agency and the EPA have since visited the facility). "When industry has a
major release, they have to notify us, and they haven't done that, so we
can assume they've had no major problems down there," says Robbie Wilbur,
the agency's public affairs specialist. "In general, I haven't heard of any
major environmental problems, but a lot of facilities couldn't even get to
them if they wanted. There's too much debris."
Although the Chevron Oil Refinery, at Pascagoula, Miss., which processes
325,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is also underwater, Wilbur says that
Chevron has been "taking on a lot of responsibility themselves." As of
Tuesday, the state environmental agency had yet to conduct water- or
air-quality tests anywhere in the region. Wilbur says he doesn't know of
any other state or federal task force working on the state's environmental
problems or cleanup.
Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, on the other hand, began
to document oil leaks the day after Katrina. They took water samples
earlier this week that they expect back any day. They're working with the
EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers on a plan to treat sludge after the
water subsides. One preliminary idea is to treat the toxic soil and use it
to rebuild the coast.
Despite the variety of plans, the agency is overwhelmed, says
communications director Rodney Mallett, a native of Louisiana. "I have no
idea about how many oil refineries are impacted. I don't know about the
Superfund sites. This is something like no one has ever seen. Nobody ever
planned for anything like this."
The EPA has no estimates on how long recovery will take because it doesn't
have a full picture of the environmental impact. Only three of New Orleans'
148 pumps are currently working, and it could take 80 days before the
floodwaters drain from the city and its outlying suburbs into Lake
Pontchartrain. Only then, following water and soil quality tests, can a
comprehensive cleanup picture emerge.
Yet finding money to clean up the environmental contamination won't be
easy. The Superfund bank account, money that would normally be used to pay
for cleaning up hazardous waste sites that are "an act of God," is
essentially broke. The tax on chemical and oil industries that pays for
Superfund cleanups expired in December 1995. According to the most recent
statistics, a 1998 report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an
environmental and health advocacy agency, $4 million for cleaning up
hazardous waste sites goes uncollected every day the tax is not restored.
In fact, every year for the past decade congressional representatives have
attempted to reauthorize the polluter payments, and every year the bill has
been voted down. The Bush administration has consistently opposed the fee.
Without the inflow of industry's money, taxpayers have instead funded the
Superfund budget. Today, most of the $1.2 billion currently appropriated
from the general revenue fund has already been committed to other sites
around the country.
"The Superfund is supposed to be our safety net when Mother Nature is at
fault," says Lois Gibbs, director of the Center for Health, Environment and
Justice, a nonprofit group based in Falls Church, Va. "These fees could
make a large dent in the costs of cleanup." Gibbs poses the question that
geographer Wells also asked, one that the nation will likely spend the next
several years trying to answer. "The entire community is now a hazardous
waste dump. How do you clean up an entire city, an entire region?" ++
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