EPA Gives New Orleans A Clean Bill of Health
Should Government Monitor or Clean Up Toxic Contamination?
By Robert D. Bullard
September 7, 2006

EPA gives New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health in its final sediment report, issued nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina struck. The agency pledged to monitor a handful of toxic hot spots. Government officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. Although EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil - a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans - EPA dismissed residents' calls to address this problem as outside of its mission. No decision has been made regarding cleanup of the benzo(a)pyrene contamination found in the Press Park area near the old Agriculture Street landfill. EPA announced in April that the carcinogen had been found at levels almost 50 times the health screening level.

This is not the first time New Orleans residents have heard from EPA officials that a place is safe, only to discover evidence to the contrary. New Orleans' Agricultural Street community-which includes the Gordon Plaza subdivision, Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) housing, and the Press Park residential area and community center-was built in the early 1980s on top of the Agricultural Street Landfill site. The 95-acre site was used as a municipal landfill (that included debris from Hurricane Betsy in 1965) for more than 50 years prior to being developed for residential and light commercial use. It closed in 1966.

Metals, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were found in surface and subsurface soils in the Agricultural Street area during environmental studies in 1993. 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 Agricultural Street Landfill, as a Superfund site in 1994. Residents immediately pushed for a property buy-out and relocation from the contamination. But the federal EPA disagreed, and ordered a $20 million "clean-up," 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 long-time 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 the Agricultural Street community residents that their neighborhood was safe after the "clean-up" 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 relocations costs. Unfortunately, it was Katrina that accomplished the relocation-albeit a forced one. In January 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 tens of 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 broad coalition of scientists, health experts, environmentalists, and local residents view EPA's post-Katrina decision to monitor-rather than clean up the contamination-as a missed opportunity. It appears that few lessons were learned from the single most catastrophic natural disaster in U.S. history. Clearly, the Mother of All Toxic Cleanups has fizzled. It's business as usual. Decades before Katrina, state and federal agencies stood by (monitored) and allowed children and families to be needlessly exposed to environmental health hazards-including lead.
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Robert D. Bullard directs the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and co-authored In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race After Katrina (The Russell Sage Foundation, May 2006).