As I commented in my diary other day, we’re starting to get some data on the chemicals released as a result of hurricane Katrina. The picture isn’t pretty. In this diary I want to look through the other end of the telescope, as it were, and see what we know about the effects of the storm and its toxic aftermath on the actual wildlife living along the coast and in the Gulf. The earlier viewpoint I’d call “environmental;” this one I’d call ecological.
Since I’m a chemist not a biologist, a good bit of what I’m passing along here is a compilation of information others have collected and evaluated, so this diary is more link-heavy than my last one. One thing I can say, having worked over the years with biologists and ecologists who did things like go out to Superfund sites and surrounding areas to see how the indigenous creatures and plants were impacted, is that this data is going to be slower in coming in – it just takes longer to go out into the Gulf and see how fish catches are being impacted than it does to take a water sample into a lab and run a series of tests. So, a lot of this information is going to be preliminary and subject to change. Take it as you would the five-day weather forecast, not as you would a reading of yesterday’s high, low, and rainfall amount.
Fish and Wildlife Service – Not At Home
The first place you might think to look for information of this type would be the US Fish and Wildlife Service website. There, you’d find a shot of FWS employees clearing trees and the statement:
The Department of the Interior’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is putting people and resources in place along the Gulf Coast to clear roadways and establish emergency corridors as it continues an agency-wide effort to support the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s overall recovery effort.
In another spot, this is explicitly made clear:
Hurricane Katrina – The FWS Incident Management Team, operating out of Mississippi Sandhill Crane NWR has determined that all FWS employees have been accounted for. Due to inaccessibility due to devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina, sixteen Refuges will remain closed until further notice. As of Wednesday, August 31, 2005, our mission has changed from recovery of Service resources to that of humanitarian relief. Multiple Service locations have already deployed personnel and assets toward this goal. Current focus is to render assistance without placing our personnel and additional resources at risk. Since further assessment of our field locations will not be taking place, today is the last day that damage status will be included in this report until our mission objective reverts back to Service recovery operations.
This is interesting, because the website also says the job of the FWS is:
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the principal Federal agency responsible for conserving, protecting and enhancing fish, wildlife and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. The Service manages the 95-million- acre National Wildlife Refuge System, which encompasses 545 national wildlife refuges, thousands of small wetlands and other special management areas. It also operates 69 national fish hatcheries, 64 fishery resources offices, and 81 ecological services field stations. The agency enforces Federal wildlife laws, administers the Endangered Species Act, manages migratory bird populations, restores nationally significant fisheries, conserves and restores wildlife habitat such as wetlands, and helps foreign and Native American Tribal governments with their conservation efforts. It also oversees the Federal Assistance program, which distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in excise taxes on fishing and hunting equipment to State fish and wildlife agencies.
Whether this is an appropriate use of FWS personnel (“FWS personnel drafted to fill in for National Guard along Gulf Coast”) or a clever ruse so they can’t be doing their real job is a topic for another diary, or for your take in the comments. “Nothing interesting here people, move along, please, move along…”
Hunting Down What Little Information Is Available So Far
Our friend Oui posted a while back about the damage to the barrier islands, and linked to this CNN story. As it was shortly after the storm, there wasn’t yet a discussion of the loss of wildlife in the CNN story.
At the state level, Dwight Landreneau, Louisiana secretary for the department of wildlife and fisheries had an early estimate of ecological damage, as reported by Reuters on Sept. 9. Areas of special concern were damage to the coastal marshes and barrier islands, and to the oyster and shrimp fisheries. Oysters are filter feeders, and can accumulate the contamination being washed out with the floodwaters.
Aside: That report was found on www.planetark.com, which has a posting of all Reuters environmental stories, updated daily. They have a search function, and searching for “Katrina” pulled up 82 stories in chronological order, in case you ever need to research a specific topic for a diary…
The Louisiana DWF also delayed the start of the alligator hunting season one week, until 9/14:
The catastrophic damages of Hurricane Katrina has severely impacted millions of people and hundreds of thousands of acres of coastal marshes. Alligator populations in affected areas have been displaced and suffered some degree of direct mortality. LDWF’s assessments of these impacts are still ongoing.
The Truthout website, is a daily clearinghouse for progressive news well worth bookmarking. They have a section on the environment, which posted this story from the LA Times (registration required for LAT) on the destruction of the Chandeleur Islands, which served as part of the coastal barrier protecting the mainland. Another story at the site reports on the situation for Gulf fisherman, and makes a few observations on the wildlife situation:
“Obviously coastal habitat has been destroyed, off-shore reefs altered. All the nutrients have been redistributed and the sediment churned up,” said Franks, who lost his own house to the hurricane and some prized, long-running experiments.
While the sediment spells death for oysters unable to escape the choking silt, other marine life might eventually benefit from the churning waters in the same way that forests can be rejuvenated by fire…
On the shoreline, many sea-facing houses have simply vanished and the rich verdant forest of pines and oaks looks like a New England autumn, the leaves burnt orange by their lengthy emersion in the salty surge.
The once vibrant bird life has also gone. A decaying cormorant floats in the marshes, a sole seagull with a twisted, broken leg flies overhead. No-one has sighted any ospreys or hawks since the storm swept north.
“I guess the birds had no-where to hide,” said 59-year-old Lorenzo Owen, who has retired and spends much of his life sailing the bayou. While the birds have gone, other local animals do appear to be resurfacing, including the alligators.
The presidents of four major environmental groups (Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense, National Wildlife Federation, and National Audubon society) have sent an open letter to President Bush, calling for restoration of coastal marshland habitat in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for the benefit of both humans and wildlife. In particular, Environmental Defense had good information on the destruction of coastal wetlands on their website, including “then and now” maps of the pre-Katrina destruction that contributed to the devastation in NOLA.
The website birderblog.com has a page where links to ecological information on the effects of Katrina are being collected. This is a good location to go to for additional information as it comes in.
One of the links on that page goes to the Society of Environmental Journalists (the good folks challenging the Bush Administration’s failure to respond adequately to environmental FOIA requests). They also have a collection of links on the environmental effects of Katrina that will be updated as new information comes in. Here are a couple of stories the SEJ linked to:
From Toxic Floodwaters Threaten Wildlife, Newhouse News Service via Detroit News, September 11, 2005, by Jim Barnett:
While authorities have come to grips with the storm’s human toll in recent days, they still know little about harm to Gulf Coast ecosystems and iconic species such as manatees and bald eagles that inhabit the stricken region.
“It’s going to take years to fully assess the damage,” said Doug Inkley, a senior science adviser at the National Wildlife Federation. “When the Exxon Valdez wrecked in Prince William Sound (Alaska), they didn’t realize the effects oil in that sound would have on wildlife five or 10 years into the future.”…
…”We don’t know how bad the initial impact will be” [of pumping untreated floodwater into Lake Pontchartrain] said Frank Manheim, who studied the lake on behalf of the U.S. Geological Survey and now teaches at George Mason University in Virginia…
…South and west of the city, Katrina likely hastened the erosion of bayous that had served as winter homes to herons and other migrating birds, Inkley said. But the precise extent of damage remains unclear from aerial photographs.
“Areas that used to be beautiful wetlands are just plain gulf water,” he said. “I am really curious to know the amount of wetland that we lost in this single storm.”
In contrast with New Orleans, much of coastal Mississippi and Alabama now are dry. But scientists said storm surge and runoff from heavy inland rains could threaten coastal fisheries, including habitats for the endangered heelsplitter mussel.
Andy Coburn, associate director of the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, said he worries about future environmental damage that might result as residents return and begin the hard work of cleanup.
From Fish Used to Assess Environmental Damage, Associated Press via Wilmington Morning Star, September 16, 2005, by Garry Mitchell:
Scientists harvested fish off the Mississippi coast as part of the latest effort to assess environmental damage inflicted by Hurricane Katrina’s monstrous storm surge and toxic floodwaters…
…Also Thursday, the Coast Guard released figures that indicate Hurricane Katrina may have spilled more than 7 million gallons of oil from industrial plants, storage depots and other facilities around southeast Louisiana.
That amount is about two-thirds as much oil as spilled from the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989. But unlike the oil from the Valdez, which poured from a single source, the oil spills caused by the storm were scattered at sites throughout southeast Louisiana.
The oil could threaten the region’s fragile coastal marshes, but three-quarters of it was not posing a danger to wetlands. The Coast Guard figures showed more than 1.3 million gallons had evaporated or dispersed.
Crews had recovered nearly 2 million gallons and had contained another 2.3 million gallons behind booms and other barriers.
An unusually large number of manatees had taken shelter in Lake Pontchartrain prior to the hurricane; there is no word yet on their condition.
Finally, Juliet Eilperin in today’s Washington Post provides the most recent snapshot of the still-unsettled situation:
“Every tree is brown, every leaf is blown off,” said Donna Yowell, executive director of the Mississippi Urban Forest Council, after touring the [Clower-Thornton Nature Trail in Gulfport, MS]. Hurricane Katrina, Yowell added, “has turned it into a toxic waste site overnight.”
…”It’s as much a disaster for the places set aside to conserve wildlife as for the cities and the people who have been impacted,” said Evan Hirsche, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association. “This is what I would call catastrophic damage to our national wildlife refuges.”
…Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dispatched a research vessel, the Nancy Foster, to the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to collect and test fish and shrimp, as well as water and sediment samples. The agency has also hired a commercial shrimp boat to take samples in the Mississippi Sound.
NOAA Fisheries Director Bill Hogarth said the agency will release its results in about a week, adding it would take “a minimum of two years” to restore the oyster industry.
“Obviously, we have to start paying attention to the potential of an environmental disaster,” said Steve A. Murawski, NOAA Fisheries’ chief science adviser. “This is a major fishing area.”
…Experts suspect the hurricane has swamped everything from oyster beds to the sea grass that provides a critical nursery for fish, and the flush of nutrients from sewage-laden water into the gulf could spark massive algae blooms deadly to marine organisms…
…In addition to unleashing toxic and human refuse, the hurricane destroyed habitat critical to area wildlife. The storm hurt 25 national wildlife refuges that will cost at least $93 million to repair, according to preliminary estimates, a figure equal to a quarter of the entire federal budget for the refuges. Sixteen are temporarily closed.
In Mississippi’s Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge, the hurricane felled pine trees crucial to the survival of the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker; Breton Island, a sanctuary for nesting and wintering seabirds and shorebirds, has largely washed away…
…Steve Cochran, a Louisiana native who now works as a senior staffer at the advocacy group Environmental Defense Fund, said the hurricane dealt the final blow to flora and fauna that have declined for decades because of habitat loss.
To close, it seems that the terrible ecological effects of Katrina are only now beginning to come into view, and will take years to fully assess. To end on a small but positive note, however, a number of trained dolphins washed out to sea from a Gulfport, Mississippi aquarium by Katrina were successfully rescued. Story here.
If you’ve seen stories or specific information I’ve not mentioned on the effects of Katrina on wildlife and ecosystems in particular, feel free to post links in the attachments.
