Toxic gumbo

The EPA is failing to protect the Gulf Coast's homebound citizens from Katrina's poisons.

By Katharine Mieszkowski and Mark Benjamin

Oct 6, 2005 | "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.

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