Summertime, and the Livin' Ain't Easy: Environmental Questions from New Orleans

by Wendy Worrall Redal

As you drive into New Orleans from Louis Armstrong Airport, signs that things aren't back to normal after Hurricane Katrina are subtle at first: a billboard asks "Got Mold?" Then another: "Call 1-800-AID-MOLD." Then another: "Screwed by your insurance adjuster? Call Bogan & Bogan, Attorneys at Law." There's more litter and debris in the expressway median and along the sides of I-10 than seems right, even in this sub-tropical party city that's not known for being particularly clean. And there is a lot of wayward vegetation along the sides of the highway: tall weeds and scruffy grass that doesn't look like it's seen any grooming in, well, the better part of a year. Driving downtown on I-10, it's evident the roof of the Superdome is still under construction, though a giant banner on the side proclaims "Re-opening 9/24/2006. Go Saints!"

But these are only surface indicators of the lingering havoc wrought by Katrina last August. An excursion into the vast tracts of flooded neighborhoods away from the interstate reveals a landscape that still looks like a war zone, and a host of environmental concerns that will raise questions about health and safety in New Orleans for years to come.

I went to New Orleans in May, part of a team of volunteers from Boulder who spent a week cleaning out and gutting houses, just a handful of the thousands of homes that sit largely untouched since Katrina sunk this low-lying city over nine months ago. I heard amazing stories of escape and heartbreak, emotional trauma and dogged determination to rebuild and renew, even as a new hurricane season threatens to hit New Orleans when she's down – way down.

As a human being, I was moved to the core by the scope of the loss around me: more than 200,000 homes destroyed, displaced families, shattered communities, a unique culture now fractured and profoundly vulnerable.

As an observer of environmental journalism, I was struck by the magnitude of the environmental problems New Orleans faces in Katrina's wake, and how little we are hearing about them – or about conditions in New Orleans generally – in the national news media. The environmental stories spawned by Katrina are myriad, but they don't seem to be getting told outside the pages of the Times-Picayune.

I saw the makings of one story during the drive in: the freeway overpasses that thousands of people huddled on last August were humming with traffic, though underneath the concrete spans lay thousands of derelict cars – dusty, filled with dried mud, dented wrecks long since looted for wheels or parts. This is where most of the city's abandoned vehicles have been stowed, for now, anyway. Some of them are gradually being towed to steel salvage yards, where they will be turned into scrap metal to be shipped to Japan. But what about the rest of the cars? The seats and tires and engine parts that can't be used? We're talking tens of thousands, maybe a couple hundred thousand, vehicles. Will they go to landfills, after whatever is salvageable has been recovered? What landfill can hold all those thousands of cars? How would they get there? What landfills have absorbed all the city's detritus so far?

That last question took on even bigger proportions for me after our first day of work. Our task was to empty out a young family's home in Lakeview, one of the hardest-hit areas that was inundated when the 17th Street Canal levee broke.

While the home's brick exterior looked mostly okay, save for the telltale "bathtub line" eight feet up on its side, a glimpse inside the front door revealed the devastation hidden from the sidewalk view. It also revealed the reason we needed to wear N-95 breathing masks, safety goggles and heavy gloves, as well as long-sleeved shirts, long pants and boots: the inside of the house was a chaotic mess of filth, damp, mud and mold, piles of upended furniture, wood flooring buckling, sodden clothing still hanging in the closets, moldering groceries in the kitchen cupboards. Six feet of putrid water had sloshed around in the house for over two weeks, floating a heavy armoire and dressers and cabinets, CDs and stereo and computer components still lodged on the wooden shelves. The air inside the house was close and dank with humidity and the odor of mold, which crawled up the walls in gray and black patches.

Moldy living room debris after 10 feet of floodwater (Photo/Russ Teets)

We hauled out ruined furniture, soggy mattresses, and countless loads of damaged household goods. In a half-day's time the 15 of us had heaped a rather colossal pile of stuff on the sidewalk out front. It looked like a half-block-long stack of junk, haphazardly mixed and tossed debris, ready for FEMA contractors to scrape up and dump. But we had picked it up bit by bit before we carted it out in wheelbarrows and garbage cans, and it was the tangible record of a family's life: their clothes and books and art and music, their food and dishes and make-up and jewelry. Treasures, now trash. What's treasured now is not what is on the sidewalk.

But where will all the trash go? I became obsessed with the question.

In the case of this home, we hadn't even torn out all the moldy sheetrock, which would have filled another half-block with debris. The owners weren't sure what they were going to do with the house, whether they could qualify for insurance in order to rebuild, so there was no point in gutting it if it was going to be bulldozed.

I learned through the Times-Picayune that plans were in place to re-open at least one closed landfill in East New Orleans, a badly flooded, low-lying part of the city that was once home to many poor residents. Apparently, this was one of many post-Katrina situations in which a quick federal override would circumvent normal channels requiring the environmental impact assessments typically mandated by such a move.

When I considered the kind of debris we had amassed at just four houses by the end of that week, there was no doubt that some of what we tossed out contained toxic substances. There were computer monitors filled with lead, old roof shingles that might have contained asbestos, ragged sheets of linoleum backed with a foul-smelling glue, and bottles of household cleaning agents – not to mention an array of electrical appliances. And while FEMA guidelines indicated that hazardous materials should be separated out, who knew how meticulous most residents, or clean-up crews, were? Surely no FEMA contractor was going to sift through the giant heaps of moldy junk sitting on the sidewalk to be sure any toxic materials hadn't been slipped in.

The contents of a Lakeview home, ready for disposal (Photo/Russ Teets)

If all this stuff was headed to a standard landfill, especially one re-opened in a hurry to help absorb the millions of tons of debris, what about monitoring the soil where these toxins might leach? What about the Vietnamese community that is re-establishing itself in New Orleans East not far from the landfill in question? What about the water table?

Water was another subject that colonized my thoughts as we worked. You still couldn't drink it in the Lower Ninth Ward, the hardest-hit part of the city next to the Industrial Canal levee breach whose (former) residents were only just permitted to return to their homes while I was there. Nearly nine months after the hurricane and no potable water in this largely poor neighborhood – assuming you could find a working tap.

A home in the Lower Ninth Ward, eight months after Hurricane Katrina (Photo/Russ Teets)

It was one thing to imagine the miles of empty houses we saw submerged in muddy, storm-churned sea water. It was another – and more accurate – to picture what else the floodwater held. My mind began to imagine the dead bodies floating in the vile water, the oil and diesel and gasoline and Freon and chemicals, the medical biohazard material, the contents of grocery store shelves, the rancid meat… What substances had permeated the soil beneath the grass on which we sat during our lunch break? What about my friend's little vegetable garden outside her home near City Park? Her elevated house escaped flooding, but two feet of that water lay around it for nearly three weeks. Had she no qualms about eating those tomatoes?

Cleaning up polluted soil is one of the tasks any returning homeowner must face. And it can be daunting. First, one has to determine what contaminants are in the soil. Studies have shown that sediment deposited by the floodwaters contains unsafe levels of arsenic, diesel fuel and other petrochemicals, heavy metals, phthalates (chemical used to soften plastics), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), fertilizers and pesticides. Many of these substances are known carcinogens, and many are linked to increased frequency of miscarriages, birth defects, or nervous system effects.

Any flooded area is likely to have dangerous levels of toxic substances, many of which were already at levels that far exceeded what is deemed acceptable by the EPA, since Lousiana's "acceptable" standards are far more lax. The problem is compounded by the extensive oil and chemical industry in and around New Orleans. Floodwaters and hurricane winds caused spillage in many storage facilities, including the release of 1.05 million gallons of crude oil from the Murphy Oil refinery, a spill larger than that of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska.

The most efficient way to clean up contaminated soil is to remove it, but this requires hiring a contractor to take away a layer of ground, a costly proposition. Common Ground, a grassroots organization founded just days after Katrina hit, has issued guidelines for residents to do their own soil-testing and clean-up far more cheaply.

Residents can take their own samples and have them analyzed using a simple test kit through the Louisiana State University Agriculture Center. Or they can use existing data collected at sites all over New Orleans by various groups including the EPA and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To clean up less expensively, Common Ground recommends using plants, or "phytoremediation," to remove toxins from the soil. Since certain plants absorb certain toxins, drawing them from the soil into their roots, shoots and leaves, one must first learn what's in the soil in order to know what plants to introduce. Sunflowers, for instance, are "hyper-accumulators" of lead, while mustard greens remove both lead and arsenic. Spinach and carrots will remove chromium, copper, manganese and iron, though one would never want to eat any vegetables used to suck heavy metals out of the ground. In fact, once the toxin-eating plants are full-grown, they must be thrown out or treated as toxic waste.

Common Ground also gives details on a "helpful bacteria"-based mold abatement method, which the group claims is more effective in preventing further mold growth than bleach, which is more commonly used. And that raises another question about the long-term environmental health of New Orleans residents: while the presence of mold can be poisonous in a home, what are the long-term effects of standard mold mitigation methods? Are the chemical sealants rendering gutted house frames "safe" really all that safe themselves? How likely is it, given the magnitude of the flooding, that mold spores will be floating in the air in New Orleans for months, years, to come?

The environmental health questions go on: "Can I eat seafood from Lake Pontchartrain?" "Is the concrete safe for my kids to play on?" "Is the mud and dust safe when it is dry?" Pamphlets from Common Ground include answers to these questions and others. And while such inquiries may seem like localized concerns for returning residents of New Orleans, the overall environmental catastrophe that Katrina spawned remains. Above all, it may be prove to be an environmental justice story that no ethical American should ignore, least of all journalists.

After Katrina, CU Geographer Gilbert White's Work Commands New Attention

By Erika Engelhaupt

When levees broke in New Orleans and water started gushing in, many Americans were stunned to learn the city—and the country—weren't ready. Outside Louisiana, leaders from the president on down said they couldn't have imagined such chilling devastation. But Gilbert White already had, decades before.

Back in 1942, White, a geographer who would later found an influential natural hazards research center at the University of Colorado, was writing about how floods could wipe out cities, and he started to push for better planning. A pioneer in approaching solutions from a whole-environment perspective, he emphasized the need to look at more than just building a levee here or a floodwall there.

White built a long career traveling the world, helping nations improve how they manage water and plan for floods. It would be decades, though, before his message would be taken seriously at home.

Now 93, White is known as the "father of floodplain management" and received the 2000 National Medal of Science for his leadership in this field. Reflecting on his lifetime of work, White said he hopes it has made a difference. "It's hard to get people to think ahead," he said.

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography Gilbert F. White (Photo/ Ken Abbott, CU-Boulder)

In 1942, White finished his doctoral dissertation, Human Adjustment to Floods, at the University of Chicago. He was already working for President Franklin Roosevelt's Bureau of the Budget, after spending the Depression years in the New Deal administration's natural resources planning efforts. America was at war that year, and White, a devout Quaker, was a conscientious objector who worked with refugees in France instead of taking up arms.

White recognized that wartime technology came to dominate the American approach to problem solving. American bombers and fighter planes were the first line of defense against Nazi Germany. The war pushed forward development of jet airplanes, radar and penicillin. Most Americans believed that science and engineering, along with American muscle, could solve most problems.

Then, as now, cities faced floods. In the 1940s, city planners and engineers were eager to push forward with technological fixes. American ingenuity seemed to be enough to ensure safety. The Tennessee Valley Authority had built dams across seven states for flood control and hydroelectric power as part of the first massive development plan of its kind in the nation.

Within the president's administration, White started preaching that such a command-and-conquer approach to protection from environmental onslaughts would backfire. Instead of a relentless focus on building new structures, White promoted stewardship of the landscape. Instead of spending large sums to rebuild after a disaster, White suggested planning ahead to reduce future impacts. He said flood-prone areas should adapt to flood hazards, by keeping people and property out of harm's way when possible, and building flood-resistant buildings when needed.

Such thinking flew in the face of traditional military and engineering approaches, and the Army Corps of Engineers resisted White's ideas for many years. But eventually his perspectives took hold even there. Over the years, ecological and interdisciplinary approaches to land and water management became more popular as resource managers learned from the mistakes of dams that failed and drainage projects that destroyed wildlife habitat. In 2001, the Corps established a complete collection of White's work—more than 4,000 publications and work papers spanning more than 50 years—at the Corps' Institute for Water Resources in Alexandria, Va.

The Corps' collection includes a written introduction that reflects a new attitude. It reads in part, "Gilbert White's influence on floodplain management practice in the United States can hardly be overestimated … [His] work demonstrated that flood control structures not only occasionally fail the standards of reliability set by planners but can actually increase the damage done when unsuspecting people risk lives and money to develop the land supposedly protected."

After the war, White established an academic career. As a professor at the University of Chicago, White asked his class one day if anyone knew of a place in the West where he could take his children to work on a ranch, as he had done as a boy in Wyoming. One student said Boulder, Colo., was a nice place with ranches. White listened, and leased 1,000 acres near Boulder for $150 for the summer. He later returned to Boulder permanently, joined the faculty at CU, and founded a center here to study and plan for natural hazards such as flooding.

That center, the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, is a vital presence on the CU campus today.

Boulder was a natural place to study flood risk, as Boulder has the highest flood risk in Colorado, according to White. Thousands of homes and businesses in Boulder are vulnerable to the kind of flooding that happens on average once a century, which Boulder is currently overdue for, while thousands more would wash away in a bigger flood, the kind that happens more rarely but which is bound to devastate Boulder eventually.

The "100-year flood level" is the standard used in federal flood regulations, but given that bigger floods happen every 500 years or so, White thinks the mandatory flood zone level should be expanded to include that risk.

White has worked to prepare Boulder for the next big flood. In 1994, he created the Boulder Creek Flood Notebook, a detailed set of questions that researchers and volunteers will answer to describe what happens during and after the next big flood to hit Boulder.

That day has not yet come, but right now, the entire country is thinking about disasters and flooding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

White said he was surprised the federal government didn't do more to deal with levee safety and educating the public about what to do before a hurricane hits. He criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), now placed under the new Department of Homeland Security. "In the interest of [counteracting] terrorism, they have put more people at risk," said White.

White said New Orleans must now "consider not only the social benefit of protecting people from floods, but also maintaining the natural ecosystem." While he said the people who really know that region need to form the specific plans, White said planners need to consider the whole landscape. "It's not just a question of do we build a levee or not, but how do we make wise use of the floodplain?"

Over the years, White's principles have woven their way thoroughly into the fabric of urban planning. His ideas may influence the way New Orleans is rebuilt, even if White is not directing the process.

The next generation of urban planners in New Orleans is learning from White through his papers. Robert Collins is an assistant professor and department chair of Urban Studies and Public Policy at Dillard University in New Orleans. In his department's courses on land-use planning, White's work on floods and planning is peppered throughout the course. "Any planner would know his name," Collins said.

Sylvia Dane, Emergency Management and Planning Coordinator for CU, has known White for 17 years. "He is the most amazing person I've ever known," she said. "He has such a strong voice because of his modesty; he can bring stakeholders to the table and they will listen."

White now lives in an airy, spacious condominium above the west end of Pearl Street in Boulder. Ironically, he chose to live in one of the most flood-prone parts of Boulder. In the kind of flood that happens on average once every 100 years in Boulder, White said that area will flood up to the rooftops of one-story buildings.

"Someday Boulder will be seriously flooded," White said. "It's just a matter of time."

When that day comes, White will be ready. He had the building built with only a garage and entryway on the first floor. He predicts the brick building will stand, and perhaps White will look out the window and decide whether his town listened.

For more on Gilbert White, the Gustavson Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Colorado, visit his biography Web site.