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September 15, 2005
Should New Orleans Be Declared A Superfund Site?
Back during the darkest days of the Katrina disaster (a couple days after the levees broke) news media overload went into the red zone. The information storm itself was a category 5, and it was almost impossible to sort fact from fiction, reason from wild speculation. But some stories even then stood out as deserving of a very beady skeptical eye. One was the "10,000 dead" pronouncement--this being made even as evacuees were still leaving the city.
I had a similar suspicion when I read the following around August 31st (all emphases are mine):
Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.
"This is the worst case," Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, said of the toxic stew that contaminates New Orleans. "There is not enough money in the Gross National Product of the United States to dispose of the amount of hazardous material in the area."
Or later, this:
"It's a Superfund site," said Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency who's worked on toxic cleanups for 30 years. He estimates it would cost $80 billion to $100 billion to clean up the damage caused by the floods. If the area were declared a Superfund site, the companies and public agencies responsible for the pollution would have to pay for the cleanup.
Kaufman's estimate is his own; the EPA has not completed its assessment of the extent of the pollution or the possible costs.
Hmmm...Hugh Kaufman's name keeps popping up--time for some more digging. Well, well, well:
Toxic chemicals in the New Orleans flood waters will make the city unsafe for full human habitation for a decade, a US government official has told The Independent on Sunday. And, he added, the Bush administration is covering up the danger. [...]
The pollution was far worse than had been admitted, he said, because his agency was failing to take enough samples and was refusing to make public the results of those it had analyzed. "Inept political hacks" running the clean-up will imperil the health of low-income migrant workers by getting them to do the work.
Mr Kaufman claimed the Bush administration was playing down the need for a clean-up: the EPA has not been included in the core White House group tackling the crisis. [...] "All the money for emergency response has gone to buy guns and cowboys - which don't do anything when a hurricane hits. We were less prepared for this than we would have been on 10 September 2001."
Sounds like a familiar refrain from Kaufman. He has also accused the EPA and other government agencies of lying about the air quality at the Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11:
The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) chief investigator has accused the EPA and other government agencies of deliberately not testing the air quality in the World Trade Center area properly and possibly covering up the reasons why.
"I believe EPA did not do that because they knew it would come up not safe and so they are involved in providing knowingly false information to the public about safety," said Hugh Kaufman, chief investigator for the EPA's Ombudsman Office, at a public hearing Saturday with scientists, residents, and small business owners. [...]
Kaufman has said earlier this month that he believes the air quality at Ground Zero is worse than the EPA will admit, and that he believes the agency has been misleading the public about the inherent risks for residents and workers in the area.
"Unsafe for full human habitation for a decade"? Unsafe by who's standards? This gets back to a fundamental gripe I have about the EPA and all regulatory agencies--standards can be meaningless if the science is hijacked by politics. (Just look at the DDT fiasco.)
Meanwhile Captain Ed injects some reason into the chaos by pointing to a Washington Post article that, you guessed it, reveals that things aren't nearly as bad as Hugh Kaufman would have you think. From the Post:
Early tests on the floodwater that covered most of this city do not suggest it will leave a permanent toxic residue or render residential areas uninhabitable for more than a short time, officials of both state and federal environmental agencies said yesterday. [...]
Despite descriptions of the floodwater as a "toxic soup" and a "witch's brew" of contaminants, the preliminary tests reveal it contains little that is different from what has been seen after past floods in other cities and here.
Well, imagine that. Captain Ed asks, "How did the "toxic soup" story start, anyway?"
Someone needs to ask Hugh Kaufman.
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Comments
72% of all statistics are made up on the spot while the author is writing without any pursuit of actualy data.
Posted by: Jim Voigt at September 15, 2005 03:35 PM
Of course, the air quality at ground zero is poor! That's because it's under water!
I think history has shown that Superfund money goes mainly to lawyers, and much of any actual work only goes forth after a period of some decades. So turning LA into a Superfund site not only will depopulate N.O. for a generation, but may halt all construction in the rest of LA as well!
Which is great if you are an environmentalist or lawyer, but terrible for everyone else.
Posted by: Solomon2 at September 19, 2005 08:46 AM
