Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Lying in the flood waters of New Orleans are three superfund sites - the Agriculture Street Landfill in New Orleans, the Bayou Bonfouca site in Slidell, La., and the Madisonville Creosote Works. Two superfund sites in Mississippi may also be impacted. Superfund sites are those designated by the EPA as areas of major pollution that require federal clean up.

The reports are everywhere of the "toxic soup" of the waters of New Orleans. Even the National Geographic reports "New Orleans Floodwater Fouled With Bacteria, Chemicals. The water is so unlike water, that Dan Barry of the NY Times says:" What laps against this city's shores, and some of its homes, churches and stores, is not water but a kind of anti-water." (9/12/05). The water is so bad, that people wading in it have received chemical burns. It is instructive to look at this google map of chemical plant locations in and around New Orleans.

The disaster has already struck the shrimping industry on the Mississippi coast where shrimping has been banned because of pollution (CNN Headline News, 9/11/05 - see also related article from The Guardian Oil spills, ravaged industry and lost islands add to the hurricane's toll).

What is draining out of the Gulf Region, and being pumped at a furious rate out of New Orleans, may kill everything in its path and leave a massive dead zone. Lake Ponchartrain may be unable to support life. This will impact the rebuilding of New Orleans as Lake Ponchartrain is part of the water supply for the city.

Long before Katrina, the people and environment of the Gulf have been impacted by industrial pollution. This is obvious in the superfund sites, and in a Bill Moyers' documentary "Trade Secrets. The statistics on the health consequences are there if you look for them. The site EnviroHealthAction has a report "Linking Chronic Disease and the Environment: Health Tracking in Louisiana:"

"One of the most famous incidents of environmental health injustice occurred in Louisiana. The area known as Cancer Alley, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, was plagued with extremely high levels of toxic emissions that are likely associated with various ailments, including cancers, birth defects, asthma, and bronchitis. In Louisiana, the data suggest that many of these high exposure areas occur in poor and/or minority communities. Furthermore, blacks are at higher risk than whites for death from heart disease, cancer, and stroke, according to the 2003 Louisiana Health Report Card[1].

While Cancer Alley has received the most publicity, there are other potential disease clusters across the state of Louisiana. The Trust for America's Health has identified the city of Mossville as well as Vermilion and Lafayette Parishes as disease clusters in which healthcare could be improved with a nationwide health tracking network."

Louisiana has the highest rate of kidney disease of any state in the U.S. - 402 per million of new cases according to the National Kidney Disease Education Program. This high rate was spotlighted by the number of victims in New Orleans who lost access to dialysis. The impacts have fallen most heavily on the poor and African Americans. Their industry-caused health problems exacerbated by lack of access to health care, and lack of resources to either move or fight the environmental nightmare in their midst.

Other cities have been hit by massive hazardous pollution - Love Canal (NY) and Times Beach (MO). Both of those cities have been evacuated - the population relocated, and the cities condemned. New Orleans may the pollution in those areas look minor. However, there is little doubt that New Orleans and the Gulf area will be rebuilt - regardless of how hazardous it will be to live there. The area is central in a variety of areas. It is the major hub of U.S. oil production and refining. It is a major import-export hub servicing traffic from the Mississippi River. It is also a hub of the petro-chemical industry. People in the U.S. are seeing what even a disruption in the energy activities of the Gulf can do to the rest of the country. The Gulf is also the primary domestic source of shrimp for the U.S., and the fishing industry is hard hit.

The Gulf is crucial to the U.S. economy. Regardless of the environmental destruction or the toxicity to life, it will be rebuilt. The victims of that toxicity will disproportionately be the poor, those of color, and the life of land and water. It will make no difference that the children of those who live there are born with birth defects and suffer chronic illnesses. It will make no difference that the dust that blows in the air causes cancer. It will make no difference that these same problem will effect every living thing in the area. It will "open for business," and neither the population or the environment will be assisted in surviving in a deadly environment.

The environmental disaster in the Gulf was not caused by Katrina - it was caused by the drive for profits over the life of the planet.