Chandeleur Islands Gone ¶ “Hazard Waste Areas :: Everyone Needs to Get Out!”

Official Calls Environmental Damage From Hurricane Katrina “A Crisis Waiting to Happen”

Living on Earth’s Jeff Young talks with Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst for the EPA, who says the city’s construction and lack of environmental enforcement made the storm’s damage worse than it could have been.

KAUFMAN: You have a large amount of hazardous materials in the area. Industrial discharges to the sewers have now been released. Sewage that would go into the sewers and into wastewater treatment plants, all of that is being released. You have oil and gas from gasoline stations, and waste oils that have been released. You’ve got household hazardous materials; you’ve got pesticides; you’ve got chemicals. There’s a lot of hazardous materials storage areas in the area. So what you have is a witch’s brew of water that not only contains bacteria and viruses from sewage, but you also have heavy metals and other toxic hazardous materials.

A man carries a baby through the
flooded streets of New Orleans.
Photo: Jeremy L. Grisham, U.S. Navy

YOUNG: How is this exacerbated by the environmental regulation and enforcement in that area in years past?

KAUFMAN: What’s happened over the years because of the power of the major industry in Louisiana – which is oil, gas, and chemical – the environmental enforcement regulations to prevent releases if a catastrophe occurred are very weak in its enforcement. And so, you don’t have the kind of precautions that you would need for such an environmentally-sensitive area being brought to bear.

[…] and so you had a tremendous population growth in areas that are very environmentally fragile, that are weakened in environmental regulation enforcement in terms of hazardous material control, and it was a crisis waiting to happen.

And frankly, folks down there were living on borrowed time and, unfortunately, time ran out with Katrina. And now all the environmental hazards, or the worst-case scenarios, occurred, and now we’re seeing the results of bad planning which made for this catastrophe.

The government said dozens of medical disaster teams from nearby states were moving into hard-hit areas.

“We’ve identified 2,600 beds in hospitals in the 12-state area. In addition to that, we’ve identified 40,000 beds nationwide, should they be needed,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt.

Storm survivors, particularly in New Orleans where floodwaters remain, face a cauldron of infectious agents, public health experts said. “You can think of floodwaters as diluted sewage,” said Mark Sobsey, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of North Carolina. Whatever infections people carry go into sewage and can be expected to show up in floodwaters. That includes common diarrheal germs including hepatitis A and Norwalk virus.

“We are gravely concerned about the potential for cholera, typhoid and dehydrating diseases that could come as a result of the stagnant water and the conditions,” said Leavitt.

However, officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health experts said cholera and typhoid are not considered to be high risks in the area. CDC officials suggested Leavitt was simply mentioning examples of diseases that could arise from contaminated food and water.

Some experts said worries about catching illnesses from being near dead animals or human bodies are somewhat overblown. “People who are alive can give you a whole lot more diseases than people who are dead,” said Richard Garfield, a Columbia University professor of international clinical nursing who helped coordinate medical care in Indonesia after the tsunami.

Mosquito-borne diseases may start to emerge within days. West Nile virus and dengue fever are both potential risks following a situation like the one in coastal Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Officials also cited carbon monoxide poisoning risks to people using generators and stoves.

“One of the things they have got to do – we’ve got to plead for – is to make sure that when these hospitals get evacuated, the National Guard or somebody is there putting major security around these hospitals, or they’re going to get ransacked. And it’s going to make a bad situation even worse,” said John Matessino, president of the Louisiana Hospital Association.

He said the four hospitals in New Orleans’ central business district – Tulane, Charity, University and the VA hospital – had the worst problem with would-be looters.

[Links added and emphasis are mine – new creve coeur]

KSLA News12 – Inside NOLA Superdome
● evacuees at the Superdome
● shelter at Hirsch Coliseum
● prescription help for all.
VIDEO News – Unedited Report from Inside New Orleans:

Sewage in floodwaters carries disease

WASHINGTON (AP) Sept. 3, 2005 — Sewage and chemicals are mixed into a potentially toxic bathtub soaking New Orleans, posing the threat of disease for residents forced to wade in Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters.

“Probably the more immediate health risk to the people is that whatever was in the sewer is in the water,” said John Pardue, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “Whatever bacterial or viral diseases that people put into the system before the flooding is now in the water.”

Along with the sewage in the floodwater is a witches’ brew of chemicals from a variety of sources, including leaking fuels and oils from gas stations and submerged cars, paints and solvents from small businesses and household cleaners and pesticides from peoples’ homes.

But the biggest chemical plants and refineries to the south and east of the city were spared a direct hit by the hurricane.

If that had happened, breaches in large tanks and other industrial facilities might have spewed heavy petroleum, hydrocarbons and chlorine gas.

Eco System :: Chandeleur Chain of Islands Gone

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Officials with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) who flew over the Gulf Coast from Florida to Louisiana stated that most of the Chandeleur chain of barrier islands — the first line of storm defense for eastern Louisiana and western Mississippi — appears to be gone.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost about 1,900 square miles of marsh and swamp, and stands to see another 700 square miles slip away by 2050 if drastic measures aren’t taken. Much of the marsh already gone was south of New Orleans, moving the city closer and closer to the Gulf of Mexico and consequently closer to hurricane storm surge.

Scientists blame both man and nature, for erosion of the Mississippi River’s delta: oil speculators, massive clear cutting of coastal forests, oil drilling, buildup of the coast and construction of levees on the Mississippi. Also due to climate effects, combined with a rise in sea levels and the sinking of land caused by shifting geologic faults.

Louisiana officials began trying to stem the loss only in the last 15 years, and now want Washington to not only help upgrade its flood protection system, but also help to restore its coastline. Until now, restoring the coast and improving the levees and floodgates were mostly seen as two projects.