Wrong Complexion for Protection

In the real world, all communities are not created equal. If a community happens to be poor, black, or located on the “wrong side of the tracks,” it receives less protection than communities inhabited largely by affluent whites in the suburbs. Generally, rich people tend to take the higher land, leaving the poor and working class more vulnerable to flooding and environmental pestilence. Race maps closely with social vulnerability and the geography of environmental risks.

At the same time, much of the death and destruction attributed to natural disasters is in fact unnatural and man-made. “There is no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster,” Case Western Reserve University history professor Ted Steinberg writes in his book Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. What many people call natural disasters are in fact acts of social injustice perpetuated by government and business on the poor, people of color, disabled, elderly, homeless, and non-drivers—groups least able to withstand such disasters. Flooding in the New Orleans area largely resulted from breached levees and flood walls. A May 2006 report from the Russell Sage Foundation, In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster, and Race After Katrina, found that these same groups often experience a second disaster after the initial storm and that pre-storm vulnerabilities limit their participation in rebuilding and recovery. 

Hurricane Katrina has been described as one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S history. A September 2005 Business Week commentary described the handling of the untold tons of “lethal goop” as the “mother of all toxic cleanups.” But the billion-dollar questions facing New Orleans are which neighborhoods will get cleaned up, which will be left contaminated, and which will be targeted as new sites to dump storm debris and waste from flooded homes.

Toxic Needles in a Haystack

The storm left debris across a 90,000-square-mile disaster area in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. According to the Congressional Research Service, debris from Katrina could well top 100 million cubic yards. This is enough trash to pile two miles high across five football fields. More than 100,000 of New Orleans’s 180,000 were flooded, and half sat for days or weeks in more than six feet of water. Government officials peg the number of cars lost in New Orleans alone at 145,000; 60,000 boats needed to be destroyed; 300,000 underground fuel tanks and 42,000 tons of hazardous waste are being cleaned up and disposed.

Where all this waste is disposed appears to be linked more to political science and sociology than to toxicology, epidemiology, or hydrology. Weeks after Katrina struck, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) allowed New Orleans to reopen the 200-acre Old Gentilly Landfill in New Orleans East, the swampiest part of the city, where the majority of the population is African American. Old Gentilly is an unlined landfill, so it lacks special protective measures required by “sanitary” landfills, such as drains, liners, and leaching collection systems. In 1986, federal regulators identified the former municipal dump as hazardous and ordered it shut down. But after lying fallow for nearly two decades, Old Gentilly was reopened to accept post-Katrina construction and demolition waste; within four months, the landfill had grown to about 100 feet high. In December last year, more than 2,000 truckloads of debris were entering the landfill every day.

LDEQ officials insist that the old landfill, which is still operating, meets all standards. But residents and environmentalists disagree. Even some high-ranking elected officials expressed fear that reopening the Old Gentilly Landfill could create an ecological nightmare. In November 2005, four days after environmentalists filed a lawsuit to block the dumping, the landfill caught fire.

In April 2006, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality issued permits to allow Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the largest commercial trash company in the country, to open a new landfill in New Orleans East. The new site is on Chef Menteur Highway, a section of U.S. Route 90 that runs through New Orleans East. Waste Management pledged that the city would receive 22 percent of revenue derived from the site. Every week, Waste Management picks up an average of 45 pounds of trash from each home, 20 more pounds per home than pre-Katrina. The new landfill could accept as much as six million cubic yards of vegetation and other debris, including roofing materials, Sheetrock, and demolition debris, which are considered less harmful than other types of waste.

The problem is, after Katrina, disaster debris from flooded neighborhoods has been mixed to the point that separation is either difficult or impossible. Regulators acknowledge the potential for toxic contamination from storm-related trash. David Romero of the U.S. EPA says the agency would be “lucky” if even 30 percent of the hazardous waste was removed from the waste stream. In an October interview on CNN, LDEQ Assistant Secretary Chuck Carr Brown said hazardous materials were hidden “like toxic needles in a haystack” in the hurricane debris.
Nevertheless, government officials say the risk of hazardous materials being dumped at the Chef Menteur site is insignificant and that current sorting practices are adequate to keep hazardous waste out of the landfill. They also insist protective liners are not needed for construction and demolition waste. “There’s nothing toxic, nothing hazardous,” Brown told the New York Times in May. LDEQ had provided a permit for the landfill. “There will be no impact” on the community, Brown said.

Landfill opponents think otherwise. They fear the government’s willingness to bend the rules will mean motor oil, batteries, electronics, ink toner, chlorine bleach, drain cleaners, and other noxious material will almost certainly wind up at the unlined landfills. “Government has done a lousy job policing what goes in landfills. When you look at the contents from gutted homes, you see all kinds of wastes mixed together that will likely end up at unlined landfills like Old Gentilly and Chef Menteur,” says Sierra Club organizer Darryl Malek-Wiley.

Father Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church, is the de facto leader of the Village de l’Est, a predominantly African-American neighborhood in New Orleans East that is also home to the third-largest Vietnamese community in the U.S. He says the Chef Menteur Highway Landfill is less than two miles from apartments where more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families live. Nguyen views the landfill as a roadblock to his community’s rebuilding efforts. “This will have a chilling effect on our recovery,” he said in a regional newspaper article in June. “There seems to be a disregard for human safety as well as recovery.”

The Mary Queen of Vietnam Parish is the headquarters for the Citizens for a Strong New Orleans East, a non-profit coalition of faith-based organizations whose mission is to ensure that “communities of color who had lived in New Orleans East prior to Katrina can return home.” Nguyen says roughly half of his 4,000 parishioners live within a one-mile radius of the church. “Is this a deliberate effort to keep us from rebuilding?” he asked. “This is how a self-sufficient, self-reliant community is rewarded for their rebuilding efforts? We use those canals to water our gardens, and now they are filled with poison.” New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the controversial landfill closed on August 15, saying that his emergency order to open it had expired and that Waste Management failed to get a conventional permit.

No Comprehensive Plan

This is not the first time New Orleans residents have heard from official sources that a place is safe, only to discover evidence to the contrary.
Community leaders beat back two other efforts, in 1990 and 1997, to locate dumps along U.S. 90 near their homes in New Orleans East. But Mayor Nagin’s fast post-storm rezoning and quick permit grants by LDEQ meant there was little time to consult the public. “We have grave concern that there is no comprehensive plan for disposal of waste and storm debris,” says Malek-Wiley.

In the early 1980s, New Orleans decided to build a community on top of what is now a controversial area called Agricultural Street. Located in the Saint Roch neighborhood of the Bywater District, less than three miles from the famous French Quarter, the 95-acre Agricultural Street site was a municipal landfill for more than 50 years. It was a repository for Hurricane Betsy debris in 1965, but was shut down a year later and redeveloped for residential and light commercial use. It now includes the Gordon Plaza subdivision, Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) housing, and the Press Park residential area and community center. In 1993, metals, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were found in surface and subsurface soils around Agricultural Street. The EPA refused to declare the site eligible for the Superfund program in 1986, but, using standards that gave more weight to soil contamination, added the landfill to the list of Superfund sites in 1994. Residents immediately pushed for a property buy-out and relocation. But the EPA disagreed, and ordered a $20 million “cleanup,” which began in 1998 and was completed in 2001. “EPA did not do a cleanup; it was more like a cover-up,” says Elodia Blanco, a longtime resident of the Agricultural Street community who lost everything in the Katrina flood. “We were fighting an environmental justice struggle to get relocated before Katrina. None of us knew when we bought our homes that they were built on a toxic dump.”

Government officials assured Agricultural Street residents that their neighborhood was safe after the “cleanup” in 2001. But the Concerned Citizens of Agriculture Street Landfill disagreed and filed a class-action lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for damages and relocation costs. Unfortunately, it was Katrina that accomplished the relocation. This year, after thirteen years of litigation, Seventh District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey ruled in favor of the residents—describing them as poor minority citizens who were “promised the American dream of first-time homeownership,” though the dream “turned out to be a nightmare.” Her ruling could end up costing the city, the Housing Authority of New Orleans, and Orleans Parish School Board millions of dollars. The case is currently on appeal. “It was a long and hard struggle, but we won,” says Blanco. “It’s a bitter-sweet victory because we lost our community before Katrina.” A dozen or so FEMA trailers now house residents on the contaminated site, where post-Katrina government samples have turned up levels of benzo(a)pyrene exceeding EPA’s residential guidelines.

A Spoonful of Dirt

In March, seven months after the storm slammed ashore, organizers of A Safe Way Back Home initiative, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University (DSCEJ), and the United Steelworkers (USW), undertook a proactive pilot neighborhood cleanup project—the first of its kind in New Orleans. The cleanup project, located in the 8100 block of Aberdeen Road in New Orleans East, removed several inches of tainted soil from the front and back yards, replacing the soil with new sod and disposing the contaminated dirt in a safe manner.

Participants included residents and steelworkers who have received training in hazardous materials handling in programs funded by the federal government’s Worker Education and Training Program (WETP). “This demonstration project serves as a catalyst for a series of activities that will attempt to reclaim the New Orleans East community following the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina,” said Beverly Wright, DSCEJ’s executive director. “We know it is the government’s responsibility to provide the resources required to address areas of environmental concern and to assure that the workforce is protected. We are not waiting for the government to ride in on a white horse to rescue us and clean up our neighborhoods.”

“FEMA should replicate this demonstration project on thousands of blocks in hundreds of neighborhoods across the City of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region,” United Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard said in a press release. “Only the federal government has the resources and authority to lead such a massive undertaking. But it has to be done. The human dignity and economic security of the people of the Gulf Coast depends on it.”

The DSCEJ/USW coalition received dozens of requests and inquiries from New Orleans East homeowners associations to help clean up their neighborhoods block-by-block. State and federal officials labeled the voluntary cleanup efforts as “scaremongering.” EPA and LDEQ officials said that they tested soil samples from the neighborhood in December and that there was no immediate cause for concern. According to Tom Harris, administrator of LDEQ’s environmental technology division, a toxicologist, the government originally sampled 800 locations in New Orleans and found cause for concern in only 46 samples. Generally, the soil in New Orleans is consistent with “what we saw before Katrina,” says Harris. He called the A Safe Way Back Home program “completely unnecessary.”

A week after the voluntary cleanup project began, LDEQ’s Harris ate a spoonful of dirt scraped from the Aberdeen Road pilot project. The dirt-eating stunt was clearly an attempt to disparage the proactive neighborhood cleanup initiative. LDEQ officials later apologized.

Is This Place Safe?

Despite barriers and red tape, a few Katrina evacuees are slowly moving back into New Orleans’s damaged homes or setting up travel trailers in their yards. Homeowners are gutting their houses, treating the mold, fixing roofs and siding, and slowly getting their lives back in order. One of the main questions returning residents have is: Is this place safe? They are getting mixed signals from various groups. Last December, the LDEQ announced, “there is no unacceptable long-term health risk directly attributable to environmental contamination resulting from the storm.” Two months later, in February this year, test results from the New York-based non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) showed otherwise. NRDC’s analyses of soil and air quality after Katrina revealed dangerously high levels of diesel fuel, lead, and other contaminants in Gentilly, Bywater, Orleans Parish, and other New Orleans neighborhoods.

Although many government scientists insist the soil is safe, on April 4, a multi-agency task force press release distributed by the EPA raised some questions. It claimed that levels of lead and other contaminants in New Orleans soil was “similar” to soil contaminant levels in other cities, but it also cautioned residents to “keep children from playing in bare dirt. Cover bare dirt with grass, bushes, or 4-6 inches of lead-free wood chips, mulch, soil, or sand.”

In August 2006, one year after Katrina struck, the EPA gave New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health, while pledging to monitor a handful of toxic hot spots. EPA and LDEQ officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil—a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans. And yet the EPA dismissed residents’ calls to address this problem as outside the agency’s mission.

Now, instead of cleaning up the mess that existed before the storm, government officials are allowing dirty neighborhoods to stay dirty forever. Just because lead and other heavy metals existed in some New Orleans neighborhoods before Katrina doesn’t mean that they are safe, or that there isn’t a moral or legal obligation to clean up contamination. Government scientists have assured New Orleanians that they do not need to worry about soil salinity and heavy metal content. They say residents need not worry about digging or planting in the soil. But can government officials really be certain that all New Orleans neighborhoods are safe? All levels of government have a golden opportunity to get it right this time. Cleanup and reconstruction efforts in New Orleans have been shamefully sluggish and patchy, and environmental injustice may be compounded by rebuilding on poisoned ground.

Robert Bullard is the Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University.