Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess
Authors:
Elizabeth Royte
This Sunday will mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. With the region now facing a new and challenging cleanup following the BP blowout, we look back at author Elizabeth Royte’s 2006 journey into the trash and debris created by the last disaster — a toxic mess strewn across 90,000 square miles of land.
Winter days in the French Quarter still commence with the hosing of the previous night’s excesses from the sidewalks, but the district’s few lunchtime patrons are dressed for drudgery, not revels. New Orleans remains a somber place. During daylight hours, this is a city unerringly and unceasingly focused on recovery. A jungle camo T-shirt popular among visiting emergency workers reads “Baghdad on the Bayou.”
Beyond the central business district, National Guard troops prowl the city in brown and green jeeps. The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded three $500 million contracts for debris removal, and platoons of subcontractors roll through New Orleans’s low-lying districts, directing thousands of foot soldiers in orange vests, hard hats, and work boots. Entire neighborhoods appear deserted; the only obstacles to parking are the ever-accumulating mounds of household chattel — the contents of a city turned inside out.
Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) estimates that Katrina created 22 million tons of debris in the southeastern part of the state. The wreckage of the World Trade Center, by comparison, was 1.5 million tons, and it lay mostly within a few city blocks. Katrina’s is strewn across 90,000 square miles. By early December, when I visited the city, only 26 percent of the residential and public debris in Orleans Parish had been removed; a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spokeswoman expected the cleanup to continue at least through this summer. Since tens of thousands of residents still hadn’t mucked out their homes, and city officials had already tagged more than 2,500 unsound structures for demolition, new massifs of waste will materialize on curbs for some time.
But where will everything go? And what will become of the hazardous material that’s inevitably mixed in with the benign?
In an ordinary trash-producing year, New Orleans generates about 350,000 tons of waste, 6 percent to 9 percent of which gets recycled. Now, everything flows in a continuous torrent that debris managers struggle to comb into five roaring streams: woody debris; construction and demolition debris; “white goods,” such as refrigerators, air conditioners, water heaters, and trash compactors; household hazardous waste; and electronic waste. The process borders on chaos. Half a dozen government agencies have jurisdiction over different types of waste, the rules change as one crosses parish lines, and information is typically offered with a sense of contingency. “We can burn the mulch,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that mulch is being burned.
The mulch comes from nearly 12 million cubic yards of oaks, magnolias, and other vegetation strewn about by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The state has authorized burning to reduce this volume, and also that of some non-recyclable household debris. Erik Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who recently visited New Orleans, worries that some wood used in construction and furniture has been treated with preservatives that can release toxins, like chromium and dioxin, upon combustion. “We’ve heard from citizens that there is burning, but the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] refuses to give us detailed information on how they’re handling debris,” he says. And then there’s an entomological caveat: As many as 80 percent of the city’s trees are infested with Formosan termites. The state Department of Agriculture, which keeps termite maps, decreed that mulch originating in termite zones can be spread only where these insects already occur. Most of the city’s chipped wood is being trucked directly to landfills, where it’s used to cover the trash and assist in erosion control.
But as organic materials — like wood and brush — biodegrade in the anaerobic confines of a landfill, they give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas. While 21 states ban yard waste from landfills — both to preserve space and to decrease the generation of methane and leachate — Louisiana’s landfills, post-Katrina, are moving in the opposite direction. Moreover, when methane and carbon dioxide (from decomposing wood) rise from landfills, they set off a chemical reaction that strips from the other waste such toxic organic compounds as benzene and toluene, which are then transported to the surface. Polyvinyl chloride occurs in roofing and insulation materials, vinyl siding, and window frames — all ubiquitous in the thousands of truckloads of debris dumped daily at six area landfills.
Construction and demolition (C&D) debris is the most heterogeneous of Katrina’s waste streams, containing both the slimed and moldy contents of houses and the houses themselves. Some household materials, meanwhile, are excluded from this rough burial, whether because of their intrinsic worth or their intrinsic toxicity. White goods are coveted for their scrap value. In a staging area set aside for this material at the Old Gentilly landfill, which sits in a cypress swamp east of the city on a road fringed with illegal dump sites, a team of workers drains the appliances’ refrigerants for reuse. Another team, known as the food guys, dumps the putrefying contents of the refrigerators and wraps them, burrito-style, in sheets of plastic. The air here is eye-wateringly bad. Gulls kettle over the decomposed food; workers wear moon suits and respirators. The reeking burritos won’t be buried at Old Gentilly, which is unlined. Instead they’re bound for River Birch, a lined landfill that already entombs 36 million pounds of spoiled meat and seafood collected from processing and export facilities in the port. As for the white goods themselves, by late December more than 230,000 appliances, squashed into six-foot-long rectangles, had been hauled to a scrap yard and sold.
Three thousand trucks enter Old Gentilly each day; a spotter in a two-story tower peers down into each load and orders the removal of any hazardous materials he or she can make out. But the trucks come fast and thick, their contents are jumbled, and spotters aren’t paid to poke through the mess. Moreover, the drivers are paid by the cubic yard, so they have no incentive to separate.
But plenty of household hazardous waste is teased out. Residents or their proxies haul it from ruined houses and set it in discrete piles on the curb: small collections of paint cans, pesticides, and solvents, the kind of stuff relegated to high shelves in garages. Household electronics too are set apart: TV and computer monitors contain between four and eight pounds of lead. Cell phones, handheld video games — anything with a circuit board — often contain chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc, and copper, all of which can potentially leach from landfills.
EPA crews troll the city for electronic waste, which they transfer to a Georgia-based company that removes batteries, cathode-ray tubes, mercury bulbs, leaded glass, and toner cartridges for recycling. What remains is sorted into metals and plastic, then shredded and sold to commodities processors. By late December, a unified command composed of the EPA, the Coast Guard, and the Louisiana DEQ had collected about 90,000 hurricane-damaged televisions, computers, stereos, and other electronic equipment in seven parishes. There’s plenty more to come.
East of the city, in a weedy lot shadowed by an abandoned incinerator, a different phalanx of EPA workers sorts through more than 12,000 pieces of household hazardous waste each day. Flammables and solvents go to a power plant hungry for their Btu value; pesticides and poisons end up at an incinerator licensed to burn hazardous waste; propane is recovered from tanks and canisters which are then either crushed and scrapped or painted for reuse. Lead from car and boat batteries is recovered for processors; bleach is poured into barrels, chemically neutralized, and discharged (under a federal permit) into waterways. Hunched over a small table, a field chemist runs tests on mystery compounds. “We’ve processed more than a million pounds of household hazardous waste,” says James Augustyn, a site coordinator. Asked whether the folks mucking out houses are segregating all the hazardous stuff, he answers with an air of resignation. “They’re supposed to, but it’s impossible to get every single piece.”
And that is the bottom line. No one is going to root out a mercury-containing thermostat from a 20-foot mound of rubbish. Not every car (Katrina left 360,000 storm-ruined vehicles on the streets) will be drained of its toxic fluids and scrapped for reuse. Not every desktop monitor will be transformed into something shiny and new.
If Katrina’s cleanup seems to be proceeding slowly (and it is, especially for exiled residents eager to come home), officials blame the unprecedented scale of the operation and the complexity of the waste stream. “We want to reuse and recycle as much as we can,” says John Rogers, a DEQ staff scientist. “We’re diverting as much as we can from the landfill because we don’t want to create problems down the line.” Rogers is alluding to the cleanup after 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, when debris was dumped indiscriminately into the Agriculture Street landfill, in the Lower Ninth Ward, and then covered with less than two feet of soil. In time, lead, arsenic, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons — in all, some 50 carcinogenic compounds — leached out, and the EPA in 1994 conferred Superfund status on the site (though not before houses, a community center, and a school were constructed atop it).
Everything has to go somewhere, the laws of nature state. Sluice the brown sediment, laced with oil and heavy metals, from your siding and the contaminated water drains into Lake Pontchartrain. Bury PVC pipes in a landfill and vinyl chlorides rise with the methane. We know, after decades of failing to manage Superfund sites, that poisons shunted elsewhere have a way of working their way back again, into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.
As winter turns to spring, it’s impossible to say whether anyone is doing a good, or even an adequate, job of handling Katrina’s fallout. The hurricane’s toxic legacy has already been written, but it may be decades until we’re able to comprehend it.
Back in New Orleans — Five Years Later
Five Years After Katrina Psychological Wounds Reopen on the Gulf Coast
Overview of NRDC's health work after Katrina
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Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess
Slow Death By Rubber Duck
For two days, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie confined themselves to a small room and did what on the face of it seem like some unremarkable things. They showered, shampooed, and shaved. They ate tuna sandwiches and canned food reheated in plastic containers. They sat on a couch and played Guitar Hero on a carpet treated with stain repellent. Those are things that many of us might do on any given day — but unlike the rest of us, Smith and Lourie closely monitored their blood and urine the whole time for seven toxic chemicals. Even though they made a conscious effort to avoid some of these chemicals before their experiment, after two days of "normal" activity, they found drastically elevated levels of toxics in their bodies. "Pollution is now so pervasive that it’s become a marinade in which we all bathe every day," they write in Slow Death by Rubber Duck . "Pollution is actually inside us all. It’s seeped into our bodies. And in many cases, once in, it’s impossible to get out." The authors, both prominent Canadian environmentalists, have been working for years to publicize the health risks of toxic chemical exposure — not just exposure as a result of say, an industrial accident, but the dangers of swimming in a sea of unregulated chemicals, as most of us unwittingly do every day. In the United States, some 82,000-odd chemicals are in use, appearing in our food, toys, air, water, clothing, furniture, electronics — just about everywhere. Only 200 of these chemicals have ever been tested for toxicity, and only five have ever been banned under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the nation’s main law for regulating commercial chemicals. Even asbestos , a known cancer-causing agent, can still be used legally in insulation, dry-wall, and other homebuilding materials. That notoriously toothless law could be revised this year, and Rubber Duck makes a colorful — perhaps too colorful — case for this much-needed change. It’s hard to write a book this scary without being labeled as scaremongering — and indeed, the authors have been skewered as such by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and others. But the insinuation of toxic chemicals into our lives is, as the authors point out, scary stuff. A growing body of research is linking childhood and prenatal exposures to some of these chemicals with an alarming range of disorders and disease, including autism, ADHD, certain cancers, diabetes, abnormal genital development, infertility, and Parkinson’s . With a list of potential health risks this alarming, it seems unthinkable that products containing these chemicals are still on store shelves and in our homes. Smith and Lourie explain this situation by delving into the history of these chemicals, the powerful corporations that created them, the ineffectual government agencies that failed to regulate them, and the everyday heroes who are fighting to change a deeply entrenched system that supports corporate profits over human health. The authors examine seven toxic chemicals : phthalates, found in the eponymous rubber duck; PFCs, the type of chemical found in Teflon and stain-repellents; brominated flame retardants, used widely in clothing and electronics; mercury, found in fish; triclosan, an antibacterial chemical used in hand soaps and other personal care products; the pesticide 2,4-D, commonly used in lawn treatments; and the now infamous plastic-making chemical, BPA. Their bodily experiments aren’t the meat of the book. It’s a gimmick that also provides a convenient structural backbone for their story. What makes this tale of modern pollution lively and engaging is its cast of characters — the lobbyists, scientists, lawyers, and just plain folks who realize something isn’t right. The chapter on Teflon and PFCs, for example, focuses on the story of Joe Kiger, a high school football coach in Parkersburg, West Virginia, who is the lead plaintiff in a class action suit against DuPont, his town’s biggest employer. Kiger’s everyday heroism is as inspiring as DuPont’s actions are disturbing - the company was hit with a $16.5 million fine for failing to properly disclose the risks of the chemicals it was making and selling. Smith and Lourie also attempt to liven up their tale with numerous pop culture references and song lyrics, a trick they lay on a bit too thick. To illustrate Americans’ obsession with hygiene and the spread of the antibacterial triclosan, they write: "Oscar-nominated actor Terrence Howard requires the women he dates to use baby wipes rather than toilet paper in the washroom, because to do otherwise would be unclean." Ick. If I wanted to know that, I’d be reading TMZ , not this book. The authors are convincing in their illustration of the pervasiveness of toxic chemicals in our lives, as well as the disturbing history of how this came to pass. They are less convincing, however, when they attempt to address the issue of the smoking gun, or rather, the lack of it, when it comes to linking certain toxic chemicals to human illness. They write: "Many citizens still possess an innate sense of danger, and although their observations may not be entirely accurate and are therefore not permissible in a regulatory context, this innate instinct should not be completely ignored. Rachel Carson was on to something and so was Lois Gibbs at Love Canal. So was Erin Brockovich … They may not always have epidemiological data or double blind longitudinal health studies to present, but they have eyes and common sense." I barely suppressed a groan when I read this argument, which seemed to undercut all the scientific evidence the authors have painstakingly footnoted throughout the book, as well as the work of the scientists they interviewed. The truth is that the study of the human health effects of these chemicals is relatively new, and it could take decades to form a strong scientific consensus. That’s how science works. But that doesn’t mean we have to rely on someone’s tingly spider-sense to take action. The evidence that these chemicals cause harm is mounting, and what we know so far is troubling enough to suggest that precaution would be in order. As the authors were writing this book, Canada declared BPA toxic, Europe banned certain flame-retardant chemicals in televisions, and the United States restricted the use of hormone-disrupting chemicals in plastic children’s toys. It’s a start, but the real shift in this country will depend on how the Toxic Substances Control Act is reformed. Will the burden still be on consumers to decipher ingredient labels, recycling symbols and surf nonprofit websites to find information about hidden toxic chemicals? Or will manufacturers and government step up and take responsibility for public health and product quality? I hope for the latter, but in the meantime, I’ll still be scrutinizing the numbers on the bottoms of plastic containers while chanting this handy rhyme I picked up from Rubber Duck : "Four, five, one and two; all the rest are bad for you."
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Slow Death By Rubber Duck
Dirty Scoundrels
When we think of America’s most wanted, the agency that usually comes to mind is the FBI. But in December the Environmental Protection Agency released a list of its own, naming 23 environmental "fugitives." Airline mechanic Mauro Valenzuela is wanted for allegedly transporting hazardous chemicals on board a plane; they caught fire, causing a crash that killed more than 100 passengers and crew. Larkin Baggett, owner of Chemical Consultants Inc., is accused of dumping toxic waste into a sewer system. Other fugitives are charged with the illegal sale of the ozone-depleting chemical Freon, dumping chemicals into a tributary of the Mississippi River through a secret pipe, and disposing of tons of oil-contaminated wheat (intended as food aid for Bangladesh) in the ocean. See the full list, complete with mug shots, at epa.gov/fugitives
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Dirty Scoundrels