(Photo: Liz Roll, courtesy of FEMA.)

MANN: Well, the traces are very small. And a lot of that, the way I understand it, is attributed to many of the homes. Much of those homes down in the flooded area of New Orleans, they’re more than thirty years old, forty years old. What the scientists are telling me, it’s due to the lead-based paint.

CURWOOD: But what about the chemicals though?

MANN: The chemicals? What we’ve done is, as far as chemicals go, we’ve flown a helicopter that’s attached to an infrared gas imaging camera. What this camera does is, from the air, it can pick out or detect chemical leaks that the human eye just cannot see. We have not seen, through this technology, any major leaks, chemical leaks, of any kind.

CURWOOD: Now, what does the Louisiana DEQ see as the biggest short-term problem right now?

MANN: The biggest short-term problem is what we’re seeing from the air. As you fly down to the mouth of the river along the river you see quite a few oil spills. But in New Orleans, on the flooded area of Jefferson Parish and St. Bernard, there’s oil sheens everywhere. You have 2,000-plus gasoline stations that are submerged with three underground storage tanks each. So that creates an oil sheen. Cars. Every car’s gonna create an oil sheen. You’ve got well over 100,000 cars that were submerged.

Murphy Oil, which is in Chalmette, Louisiana which borders a neighborhood, we had about between ten and fifteen thousand barrels of oil that seeped into a neighborhood. But this was a neighborhood that actually the houses were flooded to the rooftop.

Other issues right now that we’re dealing with is the water that’s being pumped out of the city back into the lake. We’re monitoring the effect that that is gonna have onto the lake. Once the water is drained out of the city then the biggest problem I think that we’re going to be dealing with is how do we dispose of between 22 and 25 million tons of debris. And that’s going to be a challenge.

CURWOOD: Darin Mann is with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. Darren, thanks so much for taking this time with me today.

MANN: Thank you, I appreciate it.

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Rising Up from a Toxic Legacy

CURWOOD: One person who is also worried about the short and longterm clean up of New Orleans is Darryl Malek-Wiley. He's a thirty-year environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club in Louisiana.

Mr. Malek-Wiley coined the term “Cancer Alley” – the moniker he gave to a swath of hundreds of petrochemical and other industrial plants along the shore of the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. The population of this area is mostly poor and African American and over the years there have been disproportionate rates of environmental illness, ranging from cancers to miscarriages that have led to lawsuits and the abandonment of entire communities.

Mr. Malek-Wiley, thanks for joining me.

MALEK-WILEY: Hello Steve, how are you doing?

CURWOOD: Good. I wanted to ask you, based on what you know of the areas that were most highly contaminated before Hurricane Katrina, what are you most worried about now that the city’s been flooded?

MALEK-WILEY: Well, I’m worried about all the toxic chemicals that are in the water, and the impact of the flooding of the oil refineries in Chalmette. I’ve seen television footage of the oil tank that contaminated the community with this heavy oil. I’m concerned about all the gasoline stations underground and their impact popping up. I’m concerned of what’s in everybody’s garage and under their sink. You know, all those different chemicals are out there in who knows what levels in flood water cooking under a hot New Orleans sun. And we’re probably having chemical reactions that have never happened before in the history of the world.

CURWOOD: What about some of the specific areas that you were working with residents. I know, for example, there was a lot of controversy about the Agricultural Street neighborhood and the landfill there. It’s a former Superfund site. What do you think will be going on there?

MALEK-WILEY: I don’t know, there’s been no reports from that area. That area’s called Press Park and it was an environmental justice tragedy from the word “go.” They built a community of first-home buyers, it was a federal program that they allowed people who had not bought a home to buy a house in the area, mostly African American, on special low-interest loans. But they didn’t take into account the environmental impacts of building on top of a landfill. They also built an elementary school on top of the landfill.

So it’s been an ongoing environmental justice struggle around the Agriculture Street Landfill. What the people in the community wanted was to be relocated off of the site. The EPA came in with a quote “cleanup plan” which involved removing three feet of dirt out of people’s yards, putting down a geotech fabric, and then putting three feet of dirt back in. But we don’t know what’s happening now with the site underwater, and what type of chemicals are bubbling up and further contaminating those homes.

CURWOOD: On these sites, the question comes, if people are going to go back to New Orleans. What do you think? Should they be resettling these communities? Or is this an opportunity now to get relocated as the folks at Agricultural Street wanted to be?

MALEK-WILEY: I think it’s gotta be a case by case basis. For the folks at Agriculture Street, I think that that whole area should be bulldozed down and those folks given appropriate dollar-for-dollar houses in other parts of New Orleans or where they want to relocate.

CURWOOD: In a horrible tragedy like this there can be some silver linings. How do you see the people of New Orleans benefiting from all of this?

MALEK-WILEY: With New Orleans rebuilding, and with the Gulf of Mexico rebuilding, we have an opportunity to really step back and think. Since it’s going to be, from what I’m hearing in the media, months until we’re able to get back into New Orleans to do any kind of rebuilding, we should really be thinking about how we want our city to grow and develop.

How can we make it more environmental friendly? How can we make sure that when we rebuild homes in New Orleans they are able to stand hurricane-force winds? They’re more energy efficient? They’re built back in the neighborhoods that are such a strong component of New Orleans?

You know, people wouldn’t leave New Orleans because they didn’t want to leave their neighbors. And we want to make that strong neighborhood community rebuild, at the same time putting the people who were most impacted back to work building, rebuilding New Orleans in a very visionary new way. New Orleans should become the greenest sustainable city in the world.

CURWOOD: To what extent do you think your vision is moving forward? I mean, what’s going on right now with funds for rebuilding New Orleans?

MALEK-WILEY: Right. Well, right now it’s not moving forward in New Orleans. But I heard on one of the press conferences by Governor Blanco, I heard her say, this is sort of a rough quote, I want to make sure that Louisianains have the jobs to rebuild our state. So, you know, that’s part of the vision. The bigger vision of the green vision, that’s gonna take a while.

CURWOOD: Already the Congress has approved a $10 billion emergency measure for Louisiana, for the Gulf area, and it looks like another $40 billion is going to move forward. What’s your understanding of how those funds would be spent? And what do you think of those plans?

MALEK-WILEY: The concern I have is: will these funds make companies like Halliburton and Bechtel richer? Or will they rebuild the hope and community of the citizens of New Orleans and Jefferson and St. Bernard Parishes? Will this be another transfer of American wealth to giant corporations? Or will it be to the communities, and the people in the communities that need the help?

CURWOOD: How would Halliburton be involved?

MALEK-WILEY: Well, Halliburton’s already gotten a contract to do cleanup on one of the U.S. Navy bases.

CURWOOD: Some people have said that the transportation of the evacuees from New Orleans to other communities may be part of the view of eventually gentrifying the city of New Orleans when it is rebuilt. What concerns do you have that New Orleans might be gentrified in a rebuilding process that would leave out the low-income folks that have been so much a part of the city for so long?

MALEK-WILEY: Yeah, I’ve heard that, you know, concern. It is a concern, but I think that New Orleans is a community-based, neighborhood-based society, and we had extended families throughout New Orleans. There’s been an effort, lots of effort, for people of lower income to buy houses and actually own land in New Orleans. So hopefully, that will continue, but we need to have some kind of program in place to make sure it doesn’t become a yuppie Disneyland.

CURWOOD: What are you most worried about at this point? I mean, what’s the worst-case scenario that you can foresee?

MALEK-WILEY: The worst-case scenario is we’d close the door to New Orleans and walk away and leave that wonderful cultural heart of America to rot. That’s worst-case scenario.

CURWOOD: Darryl Malek-Wiley is environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club in Louisiana. Thanks for taking this time with me today.

MALEK-WILEY: Thank you very much, Steve.

[MUSIC: Randy Newman “Louisiana 1927” from ‘Good Ole Boys’ (Reprise - 1998)]

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CURWOOD: Coming up: how Gulf Coast fisheries are fairing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Keep listening to Living on Earth.

[MUSIC: Not Drowning Waving “Walk” from ‘Through The One Last Door’ (Liberation Music 2005)]

Environmental Injustice

CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood. Many of the African American faces that were caught on camera during the prolonged evacuation of New Orleans are among the more than a quarter of citizens of the city who live below the poverty line – and half of the poor are children.

Monique Harden is an attorney with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a New Orleans-based legal group that has been battling the concentration of toxic facilities in or near communities of color. She joins me now from member station WBHM in Birmingham, Alabama. Monique, thanks for taking this time.

HARDEN: Thank you.

CURWOOD: Give me a brief history as to how so many black people wound up in these areas.

HARDEN: Well, the evolution of Louisiana’s economic development has only been two things: either slave plantations or industrial plants. Those are the two primary ones in the state’s history. And at the time that industrial facilities began entering the state of Louisiana, because of its navigable waters and rich natural resources, the state began instituting economic policies that encouraged the location of these facilities in the state and the expansion of those facilities in the state into perpetuity, without any regard for the long-lasting consequences and effects of such industrial development.

The situation for African Americans in particular under this kind of economic development history in the state has been that as they founded communities, from 1790s on, they didn’t have political status. They were unincorporated communities. So that, as the state began inviting and luring more industrial development into the state, the decisions about where those facilities would locate were not made by African Americans who had settled communities. Added to this problem is the fact that, as individuals, African Americans were denied the right to vote until the 1960s in Louisiana.

So at no point during the advent and continuing expansion of industrial facilities in the state of Louisiana did African Americans have any say or political power to impact those decisions. So you see the state now where African American communities with long histories, going back hundreds of years, are located in very close, dangerously close, proximity to industrial facilities. In the case of New Orleans, as these companies decided to abandon and leave those facilities in the midst of African American neighborhoods, to this day, in the year 2005, we’re still dealing with the situation of all the toxic waste that has been left on these sites. Where, you know, homes are across the street, there are playgrounds, there are churches, small businesses.

CURWOOD: So, do you have any indication so far of the kind of toxins people are finding in the water in these neighborhoods? Or is it too soon to tell that?

HARDEN: Well, we can definitely anticipate the kind of toxins that would be in the water based on what we know was in the neighborhoods prior to Hurricane Katrina. You’ve got lead, arsenic, DDT and its metabolites, heptachlor. A number of cancer-causing, reproductive-damaging chemicals are in these neighborhoods in New Orleans that now have, chances are, been released through the flood waters and the impact of the hurricane.

CURWOOD: So, how safe could it be to resettle these neighborhoods if all these chemicals are being exposed in this process? The water dries up, the chemicals stay behind, right?

HARDEN: It’s going to require an extensive remediation process, and one that needs to be planned with the participation of people who have long been working on the environmental cleanup of their communities. Many of these people are now displaced. And I think a concerted effort needs to be made in reaching out to displaced residents of New Orleans and reconnecting them with their families and neighbors to be a part of the rebuilding of this city.

CURWOOD: To what extent do you think the city was adequately warned about this kind of disaster happening? And who would you hold accountable for not paying enough attention to these warnings?

HARDEN: I really hold the federal government responsible for this. What we know about the city of New Orleans is this: is that there’s been, for a number of years, efforts made to do a number of things with regards to the redistribution of royalties from oil and gas drilling off the coastline to restore the coastal area of Louisiana. I should say that without a coastal restoration plan in place, rebuilding the city of New Orleans becomes something that is in vain. You’re basically setting up the situation once again for another hurricane to have a devastating impact on the city because you don’t have a reinforced coastal area.

CURWOOD: Say more about that.

HARDEN: Well, there have been plans upon plans upon plans, with some levels of public participation in the process of developing plans, for coastal restoration. It’s just one example. And when those plans are presented to Congress for funding it’s denied. Just look back the last few months in the development of the energy bill and, you know, seeing the comments by the Department of Energy, by President Bush himself, by senators like Pete Domenici, castigating and rejecting adequate funding for coastal restoration. That’s one example of how the local officials really do not have the wherewithall to take care of the impacts of a hurricane because the coastal erosion is such a huge problem that needs federal attention, and which has not ever happened.

CURWOOD: Through the years, the federal government has declined to put the kind of infrastructure cash on the table for New Orleans, to have the place be safe to live in. In terms of all the toxins that are exposed there that would have to be removed, that would have to be remediated. I imagine the tab would be just huge – billions upon billions beyond the discussions I hear about rebuilding. How realistic do you think it is for people to be able to go back into the historic black neighborhoods of New Orleans and live safely, in terms of toxic exposure?

HARDEN: I’m optimistic. I’m optimistic that this is an opportunity for us to really transform, in a positive and progressive way, the lives of people in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast of the United States. Transform the lives in a way that undoes the systemic forms of racism in these areas, that could also be able to have ripple effects for the entire country. And let me just say that as we’re spending billions upon billions of dollars in the Bush administration’s efforts to rebuild Iraq, that if that’s possible then rebuilding the Gulf Coast of the United States and New Orleans, in particular, is definitely possible.

CURWOOD: I’ve been speaking with Monique Harden, an attorney with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a New Orleans-based legal group. Monique, thanks so much for taking this time with me today.

HARDEN: Thank you.

[MUSIC: Sigur Ros “Saeglopur” from ‘Takk…’ (Geffen – 2005)]

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Health of the Gulf

CURWOOD: Crab bisque, crawfish pie and oyster po boys – not to mention fried shrimp, stuffed shrimp, shrimp gumbo and shrimp on the Barby – these are the dishes that give the Gulf Coast its unmistakable flavor. But it could be a while before Creole kitchens have adequate local seafood stocks. Hurricane Katrina has devastated fishing and shrimping fleets all along the coast, and the long-term consequences for the health of the Gulf and its fisheries is yet unknown.

George Crozier has been studying the Gulf of Mexico's fishing industry and environment for years. He's executive director of the Dauphin Island Sealab--that’s a marine research center located on one of the Barrier Islands of Alabama in the Gulf. Mr. Crozier, hello!

CROZIER: Hi, how are you today, Steve?

CURWOOD: Well, not too bad. Yourself?

CROZIER: (LAUGHS)

CURWOOD: We’re hearing some accounts that the fisheries might have a very hard time recovering from Hurricane Katrina, not just from its immediate damage but also from what might be soon emptying into the Gulf. I’m thinking of, that is, whatever refuse, the toxins and pollutants that will come tumbling out of New Orleans. What are the major fisheries that are at risk here?

CROZIER: Well, the largest cash crop, and the one people are perhaps used to, in a funny way, is actually menhaden in cat food. But as far as people are concerned it’s the shrimp. That is an enormous issue for the north-central Gulf Coast. And the intriguing thing about this is that the impact on fisheries from hurricanes is normally minor to beneficial. That’s kind of conventional wisdom. The rainfall is generally good and the infusion of nutrients has frequently stimulated fisheries’ production in the Gulf of Mexico. But this is not a situation that is going to be conventional, and I think a lot of us are quite concerned.

Although there’s certainly nothing else to do at this point. I mean, the waste from the city, and I am a native of New Orleans, has got to be moved out, and so it’s going to be pumped out. My information is that it’s going into Lake Pontchartrain which then will lead into the Gulf of Mexico through a huge estuary system. And I think the dangers of the impact in that estuary, and then eventually the Gulf of Mexico, is probably very severe.

CURWOOD: What specifically are the dangers? What’s at risk?

CROZIER: The problem is going to be one of toxins that are almost of unknown mixture. They keep talking about it as a toxic gumbo. It’s wastewater, it’s sewage, it’s decomposing animal flesh of all kinds that we don’t even like to think about it. And the residue in the estuary itself is likely to be quite long life.

The problem that I foresee is a residence time in the estuaries where it, in fact, negatively impacts the habitat that larval forms of shrimp and an awful lot of fin fish take advantage of that area for protection and for nursery services, basically. They feed there, they are protected there, and they grow through some critical life stages before they reemerge in the Gulf of Mexico.

And the impact that this discharge is going to have is extraordinarily difficult for us to predict. We don’t understand the system as well as we should, and this is a almost unique circumstance. We’ve certainly never experienced anything like this before, and it’s going to be a difficult learning situation for the marine science community.

CURWOOD: George Crozier is executive director of the Dauphin Islands Sea Lab. That’s a marine research center located in one of the barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico, off Alabama. Mr. Crozier, thanks for taking this time with me.

CROZIER: Thank you for the opportunity, Steve.

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Shrimping Future

CURWOOD: Joining me now to talk about how the Louisiana shrimping community has weathered the storm is Kerry St. Pe. He's led the effort to preserve the state's wetlands, fisheries and Cajun culture, and he's also director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program. Mr. St. Pe, hello.

ST. PE: Hello.

CURWOOD: Tell me what you’ve seen in the shrimping community since the storm. What’s it look like down there?

ST. PE: Well, as you might expect our shrimping community has been devastated. Both the region, a lot of the wetlands have been impacted, of course, but the infrastructure that supports that industry has been just decimated. Of course, this is the time when our shrimpers make their living. This is when they make their money.

CURWOOD: And their boats are gone?

ST. PE: We have several boats, many – of course, the shrimpers, they’re used to the impacts of hurricanes. So they’re aware that they have to move their boats to safe harbor, and most of them have moved out into protected waters. But, of course, you can’t move the infrastructure: the places where they sell their shrimp, the places where they get ice to preserve their catch, the roads that transport truckloads of shrimp to the processing facilities. All that has been destroyed.

CURWOOD: So, even if folks are out there trying to catch, they can’t sell catch, huh?

ST. PE: That’s right. And our shrimpers have been impacted economically for many years. I think most of the nation is aware of the artificially low prices of our shrimp, largely caused by cheap imports that have been coming into our country. It’s kept the prices down, and the money that the shrimpers are getting in just is not keeping up with the expenses.

CURWOOD: So, it was already a bad year before the storm.

ST. PE: Our shrimpers have had several years of heavy impacts to their industry, yes. And because of the stresses on the industry we have seen people reluctantly moving on to other jobs. But we have a large, large shrimping community that has stubbornly tried to stay with this way of life.

CURWOOD: Take me for a brief excursion into this way of life. What does a shrimper do? Tell me what happens. They get up in the morning, and then what happens?

ST. PE: Well, the large commercial shrimpers have very large boats. These boats are capable of going out in the open Gulf. There’s a small crew, a captain. There’s food to sustain them on board. They may go out for a week or two at a time, depending on the size of boat. They’re in constant communication with each other over radio. It’s a great experience to hear them talk on the radio, they all have nicknames for each other and it’s a very close-knit community. And when their holds are full of catch they will come in to shore to what we call the shrimp sheds. They offload their catch onto conveyor belts and from there, trucks will take the catch and bring it into the processing plants.

CURWOOD: And now none of this is going on.

ST. PE: Well, there’s no place to bring the shrimp. The shrimp sheds themselves, the first place that the shrimpers would pull into, are gone, literally. Additionally, there’s a lot of debris out in the Gulf. Damage to nets is highly probable, highly likely. All of these things have just put them out of business for this season.

CURWOOD: Looking down the road, do you think this is going to be just a year’s loss of this shrimping industry? Or might it take longer to bring things back?

ST. PE: It depends how much, how quick the infrastructure is rebuilt. We could be back as a shrimping industry next year if the ice houses and the shrimp sheds are rebuilt. My only fear is that our culture, since it’s so tied to our wetlands, and our communities have been so intact for generations, we’ve maintained this cultural identity. My worry is that forces beyond our control will dictate how we rebuild and we will look like something other than what we’ve been for generations.

If we’re going to rebuild these communities, you know, the physical infrastructure in the communities themselves, and the levy systems that protect them, we’ve got to do that at the very same time that we restore our wetlands. We cannot have a wetlands system – the system that clothes our communities – and not have the communities themselves. I mean, they’ve go to be restored together if we’re going to keep our identity as a people.

CURWOOD: Kerry St. Pe. is the director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Project between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya rivers. Mr. St. Pe, thanks for taking this time with me today.

ST. PE: OK. Thank you for calling and allowing us to tell our story.

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Emerging Science Note/Arctic Shrubs

CURWOOD: Just ahead: saving all creatures great and small in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. First, this Note on Emerging Science from Jennifer Chu.

[SCIENCE NOTE THEME]

CHU: In the barren core of Arctic tundra, winter seems infinite, endless, as if it could – and would – last forever. And it almost does. Eight to ten months out of the year, it is winter in the treeless land at the top of the world. But cropping up amid the starkness and the snow are increasing numbers of shrubs – shrubs that could shift the tundra’s delicate energy balance and cause warming of several degrees over the next few decades.

A new study by the American Geophysical Union found that increasing vegetation reduces the earth’s albedo, or the reflection of the sun’s rays from the surface. While snow reflects solar energy, dark-colored shrubs absorb it. The study monitored terrain ranging from forested canopy to tundra, and found that melting began several weeks earlier in places where shrubs were exposed than in snow-covered areas.

Climate warming seems to stimulate shrub advancement. Scientists call it a feedback loop- increased shrub growth produces higher temperatures, and higher temperatures induce further growth. Scientists predict that if shrubs continue to grow on the tundra, winter heating could increase by up to 70 percent over a period of decades. And the continued transition from tundra to shrub land could substantially alter the character of the Arctic.

That’s this week’s Note on Emerging Science. I’m Jennifer Chu.

CURWOOD: And you're listening to Living on Earth.

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ANNOUNCER: Support for NPR comes from NPR stations, and: The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, online at m-o-t-t dot org, supporting efforts to promote a just, equitable and sustainable society; The Kresge Foundation. Building the capacity of nonprofit organizations through challenge grants since 1924. On the web at k-r-e-s-g-e dot org; The Annenberg Fund for excellence in communications and education; and, The W-K Kellogg Foundation. ‘From Vision to Innovative Impact: 75 Years of Philanthropy; This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[MUSIC: Fan Modine “Marigold” from ‘Slow Road To Tiny Empire’ (Rykodisc/Phovsho – 1997)]

Pets 911

A Humane Society worker tries to coax a cat to come to her on a New Orleans street. (Photo courtesy of HSUS)

CURWOOD: It's Living on Earth. I'm Steve Curwood and coming up: Remembering Galveston, Texas and its Great Storm. But first: As search and rescue teams try to locate the stranded and sometimes stalwart holdouts amid hurricane Katrina's wreckage, there's another population of victims that's mostly been left behind: pets.

The Humane Society, along with other groups, is now organizing a massive effort to try and locate and reunite pets with their owners. So far, more than 1,200 pets have been rescued from Louisiana and Mississippi, including cats, dogs, ferrets, and chinchillas, as well as a pot-bellied pig and a sea lion.

Laura Bevan heads up the Humane Society's Katrina Rescue Operations in Mississippi. She joins me by phone from Hatti esburg. Laura, thanks for being here.

BEVAN: You’re welcome.

CURWOOD: Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re seeing now? The conditions among the animals?