What Would You Like in Your Toxic Soup?

The Society of Environmental Journalists has been working to pry open the folks who run the evidently mis-named Freedom of Information Act, so's that they could get, yup, some information. For a long time, and about all kinds of things. On this page you can find a list of their frustrated efforts to get information on a series of different topics. The one they are dealing with currently is that of trying to gain access to environmental data on toxic releases into the waters covering NOLA and the surrounding area. That the waters are beyond horrible has been amply documented in the press and media. You could start with this article from yesterday's NYT, A Black-Green Curtain of Disease and Destruction, Grime and Stench, then move on to Mopping New Orleans: What will it take to disinfect the city? On the ground with the Army Corps of Engineers as it cleans up Katrina's deadly muck, from the Katrina issue of Time Magazine. You could also just watch the pictures on your TV set of cleanup and rescue operations as they are being conducted.

NOLA and the surrounding area contain Superfund sites, chemical plants, and waste dumps (and who knows what lurks there) as well as the much talked-about petroleum and petrochemical industry sites. Three Superfund sites were flooded by the storm, and, as of Saturday, one remained flooded. "These sites in Louisiana and Mississippi contain a range of contaminants that include heavy metals linked to increased cancer risk and developmental problems and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogens." (Juliet Elperin, WaPo article) I'm going to put this entire article from Saturday's WaPo at the end of the post, Flooded Toxic Waste Sites Are Potential Health Threat, hoping that makes it more accessible to read. From that article, however, I want to mention one of the Superfund sites, the Agriculture Street Landfill:

Darryl Malek-Wiley, a Sierra Club organizer in Louisiana who has spent years working on the cleanup of the Agriculture Street Landfill two miles north of the central business district, said he is particularly concerned about that site because the city encouraged first-time black home buyers to move there in the 1970s. Federal officials placed the site on Superfund's National Priorities List in 1994.

Malek-Wiley was also on a Living on Earth (NPR) segment this week: Rising Up from a Toxic Legacy. The transcipt is at the link, but you can also listen to it or download it as an MP3. On NPR he is talking about the toxic sites all along the Mississippi River, near small towns with mainly black populations. Long story short, the EPA has yet to release any information about toxic releases from damaged chemical plants, wood treatment plants, Superfund sites. It could be that two and a half weeks after the storm, they still don't know! Because they haven't yet started testing soil and water for these industrial toxins. They do assure us that "they will soon start investigating whether hazardous materials are leaching into the environment." I'm not well enough aquainted with the VP or anyone else in high places to get an appointment to a federal office, but it does seem to me that this is information that anyone in or around the city needs to have. ASAP. Rescue and cleanup workers for one, anyone who stubbornly refuses to leave, for yet another.

So, enter the SEJ trying to get information out of the EPA. This Op-Ed piece by Perry Beeman, President, Society of Environmental Journalists, and Environment Writer, The Des Moines Register is well worth reading. He begins with this:

Hurricane Katrina presented not only a human tragedy, but also one of the biggest environmental stories of the new millennium. Even after days of criticism that the federal government didn't do enough to help hurricane victims, federal agencies compounded the problem by failing to respond adequately to journalists' environmental questions.

The event gave the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a chance to show that it had learned lessons from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when the agency was broadly criticized for withholding information and downplaying risks. Instead, EPA appears to have taken the same tight-lipped approach in responding to Katrina, denying the public crucial information collected with taxpayers' money on behalf of taxpayers in the first place.

Back at the SEJ website's FOIA page, there is a link to this most recent report:
"A Flawed Tool — Environmental Reporters' Experiences With the Freedom of Information Act," It is a testimony to this administration's belief that the public deserves to know as little as possible about environmental disaster, peril, danger to home and health. We all need to start fighting a lot harder for our right to the truth.

Start by reading Juliet Elperin's hair-raising article in its entirety (emphasis is mine):

Three Superfund toxic waste sites in and around New Orleans were flooded by Hurricane Katrina and one remains underwater, Environmental Protection Agency officials said yesterday, adding that they will soon start investigating whether hazardous materials are leaching into the environment.

Although the agency is focused on conducting search-and-rescue missions and taking floodwater samples from the city at large rather than from waste sites, officials have begun to monitor the potential danger. The Agriculture Street Landfill in New Orleans, where city residents dumped their trash for decades, is still underwater. In the nearby suburbs, the Bayou Bonfouca site in Slidell, La., and the Madisonville Creosote Works site also sustained flooding.
Local environmental activists, who are concerned that two Superfund sites in neighboring Mississippi may also have sustained water damage, said federal authorities are not moving fast enough to assess the public health threat.

The uncertainties surrounding how the storm affected hazardous waste sites -- EPA administrator Steve Johnson said his agency had yet to determine if any of their protective shields had been degraded -- highlights the challenges facing any future cleanup. The Gulf Coast has long been a magnet for chemical plants and waste dumps, some of which shut down after becoming too contaminated in recent years.

"We don't know if there's a problem or not," Johnson said, adding that officials will begin sampling soil and water from the sites when they have a chance. "We are taking appropriate steps to understand what we're dealing with. There's just a lot of work to be done."

Darryl Malek-Wiley, a Sierra Club organizer in Louisiana who has spent years working on the cleanup of the Agriculture Street Landfill two miles north of the central business district, said he is particularly concerned about that site because the city encouraged first-time black home buyers to move there in the 1970s. Federal officials placed the site on Superfund's National Priorities List in 1994.

"What's happening, we don't know. If EPA says they know, they're lying," Malek-Wiley said, adding that the agency has done more to protect Superfund sites in wealthier areas. "What it says is the federal government's approach to cleanup is that they do a better job in rich counties than in poor counties."

Several scientists and environmental experts said it was likely the rush of water, much of which remains trapped inside New Orleans, had infiltrated the waste sites and absorbed a range of contaminants. In the Agriculture Street Landfill, federal authorities replaced the top two feet of contaminated soil in residents' yards and laid down a layer of protective sheeting four years ago, but standing water could leach into the dirt over time.

"Very few facilities are designed to withstand this kind of severe flooding," said Lynn Goldman, who served as assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances under President Bill Clinton and now teaches at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "You have to get in there and do an assessment of what the damage is."

Randy Deitz, an attorney adviser in the EPA's Office of Solid Waste Management and Emergency Response, said federal officials took steps when cleaning up the Gulf Coast sites to protect them from future storm damage. But he added, "In the case of a catastrophe, sometimes all the engineering in the world is not going to prevent some erosion."

Although federal authorities have yet to conduct a formal count, several former EPA officials said they could not recall a single flood affecting so many Superfund sites since at least the early 1990s, when the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers overflowed simultaneously.

Sylvia Lowrance, who headed the EPA's hazardous waste management program and worked at the agency for nearly a quarter-century, said she could not remember a time when a Superfund site "was literally underwater. This is certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, environmental and public health disasters we've faced in modern times."

The flooded Superfund sites in Louisiana and Mississippi contain a range of contaminants that include heavy metals linked to increased cancer risk and developmental problems and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogens.

Richard T. Di Giulio, who heads Duke University's Superfund Basic Research Center, said when a toxic site is flooded, the contaminants could seep into surface water and the surrounding soil.

EPA officials said they could not determine whether serious flooding had affected two waste sites in Mississippi, a wood treating plant in Picayune and a chemical fixation facility in Harrison County along the Louisiana border. Both areas were hit by massive storm surges during the hurricane, but local activists said they had not had a chance to survey the sites.

Environmentalists said they feared many functioning chemical plants in the area also experienced damage during the storm, but dozens of operators have reported they have emerged unscathed. Dorothy Kellogg, director for security and operations at the American Chemistry Council, said of the 40 companies she had surveyed, none had reported environmental releases.

"In terms of the environment, things seem to be pretty good," Kellogg said, adding that plant operators took precautions before the hurricane hit to protect their supplies. "The companies had plans in place, and the plans worked." (This last is perhaps my favorite part. "Yes," says the fox, "the chickens are all just fine in the henhouse. Thank you for letting me guard it. I did a really good job!")

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