[StBernard] Toxic Gumbo: Katrina's Environmental Legacy

Westley Annis westley at da-parish.com
Thu Oct 6 09:04:44 EDT 2005


SPIEGEL ONLINE - October 6, 2005, 12:38 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,378296,00.html

Toxic Gumbo

Katrina's Environmental Legacy

By Katharine Mieszkowski and Mark Benjamin in Meraux, Louisiana

The United States Environmental Protection Agency is failing to protect the
Gulf Coast's homebound citizens from Katrina's poisons.

"On behalf of Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the city of New Orleans, welcome home!"
the mayor announced Sept. 25 in a public statement. "You are entering the
city of New Orleans at your own risk. Standing water and soil may be
seriously contaminated; avoid contact." Limit your exposure, the mayor
continued, "to airborne mold and wear gloves, masks and other protective
materials to protect yourself. You must supply your own protective
equipment."

"I'll give you 10 bucks for your boots," says Donna Harney, a fourth-grade
teacher, to a reporter wearing knee-high black waders. Harney is standing on
the oil-caked driveway of her best friend's house on Jacob Drive in Meraux,
just southeast of New Orleans. A headache-inducing stench fills the air. A
faint waterline rings the house, just inches below the top of the front
doors. A chocolate-brown line covers the bottom quarter of the house. That's
the oil line.

It forms a bathtub ring around a row of 20 or so modest brick houses that
stretch up and down the street. Most look salvageable from the outside, but
that illusion is dispelled the moment you step inside. Behind every front
door is a toxic junkyard, where the remains of each family's possessions,
rearranged by floodwaters into garbled piles -- and infested by weeks of
mold and rot -- are coated in a putrid mud, thick with crude.

"Oil is everywhere," says Harney with disgust. "It's encrusted on the
vehicles. It's on the houses." It's also on Harney's blue-and-white
sneakers. She says that every store within 100 miles is sold out of rubber
boots. Driving to Meraux, Harney says, "I cried on my way in, I'm not
ashamed to say."

An umbrella of environmental laws, including the Superfund law, gives the
Environmental Protection Agency considerable authority -- and in some cases
the responsibility -- to ensure messes get cleaned up right. And the mess in
southern Louisiana, as EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson himself admits,
is "the largest natural disaster we've faced."

But Louisiana environmentalists, who for decades have battled oil companies
and government agencies to improve the human and natural health of their
polluted state, say EPA's tests are insufficient and its health warnings
inadequate. "They read like 'Hints From Heloise,'" says Rick Hind,
legislative director of the Greenpeace Toxics Campaign. National critics
stress that EPA failed to comprehend the pollution that arose after the fall
of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and may be repeating the same mistakes in the
Gulf Coast.

"That entire area has to be cleaned up before people move back in," says
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y. "You could have tens of thousands of people
getting seriously ill."

To describe the EPA's response to Katrina, "the two adjectives I would use
are 'understaffed' and 'overwhelmed,'" says Oliver Houck, who runs the
environment program at the Tulane University Law School. In past years,
Houck says, federal and state agencies have been "primordial" in their
failure to monitor pollution released from industrial facilities along
"Cancer Alley," the swath of the Mississippi River that winds from Baton
Rouge to New Orleans, dotted with 136 petrochemical plants and six
refineries, all belching dense airborne toxins.

The oil spill in Meraux spouted from Murphy Oil Corp. Located in the
working-class St. Bernard Parish, it's bordered by a farm of giant white
circular tanks, where oil is stored for processing. During Katrina, one of
the tanks ruptured, dumping raw crude into floodwaters, sewers and swimming
pools. Murphy Oil says the spill is between 10,000 and 20,000 barrels. The
U.S. Coast Guard puts it at 19,500 barrels, or 800,000 gallons. Today the
oil and mud have dried and formed a cracked black layer of frosting on lawns
and driveways.

Katrina caused at least 40 oil spills from Gulf Coast refineries and storage
tanks, dumping more than 8 million gallons of crude into southern Louisiana
towns, wetlands and shorelines. The Murphy spill is not the biggest. That
honor goes to the one in Plaquemines Parish, where 3.7 million gallons of
crude leaked from tanks.

The Exxon Valdez polluted Alaska's Prince William Sound with 11 million
gallons of oil. But mopping up crude in the variegated Louisiana landscape
will be far more difficult than it was in Alaska, where the oil was confined
to one place. To date, according to the Coast Guard, 70,000 barrels of oil
have dispersed into marshes and evaporated, while 55,000 barrels remain to
be cleaned up. The fate of 2,000 underground tanks of petroleum products
remains unknown.

Oil is not the only toxin that saturates Louisiana and threatens the health
of residents returning to New Orleans and adjacent parishes. The Louisiana
Department of Environmental Quality reports that muck covering the area is
contaminated with human waste and bacteria, including E.coli, a fecal
bacterium. It estimates that between 1,000 and 5,000 railroad cars have been
damaged by Katrina, including some carrying chlorine or sulfuric acid. The
EPA says water may be polluted by arsenic and lead from paint and the
batteries of 350,000 submerged cars. Shattered homes and businesses are
contaminated with asbestos and mold.

Currently, with the EPA at the helm, state and local crews are trolling
Louisiana's streets and waterways in trucks and boats, conducting water,
soil and air tests. The EPA is posting the results on its Web site,
accompanied by guidelines for returning citizens. It advises them to wear
gloves, goggles and respiratory protection. It tells them to open windows to
avoid explosive gases and possible carbon monoxide poisoning. Remove and
discard wet material that may have mold or bacteria, it says, and avoid
mixing household cleaners that can produce toxic fumes.

But environmentalists and EPA staffers say that environmental agencies are
not conducting adequate and comprehensive tests, meaning that people are
returning to the Gulf Coast without sufficient information about health
hazards. Ultimately, the decision to allow people to return to the Gulf
Coast resides with state and local authorities like Mayor Nagin. On its Web
site, the EPA defines its role as merely helping decision makers make an
informed decision. EPA deputy administrator Marcus Peacock told a House
panel Sept. 29 that the EPA was responsible for "preventing, minimizing or
mitigating threats to public health, welfare, or the environment."

But critics say the agency should be more active in preventing people from
returning to the Gulf Coast. "The EPA has not done a thorough assessment of
the contamination of [St. Bernard] parish or any other parishes that have
been contaminated," says Hugh Kaufman, an EPA senior policy analyst at the
Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. On Sept. 12, EPA Science
Advisory Board member Richard Gilbert stated that the EPA's current plan of
sampling 24 affected areas was "very limited in scope" and didn't address
the full spectrum of contamination throughout the area. "I expect that
questions will be asked about whether the data are applicable to non-sampled
flooded parts of Louisiana that are close to chemical plants or other
potential sources of pollution," he said.

Appearing Sept. 29 before a House subcommittee on the environment, Erik D.
Olson, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it
was the EPA's moral and legal obligation to warn and protect the nation's
citizens. Yet based on NRDC's research in the Gulf Coast, he said, he was
concerned that EPA was both delaying its test results and doing a poor job
of communicating the results to people who didn't have Internet access.
"Unfortunately, EPA apparently has decided to 'punt' to local authorities
the responsibility to protect citizens' health in the wake of the massive
Katrina-related oil and hazardous chemical releases," he said.

Long-term risks from the pollutants now being found in and around New
Orleans include cancer, birth defects, spontaneous abortions and asthma. The
EPA has also underplayed the threat of mold. Health experts say trillions of
mold spores, exacerbated by the late summer heat, could sicken a large
population of children, people with asthma, older residents, and people with
weakened immune systems, the New York Times reports.

Houck says some illnesses might not show up for years or may never be
identified by health authorities. Katrina wiped out many impoverished
communities in southern Louisiana, and often indigent people cannot afford
to go to doctors. "They are going to get sick and they are not going to know
why," Houck says.

Despite the destruction and health dangers, the EPA has not taken measures
to prevent people from returning to southern Louisiana. And Nagin seems
intent on bringing people back fast. "There is a huge tension between
redevelopment as soon as possible and cleanup as well as possible," Houck
says. Jean Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of
Environmental Quality, says the agency would like to proceed with more
caution, but allowing people to return to their homes "is not really our
decision. We can advise the mayor, but it is his decision whether or not he
wants to bring people back in. That is not something we have control over."

The EPA is sending mixed messages. It recently issued a press release
stating that levels of benzene, a known carcinogen, are "slightly elevated"
around Murphy's Oil USA. But the actual test results, buried in fine print,
reveal that benzene levels are 45 times higher than the state standard. Some
of the EPA data has confused Nagin himself. At a Sept. 19 press conference,
Nagin said an EPA report to him on the danger of returning to some
neighborhoods was confusing. "We also looked at the [EPA] report as it
relates to flooded areas," Nagin said. "And it was a very clever attorney
who wrote the report. So it basically bounced on both sides of the issue and
didn't really tell you much."

While the mayor may be prematurely opening the gates to New Orleans to get
business humming again, people are driving past the grime and gunk -- and
health warnings -- for the simple reason that they want to see their homes
again and save what they can. "In America, your home is your castle, and now
it's a contaminated castle," says Darryl Malek-Wiley, Louisiana
environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club. "People deal with that
in all sorts of different ways. Some go into denial." And some, like Harney,
who uses roofing tiles that have flown off her friend's house as
steppingstones across the sludge on the driveway, go into shock.

Harney looks disgusted as she steps through the front door. The duplex is
rented by Edie Labarriere, a single mother and Harney's best friend, who
lived here with her two sons, ages 12 and 9, before Katrina. Since the
hurricane, the family has been living with Harney at her house in Harahan,
La. Just now, the Labarrieres are on their way here to salvage what's left
of their things.


>From the outside, the duplex doesn't look too bad. A yellow X is

spraypainted on each of the two front windows, indicating that it's been
checked out by search-and-rescue. The number 0 on both X's indicate that no
one's been found, dead or alive.

Inside, three wooden kitchen chairs are lodged at crazy angles. They are
stuck in a tar pit of thick, black, rancid goo, which is peppered with
random household items: a clothes hanger, stray pieces of paper, and what
was once a maroon raincoat. There's nowhere to step that isn't black mire,
which holds everything within its oily grasp.

In the backyard, the children's bikes sit encrusted in filth. "I guess we
won't have to take their bicycles home," she sighs. A hammock, ripped from
its tree, lies plastered to the backyard fence, which now leans into the
neighbor's yard. Near the back door, the muck on the ground grows smoky
gray, then a sickly green. "Ewww," she says. "I gotta go in there, people.
God, this stuff stinks. Am I a good friend or am I a good friend?"

Soon after Katrina, St. Bernard Parish president Henry Rodriguez dubbed the
area "another Love Canal." A few weeks later, says parish spokesman Steve
Cannizaro, Rodriguez consulted with the EPA, "and they told us the area was
not toxic, and we decided everyone has a right to see their home, and so we
let them back in."

Many citizens and activists in St. Bernard Parish, also home to a ExxonMobil
refinery, wanted to return home but didn't trust the EPA. In late September,
180 residents of the parish met at a Holiday Inn in Baton Rouge, seeking
information about pollution in their neighborhood. Everyone was full of
questions: "What is EPA doing?" "How big was the spill?" "What is Murphy
going to do?" In fact, St. Bernard residents are so suspicious of the local
oil companies that over a year ago they persuaded the parish to hire an
independent environmental engineer.

But today, says Kenneth Ford, president of St. Bernard Citizens for
Environmental Quality, the engineer is nowhere to be found. "We're
disappointed," says Ford. "Without his scientific proof that the parish is
not contaminated, no one should be allowed in right now."

Cannizaro replies that the parish is comfortable with the EPA's advice to
allow people to return. What's more, he says, the parish of 68,000 residents
"is one step away from being financially destroyed; businesses are flat on
their ass." People need to return and start buying and building again. "You
can't operate a government without taxes," he says.

Canvassing the parish in late September is a four-man crew from Greenpeace.
They have spent weeks living in a Cruise America R.V. with an aluminum boat
strapped on top, documenting the environmental destruction on the Gulf
Coast. They have taped the letters "TV" on the windshield of their Jeep to
make passing military and police security checkpoints easier. In weeks of
surveying the damage from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Greenpeace guys
attest that they've seen some hideous sights, like an offshore oil rig in
the Gulf that's been ripped from its moorings and turned upside down,
leaving a five-mile-long oil slick in its wake.

John Hocevar, a marine biologist for Greenpeace, says that 40 percent of the
coastal wetlands in Mississippi have been so damaged they're no longer able
to perform their ecological function as a natural water filter and habitat
to birds and wildlife. In Port Arthur, Texas, they saw a refinery so damaged
by Hurricane Rita that two of its storage tanks had imploded. But the
neighborhood surrounding Murphy Oil is by far the worst that they've
encountered.

"This community could have rebuilt but Murphy Oil killed it," says Mark
Floegel, a toxics campaigner for Greenpeace. "It would have been bad. But
the oil spill makes it so much worse."

Currently, the company is working with the Coast Guard and the EPA to mop up
the spill. Dump trucks, steam shovels and hydraulic pumps scoop up
contaminated soil around the tank and pump the oil into tankers. The workmen
are dressed in heavy boots and yellow hazard pants. One tells the Greenpeace
crew flatly: "Nobody here is going to answer any of your questions."

The Murphy spill was such a direct hit to the neighborhood that the company
is already facing two class-action lawsuits brought by lawyers on behalf of
St. Bernard residents. Another suit is being brought by the owners of the
Paris Palms Shopping Center in Chalmette for the damages it suffered. In
response, Murphy has announced that it will give $5 million to hurricane
relief to the area through the United Way, the local school system and the
parish itself.

The oil spill is clearly the final indignity after a brutal storm. But
environmentalists fear that the real story isn't getting out.

"So far, from what we've seen, we don't really have any reason to believe
that what we're being told is really the whole story," says Hocevar. "If you
don't look, there's nothing to see," he continues. "We have an
administration that has been cutting back on the EPA investigative
enforcement." According to a 2004 report by the Environmental Integrity
Project, the number of civil lawsuits filed by the federal government under
the Bush administration dropped 75 percent from the number in the last three
years of the Clinton reign. Eric Schaeffer, the former head of the EPA
enforcement office, who oversaw the project, told the Los Angeles Times, "If
you're a big energy company, you're basically on holiday from enforcement."

Greenpeace isn't conducting independent testing of the air or groundwater,
but other groups are. Under normal circumstances, a small nonprofit, the
Louisiana Bucket Brigade, distributes air-sampling kits to residents who
live near refineries and petrochemical plants so that they can independently
monitor what's being spewed into the air around them. But post-Katrina, the
group sent a professional sampling team from Dynamac Corp. into St. Bernard
Parish to take 10 soil samples. The results are due soon. NRDC also plans to
work with local environmental groups to conduct a battery of independent
tests.

Senate Republicans, led by Environment and Public Works Committee chairman
James Inhofe -- who has declared that global warming is a hoax -- have
introduced a bill that would allow EPA to waive clean water and air laws
during the cleanup. The EPA itself is drafting a plan that would allow the
agency to waive state regulations on smog emissions or pollutants pouring
out of coal plants. In response, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said: "It's bad
enough that big polluters want to exploit the tragedy to pollute more, but
it's even worse that Washington Republicans want to help them do it."

A draft for the EPA plan states that for the agency to act there must be "an
Act of God or another event that could not have reasonably been foreseen or
prevented." "They call it an act of God," says Malek-Wiley of Louisiana's
Sierra Club. "But I was just in St. Bernard Parish and it was heartbreaking
to see that people's lives are now coated with a film of oil from Murphy.
God didn't put the oil tanks in those people's backyards."

At a Sept. 14 press conference, EPA administrator Johnson defensively
stated, "Everyone is looking to EPA for what are the results and are these
done in a scientifically appropriate and sound way? We're doing that. We're
not trying to be bureaucratic. We want to make sure the results are ones
that we can all stand by."

Critics say they don't believe the EPA is trying to cover up the widespread
destruction and health hazards in southern Louisiana. But they have little
faith in the federal agency's ability to assess the grievous problems and be
forthright with the public. As we know, it's not first time the EPA has
faced this issue.

The collapse of the Twin Towers four years ago blanketed lower Manhattan in
a dust of asbestos, lead, glass fibers and concrete. Within days, then-EPA
administrator Christine Todd Whitman was assuring New Yorkers that the air
was safe and encouraged them to go back to work at Wall Street. "I am glad
to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is
safe to breathe," Whitman said in an EPA press release a week after the
towers fell.

But an EPA inspector general's report in August 2003 concluded that Whitman
did not have sufficient data to support her calming tone. The report says
the White House "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete
cautionary ones" about the environment at Ground Zero. Critics have long
speculated that the White House wanted to get New York's financial motor,
Wall Street, up and running again -- pollution be damned.

To date, nobody knows what the environmental impact has been on the
thousands of people, including pregnant women, who lived and worked near
Ground Zero. A study by the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York showed
that nearly 80 percent of 9,000 first responders may have suffered some lung
ailments and half still had those problems a year after the attacks. Several
studies are under way on the possible long-term effects on pregnant women
and infants living near Ground Zero.

Twelve Manhattan residents sued EPA last year alleging that the agency may
have endangered the health of tens of thousands of workers and residents in
lower Manhattan. That case is pending.

Pressure to open New Orleans, says Kaufman of EPA's Office of Solid Waste
and Emergency Response, is as intense today as it was on Wall Street soon
after Sept. 11. "The appearance of 'back-to-normal' gets local industry
going, then real estate, and so on," he says. "It's the same issue today,
except that the locations and contaminants are different, and people talk
with a different accent."

A week after the attacks in New York, the EPA instructed citizens to use a
wet rag or wet mop to clean their apartments, though in some cases the dust
may have been contaminated by asbestos. On Sept. 14, 2005, the EPA
instructed citizens returning to New Orleans to "wear gloves, goggles" and
use "respiratory protection" when handling material that may contain
asbestos, a known carcinogen.

The two messages are "eerily similar," New York Democrat Rep. Nadler wrote
in a letter to President Bush on Sept. 21. "I am deeply concerned that many
of the same mistakes made by EPA in response to 9/11 are being repeated on
the Gulf Coast."

"This is a potential catastrophe," Nadler says today. "We don't want two
catastrophes. We had maybe a thousand killed from the hurricane. You want
another thousand killed because of the environment? Maybe five thousand?"
Nadler wants to see the EPA conduct a more thorough environmental assessment
of the city, rather than just through its spot samples. He also wants EPA to
ensure that private companies are held liable for contamination.

That wish, according to environmentalists, shows few signs of coming true.
Both the EPA and the Louisiana DEQ have signaled that they will rely on
regulated industries to police themselves and tell the government if there
has been some major spill. The EPA administrator during the Clinton
administration, Carol M. Browner, once announced an initiative to crack down
on illegal pollution along the Mississippi River because some companies
could not be trusted. Browner at the time said there was an "unprecedented
amount of illegal pollution in the Mississippi River drainage." Asked at the
Sept. 14 press conference about leaks or damage from companies that line the
drainage, or Cancer Alley -- Johnson said he was "not aware" of any
problems. "The companies are going to do their own assessments, so we're all
working very cooperatively to try to do an assessment."

Today, more than a month after Katrina's wrath, taking inventory of the
wholesale environmental destruction remains premature -- for both the EPA
and the activists. "We are still in the assessment stage in a lot of this,"
says Kelly of the Louisiana DEQ. "The problem is so monumental that nobody
has dealt with anything like this before."

As she steps gingerly through the muck in the Labarrieres' backyard, Harney
is cheered when she finds a crocheted picture that spells "Labarriere." The
hanging is a gift she'd bought for the family and promised Edie's
9-year-old, Andrew, she'd try to recover. She carefully extracts the
cream-colored crochet from its glass frame, thinks about trying to salvage
the smudged pane, and decides against it. She folds up the crochet carefully
and puts it in her pocket. Taking a long, panoramic look at the surrounding
debris, her cheer vanishes. "You can't live in this place," she says. "You
can't live down here."




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