Link to Reference: EVIN SPEAR, The Orlando Sentinel, 12/21/05

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Highlights:
- Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere. But its destination remains a mystery.
- Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites - now and in years to come - could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life.
- How communities and industries that continue to crowd the region are so blind to their environmental risk-taking and the harm they cause the Gulf

NEW ORLEANS - Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere. But its destination remains a mystery. Scientists still don't know whether the slug of germs and chemicals is floating toward Florida's coast, drifting out to the Atlantic or lurking somewhere in between.

The massive dose of pollution stands as one of the storm season's critical environmental lessons: The Gulf roils with looping, whirling currents able to turn one shore's mess into another's lasting misery.

That message is growing more urgent with predictions that hurricanes will punch harder and more often in coming decades.

Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites - now and in years to come - could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life. At the very least, hurricane batterings will heighten threats to an ecosystem already burdened with dead zones, toxic algae and mysterious plumes of pollution-laden black water off Florida's coast.

"Where does the Gulf of Mexico reach the tipping point where it can no longer fix itself?" asked Enid Sisskin, legislative chair for the Panhandle's Gulf Coast Environmental Defense.

The Gulf of Mexico's expanse - the world's fifth-largest sea - is really an illusion. Shaped like a fishbowl, upside down and slightly canted, its widest span equals a line from Orlando to New York. But the distance is easily conquered.

A hummingbird migrates from Mississippi to Mexico in 18 hours. Ships laden with wheat steam from Beaumont, Texas, to beyond Key West in 48 hours. Natural-gas molecules surge through a pipeline under the Gulf from Mobile Bay to Tampa Bay in 59 hours.

It's not hard to see how a mess in one part of the Gulf can arrive quickly in others.

At Padre Island National Seashore, near Corpus Christi, Texas, researchers have traced trash to offshore rigs, shrimp boats, recreational boaters and more-distant sources, such as Midwest farms, said park science chief Darrell Echols.

After Mississippi River floods in the 1990s, crews hauled off everything from cow carcasses to roof trusses. After Katrina, workers returned to the park for truckloads of storm debris.

Yet how currents morph and whirl remains such a mystery that scientists aren't certain about how pollution travels. Predicting serpentine movements in the Gulf isn't nearly as reliable as forecasting a tropical storm.

"We have lots of weather observations on land," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington. "In the Gulf, we have a handful of buoys."

Stress on the Gulf of Mexico began in earnest decades ago as increasing development contributed polluted runoff, and industries found it a convenient dumping ground. Catastrophes not only added to the mess but proved how trouble in one area can extend for miles.

The world's second-worst ocean oiling issued a wake-up call in 1979. Workers on a rig near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula lost control of a well, unleashing 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf during the next nine months.

Despite efforts to skim, burn and dissolve the spill, slicks smeared Mexico's coast and drifted 600 miles to Texas, washing onto 160 miles of shoreline. In Florida, 900 miles from the blowout, officials feared tar balls on beaches and petroleum poisoning of fish.

Scientists found encouraging but worrisome news.

Mexican oil hadn't traveled to Florida. But their research at the time showed that crude from other faraway parts of the Gulf had made the journey. It came from tankers scrubbing out their holds. It wasn't a small amount of oil. The discharged oil had been swallowed by turtles - green, hawksbill and loggerhead - that washed up dead on Florida shores.

It was a clear sign that Florida needs to keep a lookout far beyond its own share of the Gulf's blue depths.

The unknowns of the Gulf have contributed to the mystery of what happened to the slug of pollution that flowed out of New Orleans.

Nobody can say how fast or in what direction it traveled. But they know more than 66 billion gallons drained out of the city - more than enough to fill the 50-square-mile Lake Apopka west of Orlando.

The giant plume set off such worries that an unprecedented armada of oceanographers, marine biologists and chemists fanned out in several ships across the northern Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to west of the Mississippi River delta.

Health authorities already had reported that evacuees who waded in floodwaters in New Orleans were breaking out with rashes and blistered skin.

"We had no way of knowing what to expect," said Shailer Cummings, chief scientist for one of the cruises sponsored by NOAA.

A University of South Florida oceanographer, in a separate effort, offered a theory. Using computer calculations and satellite observations of sea-surface changes, he estimated the swiftest-moving New Orleans contamination could have traveled the Gulf in circular detours for a month before hooking around South Florida to the Atlantic Ocean.

NOAA deployed "drifters" - floating electronic buoys - that broadcast their locations while riding currents. Some migrated toward Texas. Others meandered toward Florida.

The scientists never found fish kills, tainted shellfish or the pollution. Perhaps toxic floodwaters were neutralized by exposure to sun, sank to the bottom, decayed or were diluted.

Robert H. Gore, a marine scientist who wrote a book about the Gulf's wonders and plight in the early 1990s, doesn't expect that many of Florida's residents will see Katrina's mess as a warning.

He has marveled at how communities and industries that continue to crowd the region are so blind to their environmental risk-taking and the harm they cause the Gulf.

"You built your own nest," Gore said. "Now you have to sit in it."

Link to Reference: Cain Burdeau, The Associated Press, 12/18/05

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Highlights:
- Regulators said environmental rules had to be set aside to save the Gulf Coast from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
- Federal and state agencies waived environmental laws regulating open burning. They waived the laws regulating asbestos removal. They waived rules for landfills, gasoline and diesel fuel standards, and water and air pollution - all in the name of recovery and rebuilding.
- Records show the oil industry was quick to seek and receive waivers and exceptions from state and federal agencies. EPA said it would use discretion in its enforcement of emissions at refineries because of the gasoline shortage throughout the nation.

NEW ORLEANS - From the moment New Orleans' filthy floodwaters were pumped into Lake Pontchartrain, regulators said environmental rules had to be set aside to save the Gulf Coast from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
   Federal and state agencies waived environmental laws regulating open burning. They waived the laws regulating asbestos removal. They waived rules for landfills, gasoline and diesel fuel standards, and water and air pollution - all in the name of recovery and rebuilding.
   Meanwhile, Louisiana's U.S. senators pushed for long-term waivers of environmental laws in hurricane-hit states to quicken rebuilding, tacking the proposal onto a stalled $250 billion rebuilding plan presented to Congress.
   Mostly, said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the waivers were harmless. But some say they went too far, padding the pockets of oil companies and creating long-term environmental hazards.
   ''What these waivers represent is the government waiving protections of the public's health,'' said Adam Babich, director of Tulane University's Environmental Law Clinic. ''A lot of this seems to be happening under the radar without any public participation.''
   In Louisiana, the waivers and variances to permits came fast and furious after Katrina hit Aug. 29, DEQ documents show. More exceptions were issued a month later after Hurricane Rita.
   Some waivers, like the one that allows the burning of dead animal carcasses, appeared harmless. But many others have raised questions.
   Records show the oil industry was quick to seek and receive waivers and exceptions from state and federal agencies. EPA said it would use discretion in its enforcement of emissions at refineries because of the gasoline shortage throughout the nation.
   Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at EPA and longtime whistle-blower within the agency, said EPA's move to allow refineries to take longer to report emissions and not comply with environmental rules helped the companies make the record profits.
   ''The bottom line is everyone is taking major hits across the country except for one sector that's become a profit center, and that's not right, that's not American,'' Kaufman said.
   Darrin Mann, a DEQ spokesman, said the permits did not allow the refineries ''to go hog wild'' and emit large amounts of pollutants. Instead, DEQ says the waivers were needed so the refineries could work through kinks in their systems when they were shut down by the storms.
   EPA and DEQ officials have said that air monitors have shown no problems with air quality at the refineries. But Anne Rolfes, a Louisiana activist, insists that EPA tests after Katrina showed high levels of benzene near oil refineries.
   ''We're asking the neighbors of these refineries to put up with a lot of increased risk, increased fears and increased noise from these refineries so that we can enjoy the benefits of cheaper gasoline,'' Babich said.
   Meanwhile, environmentalists are challenging state regulators for sending much of the waste from gutted homes and businesses in New Orleans to an old city landfill that is not lined to keep contaminants from leaching out.
   The trucks hauling debris into the landfill are inspected from towers at the dump's entrance, but there are concerns that contractors are trucking in paint, household cleaners and chemicals by hiding the hazardous material at the bottom of their loads.
   Similar questions abound. In hard-hit Plaquemines Parish, waste is being burned 24 hours a day and mounds of debris will be bulldozed into unlined pits.
   Out in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Marine Fisheries Service waived the requirement that shrimpers use devices on their nets that let sea turtles escape. The agency said debris littering the Gulf made the devices impractical.
   On land, a Georgia-Pacific paper mill was allowed to burn petroleum coke because of a shortage of natural gas. A chemical factory was given the go-ahead to dispose of a petroleum byproduct stuck in a storage tank by burning it off in a flare.
   In the marshes, officials got rid of oil spills from broken pipelines by burning it off.
   The bottom line, many say, was getting the job done.
   But environmentalists worry. ''We should do it right now rather than paying more money in the future to clean it up,'' said Darryl Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club's Delta Chapter.

Link to Reference: John McQuaid, Staff writer, 12/18/05

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Highlights:
- higher levees along New Orleans' 17th Street Canal likely would fail in high water because they were built on "very soft clays with minimal cohesion.
- canals breached when foundation soil slipped from underneath them as Hurricane Katrina's storm surge rose on Aug. 29, flooding much of central New Orleans.
- Investigators, along with many New Orleans residents, are wondering how engineers with advanced degrees, using computers and detailed data on soil conditions, could design floodwalls with what, in hindsight, are obvious flaws.
- The document trail is incomplete, and mysteries remain about key design decisions. But design memoranda and other documents from the construction of the floodwalls in the two canals offer clues to what might have gone wrong. They show that in addition to concerns dating back 25 years about the stability of levees in both canals, designers sometimes worked at the edge of acceptable standards and at times failed to account for layers of weak soil. All are problems that could have contributed to the failures.


After a 1980 flood caused a stretch of the city's London Avenue canal levee to collapse, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed replacing it with a fortified design called a T-wall, with sheet pile foundations driven 26 feet deep. And in 1981, a study by Metairie design firm Modjeski & Masters found that proposed higher levees along New Orleans' 17th Street Canal likely would fail in high water because they were built on "very soft clays with minimal cohesion."

Yet when levee designs were finalized, the London Avenue Canal wall ended up with a significantly weaker design and the 17th Street walls with shallower foundations. Both canals breached when foundation soil slipped from underneath them as Hurricane Katrina's storm surge rose on Aug. 29, flooding much of central New Orleans.

As teams of forensic engineers probe why levees breached during Katrina, the key question lies at the heart of the design process. Investigators, along with many New Orleans residents, are wondering how engineers with advanced degrees, using computers and detailed data on soil conditions, could design floodwalls with what, in hindsight, are obvious flaws.

Investigators are focusing on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which breached when water rose to a point that was, at the most, two feet below their tops. They suggest that, since the walls have common elements, there is a fundamental problem with the way the walls were built.

"There does appear to be a systemic failure along the drainage canals because the failure occurred at two places simultaneously," said David Rogers, a geotechnical engineer at the University of Missouri-Rolla who is on a National Science Foundation team studying the breaches. "There's got to be something big that's causing that. . . . This is a very bad failure mark. It's telling you they missed the mark by a country mile on the design."

The document trail is incomplete, and mysteries remain about key design decisions. But design memoranda and other documents from the construction of the floodwalls in the two canals offer clues to what might have gone wrong. They show that in addition to concerns dating back 25 years about the stability of levees in both canals, designers sometimes worked at the edge of acceptable standards and at times failed to account for layers of weak soil. All are problems that could have contributed to the failures.

Unpredictable forces

Engineering has a reputation as the hardest of hard sciences. It deals not just with scientific laws and complex equations but with the real world: things such as levees, dams, bridges and jet engines. Those structures have to perform under everyday conditions for years, and also keep working when hit by rarer, more powerful stresses.

Engineers are supposed to calculate those forces -- in this case, the high pressures of rising floodwaters -- account for them and compensate for them in the design. It sounds straightforward, especially for a structure as seemingly simple as a vertical, steel-and-concrete wall. But it's not.

Every structure faces hard-to-predict scenarios. For levees, these involve the combination of weak soil and high water. Soil, especially the muck under much of New Orleans, behaves unpredictably under stress. It's hard to address that in the design, though there are safeguards built into the process that are supposed to make up for such uncertainties.

Complicated process

But the design process itself also is complicated, from the gathering of soil samples to the production of plans, said Radhey Sharma, a Louisiana State University geotechnical engineer who is studying the levee failures as part of the state-sponsored Team Louisiana.

"There are a number of stages at which things can be very delicate," Sharma said. "They can be at the site investigation, the level of testing in the field and lab, and then when you have calculations at the design level."

Far from being straight-up mathematical calculations, these involve questions of politics, money and bureaucracy. Firms and agencies with varying priorities participate and make compromises. With physical uncertainties added in, engineers say, those factors can result in designs that appear to meet all requirements but contain hidden weaknesses that show up only after it's too late.

In hindsight, experts say, designers working on the 17th Street wall got some of the basics wrong.

Not deep enough

Investigators say the floodwall's sheet pile foundation, which extended 17 feet below sea level at the breached area, allowed water -- under pressure from weight, wind and waves -- to seep through soft soils underneath it during the hurricane, leading to a breach.

The bottom of the wall rested in a layer of soft clay that can turn to the consistency of grease when pressurized water moves through it, Rogers said. It also didn't reach the 18.5-foot depth of the canal bottom, a common design benchmark because the highest seepage occurs from water penetrating horizontally from the canal.

Deeper sheet piling would have had two benefits, engineers say: preventing seepage and stabilizing the whole structure.

Modjeski & Masters says it initially recommended a depth of 35 feet to the corps, but has not provided documentation to back the claim.

Yet as the designs were developed, engineers suggested that much shorter sheet-piling depths would work fine.

Design documents by Modjeski & Masters and Eustis Engineering, a geotechnical firm, show that in 1988 and 1989 engineers calculated that the sheet pile for a 3,500-foot length of floodwall, including the breached area, should be just 12.8 feet deep. The documents appear to be general surveys that assess and approve already agreed-upon designs, Rogers said. The next year, the corps incorporated many of the same numbers into the official design and came up with an even shorter 10-foot depth for the sheet piling.

It's not clear how the foundations ended up 7 feet deeper when the walls were built. But it still wasn't enough.

The documents indicate that the floodwalls were designed primarily as retaining walls to hold back water in the canal not to prevent seepage or to buttress the soil at deeper levels underground.

"In terms of the influence of the sheet piling, if it were driven very, very deep it would have intercepted or somewhat retarded the movements of soils at, say, 20 feet," said Joseph Suhayda, a retired Louisiana State University professor and engineering consultant who studied the documents. "That certainly was not a design function indicated by the documents. There was a separation of function."

Not stable enough

That separation is appropriate if the levee part of the structure is strong. Floodwalls are only as stable as the soil in which they're built. Though both are part of one, integral system, they also are distinct structures with different forces acting on them that behave in different ways under stress. When a wall fails in isolation, it tends to dislodge from its moorings, rotating around a point, bending or breaking. When soil fails, pressures build in its softest layers until they literally break apart and an entire mass suddenly slips along an arc or a plane, like a book sliding across a table.

The designers figured, incorrectly, that the earthen structure alone would be stable enough in the layers below the bottom of the sheet pile. One reason for that is that they miscalculated how far down the soil would be likely to slide.

The 17th Street designs calculated the most likely point for the soil to fail was at 36.5 feet below sea level 15 to 20 feet below the weakest layers.

At about 36 feet below sea level, boring data show that softer soil layers give way to sand, the remnant of an ancient beach. Geotechnical engineers say it makes sense to assume soil might slip where one distinct layer sits on another. But they also say that weaker soils above that, where transitions between soft clays, peat and other marshy materials were not as clearly demarcated, were more likely failure points.

The edge of safety

The calculations also show that at various stages before the sheet-piling depth was changed to 17 feet, designers were operating at the edge of acceptable safety standards.

Rogers called the calculations "suspicious" because they derived a safety factor of 1.3 for that 36 feet-below-sea-level depth exactly the minimum called for by the Army Corps of Engineers' standards for levees. A safety factor is a cushion built into the design to make sure a structure is stronger than the maximum forces it's designed to withstand.

Getting a minimum safety factor in a design is not unusual; it's usually the goal. Higher safety factors mean bigger costs. But Rogers noted that design requirements mandate the safety factor be 1.3 only at the weakest points; at other points in a typical structure it's often much higher. But in the 1988, 1989 and 1990 design documents for the breached area of the 17th Street wall, virtually all of the safety factors were 1.3 or slightly above it one, however, was 1.2965 indicating the structure barely met corps standards.

"If I can do a hundred cross sections of a levee and a few are 1.3, that's OK. But here all the factors are around 1.3," Rogers said. "From the outside, that's suspicious. If you come across something like this, you say maybe the answers they want to get are driving the analysis, not the analysis driving the answers."

With a safety factor of 1.3 -- low for an important structure protecting lives and property -- there is relatively little room for error, and engineers are supposed to compensate for that with conservative designs, taking into account the unexpected soil variations.

The breached floodwalls were I-walls, a vertical wall that is the least expensive and least stable of the choices available. But it's not clear yet whether such concerns or other factors led to deepening the sheet piles from the shorter designs to 17 feet.

Weak spots

In calculating those safety numbers, designers also broadly generalized about quirky soil in an area where pockets of weakness can matter a great deal. Wide variations in soil type and strength were mathematically lumped together to simplify the calculations.

To figure out where the trouble spots are -- where soil is likely to slip or slide -- engineers use equations that give a rough prediction of how the earth will behave during the maximum flood: in this case, a water height of 11.5 feet in the canal associated with a Category 3 hurricane.

The three sets of documents show engineers used the same soil-strength figures for a section of the levee wall more than 6,000 feet long. A profile generated from boring data shows the layer of especially weak soil was about 1,500 to 2,000 feet long.

Designers are supposed to be cautious and account for weak points in such generalizations, but the documents do not indicate whether they did. Rogers said they might have averaged low numbers with higher strengths in the vicinity, blurring the differences -- and underestimating the risk of failure.

The stability analyses don't mention concern about the weakest soil layers or isolated weak points. A second round of calculations done in 1989 by Modjeski & Masters, intended to double-check Eustis' 1988 numbers, concluded that the designs apparently were fine, as did the 1990 design memorandum.

The peat and soft clays "presented a real challenge," Suhayda said. "When you look at the design calculations, it seems to be absent."

If they make generalizations and have an incomplete picture of what's going on underground, there is always a risk engineers will not identify serious trouble spots. "There might be a big layer that is very weak that might have been totally missed," Sharma said.

There also is evidence of such a possible oversight in the London Avenue canal, whose floodwalls breached in two spots. According to a 1989 project design memorandum, designers had ignored layers of soft clays in levee sections for an area near the lakefront, an error caught by corps reviewers at the Lower Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg.

The memo, from corps Lower Mississippi Valley Division official William Hill, says: "These stability analyses plates show no clay layers above el(evation). -41 [ft.]. However, borings . . . show very soft clay layers (and 'no sample') in the vicinity of el -15; and Boring 32 very soft clay between elevations -18 and -20. If these very soft clays were included in the referenced stability analyses, lower than allowable factors of safety would result."

New Orleans district engineering chief Frederic M. Chatry concurred, saying that new soil borings would be done in that area and the numbers recalculated. It's not clear what happened after that, but at some point the design for the east side that breached was changed from a T-wall to the weaker I-wall.

Link to Reference: Mark Schleifstein, Staff writer, 12/15/05

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Highlights:
- A leader of a state team investigating New Orleans area levee failures Wednesday defended sonar and seismic tests conducted by a state contractor that indicated some sheet piles installed along the 17th Street Canal were sunk to only 10 feet below sea level.
- the corps' findings also don't relieve the agency of responsibility for the failure of the 17th Street Canal levee or other levees in the city.
- We have to be responsible to the people of New Orleans and fix these problems and fix them right. That calls for validated scientific information and not speculation and accusations that are creating anxiety and fear in people

A leader of a state team investigating New Orleans area levee failures Wednesday defended sonar and seismic tests conducted by a state contractor that indicated some sheet piles installed along the 17th Street Canal were sunk to only 10 feet below sea level.

On Tuesday, Army Corps of Engineers contractors pulled eight pilings from just north and south of the breach in the canal, revealing those pilings were sunk to at least 17.5 feet below sea level, as required by the corps' levee design.

A corps contractor in October, using a similar sonar and seismic instrument, incorrectly estimated that two of the pilings removed Tuesday would reach to only 10 feet below sea level.

Corps officials said the piling pull exercise indicated that both their own sonar and seismic tests and those conducted by Louisiana State University must not be accurate.

Differences in equipment

But Ivor van Heerden, one of the leaders of Team Louisiana, a group of six LSU professors and three independent engineers investigating the levee failures for the state Department of Transportation and Development, said the team thinks the measuring equipment used by Southern Earth Sciences was more accurate than that used by the corps, and that the reading of 10 feet below sea level was accurate. Van Heerden said the LSU soundings were made in a borehole dug only 1.5 feet from the wall. The corps tests were done in boreholes dug 5.5 feet and 6.2 feet from the north and south wall sections next to the breach.

"So our preliminary assessment is still that where we tested the sheet piles, they ended at minus 10 feet below sea level, but we will do some additional testing ourselves," van Heerden said.

Van Heerden described the location of the Team Louisiana tests as "a couple hundred feet south of the breach" but would not give an exact location. He also demurred on why the team didn't respond to a request from the corps for that location so it could pull pilings there to determine the accuracy of the state tests.

"The sites chosen by the state were where there were indications of seepage at the present time, as well as evidence of sand boils and similar blowout features from Hurricane Katrina," van Heerden said.

Not off the hook yet

He said the corps' findings also don't relieve the agency of responsibility for the failure of the 17th Street Canal levee or other levees in the city.

"Our geotechnical engineers, when they did their safety calculations, used both sheet pilings to minus 10 and minus 17, and in both cases they indicated that the sheet piles would have failed as the water level in the canal approached 11 feet above sea level, which is exactly what happened in Katrina," van Heerden said.

"The fact that the corps found some sheet piling sunk to minus 17 does not negate the fact that we had catastrophic structural failures of the levees in 58 locations around New Orleans," he said.

"I was fortunate enough to tour a number of the major levee systems and flood control structures in the Netherlands, and their levees make ours look extremely sad," said van Heerden, who returned from a tour of the Dutch levee system Tuesday. "As an American, I feel the sooner the Corps of Engineers accepts responsibility, the sooner we can move forward. The Dutch have all the technology that we need, and building a world-class levee system for southeast Louisiana is an extremely doable task."

Corps vows solutions

Corps spokesman Jim Taylor said agency officials think the LSU test site may be outside the boundary of a cofferdam of deep sheet pilings that has been built around the breach area to keep canal water out while repairs are made.

"We couldn't pull those anyway without risking flooding again," Taylor said.

He said the corps is committed to providing accurate information to its own investigators and those outside the agency looking into the reasons for levee breaches, which was the reason for Tuesday's piling removal operation.

"We absolutely have to find out what the answer is," he said. "We have to be responsible to the people of New Orleans and fix these problems and fix them right. That calls for validated scientific information and not speculation and accusations that are creating anxiety and fear in people."

Al Naomi, a corps engineer directing a study of expanded levee protection of south Louisiana, is traveling to the Netherlands in a few days to examine its flood protection system, corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson said.

"We've been in partnership with the Dutch since 2001," Jackson said of a relationship that has included exchanges of engineers between the two countries. "Naomi will probably tour their facilities, their barrier, and is going to be sitting down with them to discuss everything from the big levee plan to hydrology."

The Netherlands also supplied trained pump operators to assist the corps in removing water from the city in Katrina's aftermath, she said.

Link to Reference: Mark Schleifstein and Bob Marshall, Staff writer, 12/14/05

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Highlights:
- confirmed that the foundation had been driven to the depths required by the Army Corps of Engineers. But those findings only turned the focus back on whether the structure's basic design was key to the levee breach that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina.
- The measurements, however, were somewhat surprising because recent seismic/sonar testing by the corps had predicted that the sheet piles just north and south of the breach reached to only about 10 feet below sea level. That's the same depth found by a testing company hired by Team Louisiana, a group of six Louisiana State University professors and three independent engineers investigating the levee failures for the state Department of Transportation and Development.
- Finding the reasons behind the levee failures is important in determining how to rebuild failed sections and whether other parts of the more than 100 miles of levee walls in the New Orleans area are strong enough to prevent future hurricane-related flooding.

Measurements of sheet pilings pulled Tuesday from the 17th Street Canal confirmed that the foundation had been driven to the depths required by the Army Corps of Engineers. But those findings only turned the focus back on whether the structure's basic design was key to the levee breach that flooded much of the city during Hurricane Katrina.

The pilings removed from beneath four wall segments on the north and south side of the break averaged 23.5 feet long, corps officials said. That means they extended to about 17 feet below sea level, as described in corps design documents.

The measurements, however, were somewhat surprising because recent seismic/sonar testing by the corps had predicted that the sheet piles just north and south of the breach reached to only about 10 feet below sea level. That's the same depth found by a testing company hired by Team Louisiana, a group of six Louisiana State University professors and three independent engineers investigating the levee failures for the state Department of Transportation and Development.

That depth raised questions about possible malfeasance in the construction and prompted the corps to spend Monday and Tuesday pulling sections of the floodwall for examination by forensic experts. Corps officials said they plan to measure sheet piling at the ruptured London Avenue and Industrial Canal for measurements as repairs there proceed.

While the hands-on measurements seem to reduce the possibility of criminal conduct, corps officials and independent engineers said serious questions remain about how the wall failed during the Aug. 29 storm.

"The investigation will be ongoing until we find out exactly why, the scientific and engineering reasons why some levee parts of the system were able to withstand the forces of this hurricane and others did not," said Brig. Gen. Robert Crear, commander of Task Force Hope, which is assisting in the recovery of the New Orleans area.

The rebuilding question

Finding the reasons behind the levee failures is important in determining how to rebuild failed sections and whether other parts of the more than 100 miles of levee walls in the New Orleans area are strong enough to prevent future hurricane-related flooding.

"We need to check every foot of the levees," said Michael McCrossen, acting chairman of the Orleans Levee District. "Random tests are not enough."

Two pilings pulled Tuesday by the corps were at sites where the agency had conducted seismic soundings, and both showed the test measurements were off by 7 feet. No one could explain the discrepancy Tuesday.

Corps spokesman Jim Taylor said the agency wanted to pull pilings at the spot where the Team Louisiana had conducted its tests, but team officials would not identify the location.

Scott Slaughter, branch manager for Southern Earth Sciences, which did the piling depth investigations for Team Louisiana, said he "would very much welcome" the corps to pull sections of the wall where his company did its work.

"We used the same technology the corps used when it measured the sheet pilings depth, and we got the same answers," he said.

Late Tuesday, Ivor van Heerden, a leader of Team Louisiana, said he had been in and out of the country in recent days and was unable to act on the corps request.

The tests are conducted by driving a "seismic cone" into the earth near the wall and striking the top of the sheet piling with a heavy object. The cone marks the time it takes for the energy waves from the strike to travel down the piling.

"Energy waves travel much faster through steel than through soil," Slaughter said. "So we know when we get to the end of the piling because it suddenly takes longer for those waves to reach our instruments.

"This technology has been around a long time. It's widely available. It's the same device the corps used in taking its readings.

"We've had our methodology verified and tested many times, but if we're making some kind of mistake, we want to know about it to correct it," he said. "The only way to find that out for sure is to have the corps come to the spot we made our checks, and pull one of those pilings."

End the blame game

Col. Richard Wagenaar, who heads the corps' New Orleans District office, said he hoped the findings Tuesday would restore confidence in the corps, which had said the pilings were driven to 17 feet below sea level, and reduce criticism of corps employees, many of whom lost homes in the storm.

"There's an environment right now in which everybody wants to come after the corps," he said. "But the corps didn't come into New Orleans in the 1800s and build this canal. And we're not going to get anything done if people continue to want to blame people."

University of California-Berkeley engineering professor Raymond Seed said that the measurements help confirm the theory being considered by a team of engineers working for the American Society of Civil Engineers and the National Science Foundation that the design was not adequate for the soils in the area.

While the sheet piling now seems to stretch just deep enough to cut off water from the canal reaching the soft peaty soils beneath the levee wall, the soils in which the tip was resting were still too weak, and the wall could not sustain the pressure of surge water in the canal, said Gordon Boutwell, a Baton Rouge soils specialist and member of the civil engineers team.

Water seepage through a layer of sand beneath the London Avenue canal still is the leading theory for the failure of several sections of wall there, Seed and Boutwell said.

Wrong design at outset?

Engineers with Team Louisiana agree that the 17th Street Canal pilings were still too short, even at 17 feet below sea level.

Using the soil data available to the design teams and the corps, it ran the engineering equations used to test the limits of the design, and found the wall would fail when water levels rise between 11 and 12 feet -- as it did in Katrina -- even with the sheet pile as deep as 20 feet below sea level.

Engineers on the team said their work also indicates the weak soils may have been too risky for the I-wall design chosen by the corps even if sheet pilings had been driven 35 or 40 feet below sea level.

They said a safer design would have been the T-wall concept, which was suggested by the original design teams, but rejected by the corps at both the London and 17th Street Canal projects, documents show.

Show them the money

Meanwhile, New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board Director Marcia St. Martin told the corps' Crear during Tuesday's sheet-pile pull that her agency has decided to begin work on building new pump stations at the end of the 17th Street, Orleans Avenue and London Avenue canals.

"The Sewerage & Water Board will need federal assistance," St. Martin said, "because each pump station will cost upward of $150 million."

The new stations would take at least three years to build. Corps officials have said they probably will keep a sheet pile wall or other structure in place at the canal entrances during the 2006 hurricane season that begins June 1, while studying their own gate options.

Existing pump stations that sit on higher ground to the south of Lake Pontchartrain -- the 19th century edge of New Orleans -- will continue to operate under the water board plan, St. Martin said. But the new pumps will assist in pumping rainwater out and, more importantly, act as blockades against hurricane storm surge entering the canals.

Original corps plans for levees along all three canals west of the Industrial Canal called for installing automatic butterfly gates that would close when the water level in the lake rose above that in the canals. But those plans were vetoed by the Sewerage & Water Board in the late 1980s and early 1990s because of concerns that the gates might interfere with the ability of the internal pump stations to move rainfall out of the city, even during a hurricane.

St. Martin said the use of pumps at the canal entrances will eliminate that concern, and turn them into mirrors of the pump stations at the ends of several drainage systems in eastern New Orleans.

Crear said the corps is willing to work with the board on the plans, but was noncommittal about the money necessary to build the pumps.

Link to Reference: RICHARD BURGESS, Acadiana bureau, 12/17/05

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Highlights:
- Department of Environmental Quality has identified more than 500 water wells in an area being tested for oilfield waste contamination and plans to continue water sampling there through next year
- Private tests there have found soil and groundwater contamination believed to be related to oil-production waste.
- list of water wells registered with the state, but he said many residential wells don't appear in state records.

EVANGELINE -- The Department of Environmental Quality has identified more than 500 water wells in an area being tested for oilfield waste contamination and plans to continue water sampling there through next year, DEQ officials said Friday.

DEQ announced plans in October to begin testing ground water in the area of the Jennings Oil and Gas Field, where oil was first discovered in the state in 1901. The field is located a few miles northeast of Jennings near the community of Evangeline in Acadia Parish.

Private tests there have found soil and groundwater contamination believed to be related to oil-production waste.

"There are well over 500 wells in the area," said Lewis "Dutch" Donlon, a geologist supervisor with DEQ. Donlon said the agency has been working from a list of water wells registered with the state, but he said many residential wells don't appear in state records.

"You go out looking for five or 10 wells and find 20," he said.

Samples have been taken from 50 wells, and no contamination has been found in the 22 samples that have been analyzed so far, Donlon said.

The testing has been slowed because of the increased workload at DEQ labs in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, he said.

"Our labs are really overburdened now," Donlon said.

He said testing will continue at a rate of about 10 wells a week and no determination has been made on the total number of wells to be tested.

DEQ is targeting water wells near abandoned earthen "pits," where oil- and gas-production waste had been stored for decades before the stricter environmental regulations ended the practice.

While the testing continues, the nearby Egan Water Corporation in Acadia Parish has plans to extend public water lines into the area, said Kirk Cormier, with the Egan water service.

Cormier said the new water line is expected to be completed sometime next year.

DEQ's attention focused on the Jennings Field after a private firm, Icon Environmental Services of Baton Rouge, found extensive soil and groundwater contamination linked to oilfield waste, including contamination in the upper levels of the Chicot Aquifer, according to Icon's report. The aquifer provides drinking water to most of the Acadiana area.

Icon conducted environmental testing for a group of landowners involved in a lawsuit seeking to force oil companies to clean up land that had been leased for oil and gas production.

Most of the contaminated soil and water samples noted by Icon came from "test pits" the company dug, not in the 19 drinking water wells sampled in the study, according to the report.

But Donlon said DEQ sought more-extensive tests on residential water wells since the Icon study looked at only a small percentage in the area.

He said DEQ may conduct more general environmental testing at the Jennings field in the future.

"We are keying in on the drinking water because that is a direct exposure route," he said. "We will go from there."

Link to Reference: Mark Schleifstein, Bob Marshall and John McQuaid, Staff writers, 12/16/05

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Highlights:
- President Bush pledges $3.1 billion for fortified hurricane protection.
- New pumping stations aimed at keeping storm surge from pouring into New Orleans through drainage canals, vulnerable levees reinforced to resist erosion from waves and fast-track completion of a long-promised hurricane protection system are the cornerstones of an additional $1.5 billion request
- repairs to a variety of breaches in canal levee walls and eroded earthen levees in New Orleans and Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes.


President Bush pledges $3.1 billion for fortified hurricane protection. Nagin, Blanco urged displaced residents to return home.

New pumping stations aimed at keeping storm surge from pouring into New Orleans through drainage canals, vulnerable levees reinforced to resist erosion from waves and fast-track completion of a long-promised hurricane protection system are the cornerstones of an additional $1.5 billion request announced Thursday by the Bush administration.

"The levee system will be better and stronger than it ever has been in the history of New Orleans," said Donald Powell, the top federal official for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. "Better and stronger than it ever has been in the history of New Orleans," Powell repeated, as New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin stood at his side at the White House.

"If a hurricane such as Katrina ever visited New Orleans again, I'm convinced that the work that the corps would be doing as I've described will prevent any catastrophic flooding," Powell said.

He said the Army Corps of Engineers would correct any design flaws that may have contributed to the catastrophic flooding caused when Katrina slammed into the area Aug. 29, and would raise and strengthen levees that have settled over the years.

Nagin praised Bush's commitment to nearly double an earlier $1.6 billion package for levee repairs and improvements, saying the president had responded to local residents' call for action.

"I want to say to all New Orleanians, to all businesses, it's time for you to come home, it's time for you to come back to the Big Easy," Nagin said. "We now have the commitment and the funding for hurricane protection at a level that we have never had before."

Calling it a down payment on greater protection for all of south Louisiana, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the announcement "is a strong signal to our families that they can come home and rebuild."

"I want to thank the president for his commitment to rebuild the New Orleans levees to a true Category 3 level," she said.

The list of improvements is expected to raise the hopes and confidence of displaced residents who have been looking for reassurance that destroyed homes in flooded areas can be rebuilt with some guarantee of increased protection from hurricanes.

The work, however, could take as long as five years for some projects.

Plenty of projects

Powell and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said the Bush request would provide the money needed to complete construction of long-delayed levees in St. Charles Parish, on the West Bank of Jefferson Parish and the New Orleans-to-Venice project in Plaquemines Parish. The request also includes $250 million for wetlands restoration efforts.

The money would come from part of the $62 billion already appropriated by Congress but not yet spent for aid after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

It would be added to $1.6 billion already pending before Congress to pay for the corps' immediate repairs to a variety of breaches in canal levee walls and eroded earthen levees in New Orleans and Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes.

Dan Hitchings, head of the corps' Task Force Guardian, said the agency aims to restore and upgrade all levees to pre-Katrina standards by the start of the 2006 hurricane season June 1. The additional improvements, such as reinforcing some levees, will take until Sept. 2007, and the new pumping stations will be finished in three to five years, he said.

The corps is looking at several options to block off the mouths of three canals -- 17th Street, London Avenue and Orleans -- from floodwaters until the pumping stations are completed, Hitchings said. Breaches at the 17th Street and London Avenue canals flooded much of the city during Katrina and have long been a concern as a pathway for hurricane flooding.

"One would be a barrier system that has gates at the lakefront so that they could be opened and closed as needed. That's the preferred option at this point," he said. "Until we are able to get those in place, we'll be leaving the sheet piling in."

Hitchings said it would be up to designers whether to permanently close the canals to the lake or leave a gated structure in place.

"One of the things that is an advantage of putting pumping stations at the lakefront here is that the canal areas will not be subjected to the surge from the lake," he said. "Basically what that means is you will not need to have the level of protection there, that the water will never get that high."

Protection promised

Hitchings said any levee subjected to significant wave action from Lake Pontchartrain or the Gulf of Mexico would be armored with stone or concrete.

"The advantage of armoring is that those storms won't destroy the levees," he said. "You can imagine that a lot more water will run in through an open breach than if it's just running over the top of it."

The extra protection increases the chances that pumping stations inside the levees would still be working, and could remove the water that has made its way in, he said.

Among the protection measures are:

-- A concrete slope on the backside of some levees to prevent water topping them from scouring the levee soil.

-- The use of rocks or "gabion," rocks wrapped in fabric or chicken wire to hold them together, to reduce scour on the back of levees.

-- Adding a rock base on the water side to break down waves before they undermine a levee.

Hitchings said completing the West Bank levee project, which will protect parts of Jefferson Parish from surge moving through Lake Catouache from Barataria Bay, in two years would be "a significant acceleration."

"Under the current, previous plan, the West Bank levee system there would not have been completed until 2018," he said.

The two-year completion of the St. Charles Parish part of the Lake Pontchartrain plan and the raising of levees that is part of the New Orleans-to-Venice plan also represents a major improvement.

The big one

While the levee improvements will significantly reduce the risk from hurricanes smaller than Katrina, several scientists doubt they will block all the effects of larger storms.

Indeed, even Powell and Hitchings agree that storms considered weaker than Category 3 when they hit New Orleans could have stronger force that would lead to topped levees in parts of eastern New Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, even with the levee improvements.

"The levee system in St. Bernard, Orleans east and Plaquemines Parish would be exposed to the same level of flooding as they were before," Hitchings said. "They were overtopped significantly by Katrina."

Blanco and other Louisiana politicians have been lobbying Congress for support for a larger levee and gate system that would protect the city from Category 5 hurricanes.

A spokesman for the governor said she was not invited to the White House event Thursday, which was attended by Nagin and several federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Blanco had asked for a meeting with Bush during her trip to Washington, from Sunday night until today, but was told that the president's schedule would not permit a visit, said Roderick Hawkins, a Blanco spokesman. Blanco met Thursday with two top Bush officials, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson and Education Secretary Margaret Spellings.

Hawkins said Blanco was very pleased with the White House's levee pledge. "Without the levees we don't have homes, without the homes we don't have people," he said. "Today's announcement is a strong signal that New Orleans is coming back."

A White House spokesman would not comment on why Blanco was not invited to the White House event.

"We are continuing to work with everyone at the state and local level. While addressing the levee situation is important to the state, it is critical to New Orleans," spokesman Blair Jones said. "The levee situation is critical to New Orleans, that is why Mayor Nagin was there."

The grandchild test

In a meeting with members of the Louisiana congressional delegation and in several discussions with reporters, Powell said he asked corps officials to apply the "grandchild test," whether they would be confident enough to say that the system is safe enough for their grandchildren to live in New Orleans. He said the corps officials all answered, "Yes, yes, yes."

Earlier this week, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has threatened to keep Congress in session through the Christmas holidays if more money is not earmarked for Katrina recovery, reached an agreement with Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Miss., to increase the dollars for levee repairs to $3 billion.

She told reporters Thursday that she credited the grassroots efforts of Louisiana residents and the constant prodding of the delegation and state and city leaders with getting the White House to make Thursday's announcement.

Landrieu said Bush's support will be instrumental in gaining approval for the extra dollars when the supplemental appropriation request returns to the House of Representatives, where support for additional money for Louisiana has been lukewarm.

"This commitment to Category 3 protection, along with some early construction toward Category 5, is a good step, but more steps need to be taken to ensure protection for the entire south Louisiana region," Landrieu said in a statement.

"I will not stop working until all parishes can be assured that this 'never again' defense is in place," she said. "If the Netherlands, at half the size of Louisiana, can protect itself from North Sea storms so strong they occur but once every 10,000 years, surely the United States of America can protect its own citizens from a lake."

Vitter said the commitment made by Bush to restore the levees to their authorized strength is open-ended, despite the price tag quoted by Powell.

"They are committed to do a certain scope of work," he said. "Their estimate is $3.1 billion. My estimate is $3.75 billion. But they've committed to complete the listed projects no matter what the cost."

Vitter, however said he will not be satisfied until a new commission "dominated by outside, independent experts who can work with the Corps of Engineers from start to finish" is in place to oversee the corps' work.

'45 years late'

Joseph Suhayda, a coastal scientist and retired Louisiana State University professor who helped design computer programs allowing the modeling of the effects of storm surge on New Orleans, said the most impressive part of Powell's announcement was the plan to armor the levees and close the canals by building pumping stations at the lake. "Those are significant and will have a positive affect, especially removing the canals as a serious threat," he said.

But the rest of the work, Suhayda said, was "the federal government simply saying they would finally do what they had committed to doing in 1965," when the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project was authorized by Congress. "In that regard, they aren't restoring to Category 3 levels, they're finally getting there, just 45 years late."

Suhayda also said the Bush announcement could take steam from the drive to provide Category 5 protection for New Orleans, a commitment he said is vital to the city's future.

"We've already seen some businesses say they can't come back, or won't come, unless they have that level of protection," he said. "It may be a case of, 'If you don't build it they won't come.'

"I think we're looking at having a city of 350,000 with Category 3 protection, as opposed to a vibrant, growing city of 1.5 million again with Category 5.

"So, while I think the announcement is great as far as it goes, I don't want them to think this is the end of the story," Suhayda said.

Ivor van Heerden, director of the LSU Hurricane Center, said he applauds all the proposals but "in terms of the overall needs of southeast Louisiana, those are little more than Band-Aids."

Van Heerden said Katrina proved the system being rebuilt will not keep the city safe from a Category 3 storm because surge heights were the equivalent of those produced by a Category 1 storm by the time they reached some parts of town where levees failed or were topped.

"The problem is the design criteria they had in the past wasn't for a Category 3 hurricane; Katrina proved that," he said. "The breaches at London Avenue and 17th Street were caused by surges generally associated with a Category 1 storm."

Simulations run by the LSU Hurricane Center showed a true Category 3 storm passing west of the city would flood the entire West Bank and downtown New Orleans with the current protection system in place, van Heerden said.

"The point is, we have to do better if we want even Category 3 level of protection," he said. "And that is very doable.

"Powell said their intention as to build the best levee system in the world. Well, the Dutch have the best system in the world. They built for a 10,000-year flood. We can build for a Category 5 hurricane. It's doable."

U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans, agreed that more needs to be done.

"We need a system of protection for our barrier islands and wetlands that will help slow hurricanes before they reach populated areas," Jefferson said in a written statement. "I hope that we can move forward with more commitment in the future for a continued stream of south Louisiana."

Link to Reference: Babe Winkelman, The Pilot-Independent, 12/15/05

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Highlights:
- President Bush made a pledge to all hunters, anglers and conservationists to preserve wetlands. The president not only reaffirmed his father's pledge of a no net loss of wetlands, but also committed his administration to a policy of gaining wetland habitat each year.
- Truth is, we do not have a serious federal wetlands policy, and until we do, we will continue to lose wetlands acreage and, perhaps worse, further erode our nation's once-uncompromising commitment to natural resources conservation.
- federal wetlands law has been in a sort of limbo, although wetland losses continue unabated today. That despite President Bush's pledges to sportsmen and women.

Astute readers of this column will remember that President Bush made a pledge to all hunters, anglers and conservationists to preserve wetlands. The president not only reaffirmed his father's pledge of a no net loss of wetlands, but also committed his administration to a policy of gaining wetland habitat each year.

Both pledges were lavished with considerable praise from the Usual Suspects of the conservation movement — from mainstream hook-and-bullet groups to hardcore environmental activists. And why not: increasing wetlands habitat in the United States is a noble and meaningful goal, one that, if achieved, would benefit people, fish and wildlife.
But two General Accountability Office (GAO) reports released recently, not to mention actions taken by some federal lawmakers, illustrate just how far out in the wilderness we are as a nation on wetlands preservation.
Truth is, we do not have a serious federal wetlands policy, and until we do, we will continue to lose wetlands acreage and, perhaps worse, further erode our nation's once-uncompromising commitment to natural resources conservation.

The GAO is commonly referred to as the investigative arm of Congress. It studies how the federal government spends taxpayer money by evaluating federal programs.
According to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), the two GAO reports found that the Army Corps of Engineers is failing in "its duty to protect vital wetlands and other water resources." In addition, for the third consecutive year, Congress recently cut funding for the nation's largest voluntary wetlands conservation initiative — the Wetlands Reserve Program.
"These reports show that the Corps is failing to ensure that Clean Water Act regulations are applied to their full extent and is providing no rationale for its failure to protect many wetlands," said Jim Murphy of NWF.
"And if this isn't troubling enough, the Corps is making little effort to ensure that permitted impacts to wetlands are mitigated. This all adds up to wetland losses that are not being accounted for."
I could detail the specifics of both reports, but to do so would be cruel and unusual punishment for you, the reader. Mr. Murphy's quote above gives all the insight you need to illustrate what's happening on the ground.
What's important to remember is that until 2001, the Clean Water Act protected nearly all swamps, marshes and seasonal ponds. However, the Supreme Court that year ruled that certain isolated potholes, considered unconnected to other waters (many biologists believe they are connected, however), fell outside the scope of federal regulation under the act.
Since that decision, federal wetlands law has been in a sort of limbo, although wetland losses continue unabated today. That despite President Bush's pledges to sportsmen and women.
Of course, prairie potholes — to name one wetland type — are enormously important wetlands, though they're often the most misunderstood.
More than half of North America's ducks produced each year come from isolated wetlands known as prairie potholes, which provide critical habitat for literally hundreds of bird species, including song birds, shorebirds and other nongame species.
Isolated wetlands are small and shallow and warm quickly during the spring, producing thousands upon thousands of tiny protein-rich invertebrates important to female ducks. As hens migrate north in March and April their nutritional requirements for egg development are extremely high.
Thus, potholes produce a protein-laden smorgasbord for migrating waterfowl.
But without these 1- to 3-acre potholes — which often dry and disappear during the heat of summer, in effect blinding us to their ecological importance — prairie duck production will decrease dramatically, say waterfowl biologists.
In fact, research conducted by Delta Waterfowl Foundation as early as the 1940s discovered that 10 one-acre wetlands produce three times as many ducks as one 10-acre wetland.
"Most duck hunters think in terms of big marshes, and traditionally habitat conservation efforts have focused on big waters," said Rob Olson of Delta. "Seasonal wetlands don't get much attention, but without them duck populations will crash."
According to Olson, about 80 percent of wetland basins in the Dakotas are classified as seasonal or temporary. All totaled, seasonal wetlands account for 70 percent of the duck production in the Dakotas.
All Wetlands — even small prairie potholes — provide society with untold benefits by performing certain ecological functions. Wetlands filter pollutants from water runoff before it reaches lakes, rivers and streams.
Wetlands act as nature's holding ponds by stemming flash floods that cause erosion and fill our streams with sediments and pollution. Had our coastal marshes that buffer storm surges not been destroyed for decades, the human toll from hurricanes Katrina and Rita would have been markedly less.
The benefits of wetlands are endless.
What to do? The solution is within our grasp, my friends. Congress must pass legislation to reaffirm the wetlands protections in the Clean Water Act.
Promises will no longer suffice.
Babe Winkelman is a nationally known outdoorsman who has been teaching people to fish and hunt for 25 years. Watch his award-winning "Good Fishing" television show on WGN-TV, Fox Sports Net, The Men's Channel, Great American Country Network and The Sportsman's Channel. Visit www.winkelman.com for air times.

Link to Reference: David Brown, Washington Post Staff Writer, 12/15/05

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Highlights:
- Some New Orleans neighborhoods are covered in a layer of sediment containing lead above the concentration the federal government considers hazardous to human health, a new study has found.
- The team sampled 14 sites, 12 of them inside the city limits. In two, lead was above the 400-parts-per-million concentration of the Environmental Protection Agency's "high-priority bright line screening" level, a hazardous designation set by the EPA. One was on Esplanade Avenue downtown (406 ppm) and the other was on the bank of the Industrial Canal (642 ppm).
- They also sampled snakes and an alligator to determine baseline levels of various pollutants the animals acquired before the flood. More will be sampled later to see if the flood increased their levels of toxic substances

Some New Orleans neighborhoods are covered in a layer of sediment containing lead above the concentration the federal government considers hazardous to human health, a new study has found.

The dirt poses the greatest hazard to small children who might play in it, said Steven M. Presley, a toxicologist at Texas Tech University, who led the soil survey team. The hazard could be reduced by keeping the dirt from becoming dry and airborne, by covering it with uncontaminated soil or, if necessary, by hauling it away.

"These levels are not astronomical. It's not like this is an insurmountable hazard. But we are saying that we did find levels that exceeded these thresholds for human health," Presley said yesterday after the study, which will appear in Environmental Science & Technology, was posted on the American Chemical Society's Web site.

The team sampled 14 sites, 12 of them inside the city limits. In two, lead was above the 400-parts-per-million concentration of the Environmental Protection Agency's "high-priority bright line screening" level, a hazardous designation set by the EPA. One was on Esplanade Avenue downtown (406 ppm) and the other was on the bank of the Industrial Canal (642 ppm).

Slightly elevated levels of arsenic and numerous organic chemicals, including some pesticides, were also found at the Industrial Canal. Presley said that was not surprising because "it was the neck of the funnel for the water being pulled from New Orleans."

The researchers also found slightly elevated concentrations of iron at one site near the Lakefront neighborhood and elevated pesticide residues near City Park, which Presley speculated might have come from a nearby golf course.

Presley thinks the chief implication of the study is that more extensive sediment testing needs to be done, as contamination is likely to vary across the city.

The source of most of the lead was exhaust from a century's worth of leaded gasoline burned by automobiles. In many places, it was under the soil surface and covered with vegetation. Hurricane Katrina and the flood suspended it in the water and then redeposited it, sometimes a long way from where it originated.

The sediment is inside many buildings that will be torn down or renovated, making it a potential hazard to construction workers. They should wear masks in dusty areas and wash their clothing and hands, Presley said.

Eryn Witcher, an EPA spokeswoman, said the new findings are "consistent with the sampling we have done. We have seen elevated levels of lead and arsenic, and we have urged the public to avoid contact with the sediments."

The researchers also sampled water and found high levels of some pathogenic bacteria, including various species of Aeromonas that caused many skin infections in victims of last December's tsunami in Southeast Asia. The sampling was done in mid-September; these organisms would have died as the water evaporated.

They also sampled snakes and an alligator to determine baseline levels of various pollutants the animals acquired before the flood. More will be sampled later to see if the flood increased their levels of toxic substances

Link to Reference: Associated Press, 12/14/05

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Highlights:
- From the moment New Orleans' filthy floodwaters were pumped into Lake Pontchartrain, regulators said environmental rules had to be set aside to save the Gulf Coast from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.
- Mostly, said officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the waivers were harmless. But some say they went too far, padding the pockets of oil companies and creating long-term environmental hazards.
- Records show the oil industry was quick to seek and receive waivers and exceptions from state and federal agencies. EPA said it would use "discretion" in its enforcement of emissions at refineries because of the gasoline shortage throughout the nation.


NEW ORLEANS — From the moment New Orleans' filthy floodwaters were pumped into Lake Pontchartrain, regulators said environmental rules had to be set aside to save the Gulf Coast from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

Federal and state agencies waived environmental laws regulating open burning. They waived the laws regulating asbestos removal. They waived rules for landfills, gasoline and diesel fuel standards, and water and air pollution -- all in the name of recovery and rebuilding.

Meanwhile, Louisiana's U.S. senators pushed for long-term waivers of environmental laws in hurricane-hit states to quicken rebuilding, tacking the proposal onto a stalled $250 billion rebuilding plan presented to Congress.

Mostly, said officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, the waivers were harmless. But some say they went too far, padding the pockets of oil companies and creating long-term environmental hazards.

"What these waivers represent is the government waiving protections of the public's health," said Adam Babich, director of Tulane University's Environmental Law Clinic. "A lot of this seems to be happening under the radar without any public participation."

In Louisiana, the waivers and variances to permits came fast and furious after Katrina hit Aug. 29, DEQ documents show. More exceptions were issued a month later after Hurricane Rita.

Some waivers, like the one that allows the burning of dead animal carcasses, appeared harmless. But many others have raised questions.

Records show the oil industry was quick to seek and receive waivers and exceptions from state and federal agencies. EPA said it would use "discretion" in its enforcement of emissions at refineries because of the gasoline shortage throughout the nation.

Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at EPA and longtime whistleblower within the agency, said EPA's move to allow refineries to take longer to report emissions and not comply with environmental rules helped the companies make the record profits.

"The bottom line is everyone is taking major hits across the country except for one sector that's become a profit center, and that's not right, that's not American," Kaufman said.

Darrin Mann, a DEQ spokesman, said the permits did not allow the refineries "to go hog wild" and emit large amounts of pollutants. Instead, DEQ says the waivers were needed so the refineries could work through kinks their systems when they were shut down by the storms.

EPA and DEQ officials have said that air monitors have shown no problems with air quality at the refineries. But Anne Rolfes, a Louisiana activist, insists that EPA tests after Katrina showed high levels of benzene near oil refineries.

"We're asking the neighbors of these refineries to put up with a lot of increased risk, increased fears and increased noise from these refineries so that we can enjoy the benefits of cheaper gasoline," Babich said.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are challenging state regulators for sending much of the waste from gutted homes and businesses in New Orleans to an old city landfill that is not lined to keep contaminants from leaching out.

The trucks hauling debris into the landfill are inspected from towers at the dump's entrance, but there are concerns that contractors are trucking in paint, household cleaners and chemicals by hiding the hazardous material at the bottom of their loads.

Similar questions abound. In hard-hit Plaquemines Parish, waste is being burned 24 hours a day and mounds of debris will be bulldozed into unlined pits.

"To get businesses and communities back and running, you have to kind of bend the rules to a certain extent, but not to the point where you are creating a situation where's it's unsafe for people," said William Serpas, the parish's director of public service.

Out in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Marine Fisheries Service waived the requirement that shrimpers use devices on their nets that let sea turtles escape. The agency said debris littering the Gulf made the devices impractical.

On land, a Georgia-Pacific paper mill was allowed to burn petroleum coke because of a shortage of natural gas. A chemical factory was given the go-ahead to dispose of a petroleum byproduct stuck in a storage tank by burning it off in a flare.

In the marshes, officials got rid of oil spills from broken pipelines by burning it off. Oil well operators hit by the storm were allowed to vent gas from their wells and move oil without filling out the usual paperwork.

The bottom line, many say, was getting the job done.

"We're kind of winging it," said Jeff Morgan, an independent debris removal inspector. He said Louisianans are "head-headed" people who "don't want to be told how to do it."

Michael Wascom, an environmental law expert at Louisiana State University, said the waivers were mostly limited in duration and related to an emergency.

"I don't see anything scandalous in there," Wascom said. "They all seem fairly innocuous and limited to their sites."

But environmentalists worry. "We should do it right now rather than paying more money in the future to clean it up," said Darryl Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club's Delta Chapter.

And Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said regulators need to ensure that companies did not take advantage of the waivers and that when the next catastrophic hurricane hits, industries are better prepared.

"I understand that we may need to run around and do these deals," he said, "but the system has to shift."

Link to Reference: Stephen Maloney, St. Tammany News, 12/14/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- The Northshore of the lake lost a staggering 3.6 square miles of wetland habitat to the storm.
- Overall, Lake Pontchartrain's coastline lost an estimated 75.3 square miles due to the storm.
- Lake Pontchartrain was able to heal itself with such astounding speed through the simple process of dilution.

MANDEVILLE - In a matter of 30 hours, Hurricane Katrina dealt an unprecedented blow to the Lake Pontchartrain basin. "Never before in the history of America has this happened," said Carlton Dufrechou, director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

The Northshore of the lake lost a staggering 3.6 square miles of wetland habitat to the storm. According to Dufrechou, the regular yearly rate of loss is substantially less. "We're usually dealing with losing several feet of wetlands a year on the Northshore to natural causes, maybe a square yard," Dufrochou said, "Nothing like this."

Overall, Lake Pontchartrain's coastline lost an estimated 75.3 square miles due to the storm. That's about 130 percent more than what was lost from 1990 to 2001, according to the findings of the U.S. Geologic Survey posted on the foundation's Web site.

Immediately after the storm, Dufrechou said the lake's waters reached unprecedented levels of pollution, but by mid-October the coastal water was back to pre-Katrina levels. "We had fishable/swimmable water again about five weeks after the storm," he said.

Lake Pontchartrain was able to heal itself with such astounding speed through the simple process of dilution.

"We're not advocating fighting pollution with dilution by any means," Dufrechou said, "But in reality, the lake covers about 630 square miles, so any localized contaminates were able to quickly spread out and break down."

The pollutants only represented about 10 percent of the lake's overall volume, so while the short-term localized effects were very significant, they didn't last long enough to affect the lake's overall pollution levels.

Dufrechou said the coastlines are the area's first line of defense.

"Without them, we will continue to see higher and higher storm surges on a more and more frequent basis," he said.

While the levee system is designed to be an effective breakwater system, Dufrechou said levees alone won't keep us safe. He said he supports the integration of our levee systems with our natural wetlands. The two working together will be a much more effective means of protecting ourselves from hurricanes and floods.

"The levees can be much better, but we can't do things the old way," Dufrechou said. "Everything needs to be integrated. The levees and the wetlands need to work together to protect us."

Link to Reference: BRETT MARTEL, Associated Press Writer, 12/13/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- Eight sections of steel sheet pulled from a failed New Orleans levee Tuesday appear to have been driven into the ground to the specified depth, contradicting earlier tests, engineers said.
- The steel had been sunk into the ground to prevent water from saturating the soil and destabilizing the flood walls. Initial testing by sonar had indicated the sheet pilings were driven to only about 10 feet below sea level, even though the design called for 17.5 feet below sea level.
- After pulling and measuring the pilings, officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expressed a measure of relief, since the Corps was responsible for ensuring the construction matched the design when the flood wall was built in the early 1990s.
- restoring about 350 miles of hurricane protection levees in the New Orleans area.

NEW ORLEANS - Eight sections of steel sheet pulled from a failed New Orleans levee Tuesday appear to have been driven into the ground to the specified depth, contradicting earlier tests, engineers said.

The sheet pilings were removed as part of an investigation into why the flood wall at the 17th Street Canal failed, contributing to floods that covered 80 percent of the city when Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29.

The steel had been sunk into the ground to prevent water from saturating the soil and destabilizing the flood walls. Initial testing by sonar had indicated the sheet pilings were driven to only about 10 feet below sea level, even though the design called for 17.5 feet below sea level.

The discrepancy fueled suspicion of wrongdoing in the building of the flood wall, attracting criminal investigators to the work site. The U.S. attorney, the state attorney general and the district attorney all have launched investigations into the building and maintenance of the levees.

After pulling and measuring the pilings, officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expressed a measure of relief, since the Corps was responsible for ensuring the construction matched the design when the flood wall was built in the early 1990s.

But if the flood wall was built to specifications, as the latest inspection indicated, the next question will be whether the design was faulty.

"We need to look at all the failure mechanisms because obviously something did happen here and each piece of the puzzle helps us determine what happened," said Col. Lewis Setliff, commander of the task force restoring about 350 miles of hurricane protection levees in the New Orleans area.

Brig. Gen. Robert Crear said the length of the sections pulled all exceeded 23 feet. About six feet of the sheet piling was above sea level, leaving a little more than 17 feet below sea level — in accordance with design specifications.

Engineers also plan to test the concrete and the reinforcing bars in the flood wall to ensure they were made properly.

Also, engineers must try to figure out why the sonar tests yielded bad results on how deep the sheet pilings were driven.

Link to Reference: Jim Stratton, Sentinel Staff Writer, 12/13/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- Along the 1,600-mile arc of the Gulf of Mexico, refineries, chemical plants and other industries stand like bowling pins waiting for the next hurricane to strike.
- Today, the ravaged coastline stands as a warning of what can happen when Gulf Coast industries meet Gulf Coast storms.
- The facilities crowd the coast because it was convenient and profitable to build there. Elected officials approved them, eager to create jobs and a solid tax base. Neighborhoods expanded around them, and in some cases, are now separated from them by only a chain-link fence. Much of the development happened more than 40 years ago, with little thought to land planning or environmental protection. In the following years, industries solidified their places and expanded during a period of fewer severe hurricanes.

Along the 1,600-mile arc of the Gulf of Mexico, refineries, chemical plants and other industries stand like bowling pins waiting for the next hurricane to strike.

The sites pulse with crude oil, acids and a menu of dangerous chemicals used in everything from jet fuel to fertilizer to cleaning supplies found in virtually every American home. Yet many are dangerously close to the water, exposed to the strongest winds and storm surges. Though the plants are built to withstand violent storms, Hurricane Katrina offered a vivid reminder that nature has little respect for concrete and steel. In Florida, that means sewage-treatment facilities, pulp mills and the Port of Tampa -- home to half the state's hazardous chemicals -- could get badly bruised by a major hurricane.

Katrina damaged dozens of facilities and dumped a slew of chemicals and petroleum into Louisiana neighborhoods. Today, the ravaged coastline stands as a warning of what can happen when Gulf Coast industries meet Gulf Coast storms.

"Where is the wisdom of putting these vulnerable facilities in areas most subject to catastrophic storms?" asks Quenton Dokken, the executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Foundation and a former top official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "Hurricanes are going to happen, and we know they're going to happen. Where's the logic?"

Water power

The facilities crowd the coast because it was convenient and profitable to build there. Elected officials approved them, eager to create jobs and a solid tax base. Neighborhoods expanded around them, and in some cases, are now separated from them by only a chain-link fence. Much of the development happened more than 40 years ago, with little thought to land planning or environmental protection. In the following years, industries solidified their places and expanded during a period of fewer severe hurricanes.

Now more than 700 facilities stand along the coast -- from chemical plants and pulp mills to oil refineries and gas-processing plants -- according to state records, industry representatives and a review of industry publications. The plants have transformed the Gulf into an economic powerhouse, but not one free of risk.

"Anywhere you have such a high concentration of these places, there's the potential for catastrophe," said Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane researcher at Louisiana State University. "We all know that."

Water, in the form of a storm surge, is most likely to cause that catastrophe.

In New Orleans, raging stormwaters washed thousands of 55-gallon drums loaded with chemicals out of warehouses and into neighborhoods where they bobbed in the water like poisonous corks. Water toppled freight cars near the Mississippi River, adding punch to the toxic cocktail. A flooded chemical depot exploded, filling the sky with a hellish red glow and choking black smoke. And floodwaters wrenched an oil tank from its foundation, sending 900,000 gallons of crude rushing toward a neighborhood, where it coated about 1,800 homes.

Driven by 100-mph winds and its own momentum, rushing water can dislodge bridge supports, carry cars away and strip clothes off bodies. The National Hurricane Center has projected that a Category 5 storm could produce a storm surge of 29 feet in Apalachee Bay, the highest surge predicted for Florida's west coast; 30 feet in Bay St. Louis, Miss.; and 28 feet in Galveston, Texas, the hub of the nation's petrochemical industry.

Katrina produced a 30-foot-high surge in Biloxi, Miss., the highest recorded in the United States. Water obliterated neighborhoods, smashing into homes like a wrecking ball.

A Category 5 storm barreling through Tampa Bay could push a 25-foot-high wall of water toward downtown Tampa and submerge much of Pinellas, the state's most densely populated county.

Heavy winds and rain could overwhelm dikes designed to protect phosphate mines and processing plants in the Tampa area.

Last year, 65 million gallons of acidic water spilled into Hillsborough Bay after Hurricane Frances damaged a dike in Riverview. Hurricane Jeanne caused a 4.5 million-gallon spill at a similar site in Bartow.

The Port of Tampa would pose the biggest threat if it took a direct hit from a monster storm. The port is adjacent to the city's business district and stores hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel, liquid propane, chlorine and other hazardous substances.

FBI officials have estimated the port, the nation's 10th-largest, houses 50 percent of all hazardous material in Florida.

In 2002, the agency's Tampa division chief told a congressional hearing on national security about three terminals at the port that contain anhydrous ammonia, used in fertilizer, a substance that can burn skin, cause respiratory problems and, in some cases, blindness.

James Jarboe said the terminals had "outstanding safety records," but he issued this warning: "Individually, each of the three ammonia terminals pose a risk to the surrounding community, and the effect of three facilities, in close proximity with such massive quantities, pose an even greater risk."

The port and other nearby industrial areas, Jarboe said, are vulnerable not only to terrorist attacks but to "acts-of-nature releases." Any release, the National Sheriffs' Association has said, represents "a serious risk to communities in the area."


"They've got a lot of hazardous materials over there," said Mike Trimpert, chief of planning for Hillsborough County emergency management. "And they're right on the bay in downtown, so it's always a concern."

Florida's coast isn't as heavily populated by chemical plants or oil refineries, but facilities still hug the coastline. The Panhandle is home to a collection of chemical and petroleum facilities that produce or store materials used to manufacture everything from acrylic fibers to propellants for ammunition.

North of Tampa, the Crystal River nuclear plant overlooks the Gulf of Mexico. Nuclear facilities have held up well during hurricanes because their walls are several feet thick and made of reinforced concrete. A plant about 20 miles west of New Orleans survived Katrina virtually intact. Although Hurricane Andrew caused extensive damage to some buildings at the Turkey Point plant near Homestead, the nuclear reactors were protected.

Dozens of major wastewater plants and hundreds of lift stations -- pumps that move sewage out of neighborhoods -- are among some of the most vulnerable facilities. If a hurricane knocked out power to parts of the coast, generators would keep the plants running.

But a recent edition of the Florida Water Resources Journal warned local water officials that generators fail at least 10 percent of the time. The rate rises to 50 percent for old or used generators.

Failing wastewater plants could dump untold amounts of sewage -- and its disease-causing bacteria -- into neighborhoods, streams and, ultimately, the Gulf.

That's what happened when Hurricane Wilma swept through South Florida in October. The storm leveled utility poles and left water-treatment plants and lift stations powerless. In Broward County, sewage bubbled up into the streets and residents' bathtubs.

Weighing the risks

The risk of any single facility being hit by a major storm is relatively small, but the destruction caused by Katrina has renewed questions about the best ways to protect Gulf Coast facilities and the communities around them.

Some environmentalists have suggested that plants be required to withstand Category 5 storms, but there is little political will for a proposal that could cost billions of dollars.

So far, there has been no organized push to require industries to strengthen the storm protection at existing coastal sites. Nor is there a movement to ban them along the coast altogether.

"Many of them have to be near the water," said Larry Gispert, Hillsborough County's emergency-management director and a regional president for the International Association of Emergency Managers.

Most facilities, industry representatives say, are already well-protected against most storms. The specific requirements, however, vary by jurisdiction.

In some Alabama communities, for example, structures must be designed to withstand winds of 135 mph. In Hillsborough, the requirement ranges from 110 mph to 130 mph. Many companies build to exceed those minimum standards, but virtually none build with the worst storms in mind.

"Are they built to withstand Category 5 storms?" said Bruce Baughman, Alabama's director of emergency management and president of the National Emergency Management Association. "It's pretty clear they're not."

Facilities could be designed to weather the strongest storms, but it's unlikely to happen.

"If they had to build everything to that standard," Gispert said, "we couldn't afford the products they make."

Moreover, businesses pummeled by Katrina or Rita are more concerned about repairing existing problems than preventing future ones. For example, Air Products in New Orleans -- which produces liquid hydrogen -- hopes to have its badly damaged plant up and running by January. Fortifying the site against the next Katrina will have to wait.

"It's a very valid question, and in the long term, it's something we'll look at," company spokesman Art George said. "But our immediate focus is on resuming substantial operation by year's end."

Seven years ago, Chevron took a different tack at its refinery in Pascagoula, Miss. After Hurricane Georges caused $300 million in damage and sank the facility under 5 feet of water, the company built a $10 million, 5-mile dike around the property. Chevron officials say that dike, 20 feet high in some places, prevented serious flooding when Katrina blew through.


Chevron's decision, however, is more the exception than the rule. Until there is tremendous public and political pressure to shore up facilities, former NOAA official Dokken and others say most companies will take their chances they won't get hit.

"On this, there's been no leadership in the Gulf Coast community," Dokken said. "So it's incumbent for us to stand up and say, 'Here's what we want. Here's the way we want you to do business.' "

Any change, of course, will be too late to help residents in Chalmette, La.

In the suburb just east of New Orleans, the risks of putting Gulf Coast industries in the path of Gulf Coast storms became more than theoretical.

When Katrina roared ashore, its floodwaters ripped a Murphy Oil tank from its foundation and cracked it open, smearing just about everything in the town once named Louisiana's cleanest community.

Three months after the storm, the stains on homes, cars and yards are still visible. It's unclear when, or whether, the community will fully recover.

Parish President Henry "Junior" Rodriguez said that for years, Murphy had offered to buy homes from residents who no longer wanted to live near the refinery.

"They were looking to create a buffer zone around their refinery," Rodriguez said. "They've got a buffer zone now. They've got one hell of a buffer zone."

Link to Reference: Kevin Spear, Sentinel Staff Writer, 12/12/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere. But its destination remains a mystery.
- Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites -- now and in years to come -- could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life. At the very least, hurricane batterings will heighten threats to an ecosystem already burdened with dead zones, toxic algae and mysterious plumes of pollution-laden black water off Florida's coast.
- The unknowns of the Gulf have contributed to the mystery of what happened to the slug of pollution that flowed out of New Orleans. Nobody can say how fast or in what direction it traveled. But they know more than 66 billion gallons drained out of the city -- more than enough to fill the 50-square-mile Lake Apopka west of Orlando.

NEW ORLEANS -- Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere. But its destination remains a mystery. Scientists still don't know whether the slug of germs and chemicals is floating toward Florida's coast, drifting out to the Atlantic or lurking somewhere in between.

The massive dose of pollution stands as one of the storm season's critical environmental lessons: The Gulf roils with looping, whirling currents able to turn one shore's mess into another's lasting misery. That message is growing more urgent with predictions that hurricanes will punch harder and more often in coming decades.

Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites -- now and in years to come -- could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life. At the very least, hurricane batterings will heighten threats to an ecosystem already burdened with dead zones, toxic algae and mysterious plumes of pollution-laden black water off Florida's coast.

"Where does the Gulf of Mexico reach the tipping point where it can no longer fix itself?" asked Enid Sisskin, legislative chair for the Panhandle's Gulf Coast Environmental Defense.

Shared sea

The Gulf of Mexico's expanse -- the world's fifth-largest sea -- is really an illusion. Shaped like a fishbowl, upside down and slightly canted, its widest span equals a line from Orlando to New York. But the distance is easily conquered.

A hummingbird migrates from Mississippi to Mexico in 18 hours. Ships laden with wheat steam from Beaumont, Texas, to beyond Key West in 48 hours. Natural-gas molecules surge through a pipeline under the Gulf from Mobile Bay to Tampa Bay in 59 hours.

It's not hard to see how a mess in one part of the Gulf can arrive quickly in others.

At Padre Island National Seashore, near Corpus Christi, Texas, researchers have traced trash to offshore rigs, shrimp boats, recreational boaters and more-distant sources, such as Midwest farms, said park science chief Darrell Echols.

After Mississippi River floods in the 1990s, crews hauled off everything from cow carcasses to roof trusses. After Katrina, workers returned to the park for truckloads of storm debris.

Yet how currents morph and whirl remains such a mystery that scientists aren't certain about how pollution travels. Predicting serpentine movements in the Gulf isn't nearly as reliable as forecasting a tropical storm.

"We have lots of weather observations on land," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington. "In the Gulf, we have a handful of buoys."

Pollution travels

Stress on the Gulf of Mexico began in earnest decades ago as increasing development contributed polluted runoff, and industries found it a convenient dumping ground. Catastrophes not only added to the mess but proved how trouble in one area can extend for miles.

The world's second-worst ocean oiling issued a wake-up call in 1979. Workers on a rig near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula lost control of a well, unleashing 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf during the next nine months.

Despite efforts to skim, burn and dissolve the spill, slicks smeared Mexico's coast and drifted 600 miles to Texas, washing onto 160 miles of shoreline. In Florida, 900 miles from the blowout, officials feared tar balls on beaches and petroleum poisoning of fish.

Scientists found encouraging but worrisome news.

Mexican oil hadn't traveled to Florida. But their research at the time showed that crude from other faraway parts of the Gulf had made the journey. It came from tankers scrubbing out their holds. It wasn't a small amount of oil. The discharged oil had been swallowed by turtles -- green, hawksbill and loggerhead -- that washed up dead on Florida shores.

It was a clear sign that Florida needs to keep a lookout far beyond its own share of the Gulf's blue depths.

Mysterious currents

The unknowns of the Gulf have contributed to the mystery of what happened to the slug of pollution that flowed out of New Orleans. Nobody can say how fast or in what direction it traveled. But they know more than 66 billion gallons drained out of the city -- more than enough to fill the 50-square-mile Lake Apopka west of Orlando.

The giant plume set off such worries that an unprecedented armada of oceanographers, marine biologists and chemists fanned out in several ships across the northern Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to west of the Mississippi River delta.

Health authorities already had reported that evacuees who waded in floodwaters in New Orleans were breaking out with rashes and blistered skin.

"We had no way of knowing what to expect," said Shailer Cummings, chief scientist for one of the cruises sponsored by NOAA.

A University of South Florida oceanographer, in a separate effort, offered a theory. Using computer calculations and satellite observations of sea-surface changes, he estimated the swiftest-moving New Orleans contamination could have traveled the Gulf in circular detours for a month before hooking around South Florida to the Atlantic Ocean.

NOAA deployed "drifters" -- floating electronic buoys -- that broadcast their locations while riding currents. Some migrated toward Texas. Others meandered toward Florida.

The scientists never found fish kills, tainted shellfish or the pollution. Perhaps toxic floodwaters were neutralized by exposure to sun, sank to the bottom, decayed or were diluted.

South Florida resident Robert H. Gore, a marine scientist who wrote a book about the Gulf's wonders and plight in the early 1990s, doesn't expect that many of the region's residents will see Katrina's mess as a warning.

He has marveled at how communities and industries that continue to crowd the region are so blind to their environmental risk-taking and the harm they cause the Gulf.

"You built your own nest," Gore said. "Now you have to sit in it."

Link to Reference: Ana Radelat, hattiesburgamerican.com, 12/11/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- The Sierra Club this week released a report that said that soil samples taken in Hurricane Katrina-hit regions of Mississippi and Alabama have dangerous levels of pollution.
- Katrina's storm surge - which covered the coast with sludge that contained heavy metals and microorganisms - is to blame.
- Bass said his agency did not test the soil at DeLisle Elementary School. But he said sampling of nearby areas showed there's no danger to the children who attend the school. "Unless the children are eating the dirt, I don't think there's a high risk," he said.

WASHINGTON - The Sierra Club this week released a report that said that soil samples taken in Hurricane Katrina-hit regions of Mississippi and Alabama have dangerous levels of pollution.

The samples revealed higher than normal levels of arsenic, heavy metals, dioxin and life-threatening E-coli bacteria, the environmental group said.

Wilma Subra, a Sierra Club chemist, said Katrina's storm surge - which covered the coast with sludge that contained heavy metals and microorganisms - is to blame.

"There's a need to determine the extent of that contamination and establish a plan to remove the contaminants in order to prevent residents and workers from being harmfully exposed," Subra said.

The Sierra Club said the highest levels of arsenic - 27 times more than Environmental Protection Agency limits - were found in Moss Point on Elder Ferry Road near the site of the former Rohm and Hass chemical plant. The group also found high levels of arsenic in Gulfport's Big Lake and near Pearlington in Hancock County.

The Sierra Club also said it found unsafe levels of arsenic at DeLisle Elementary School in Pass Christian, which is located near a DuPont chemical plant.

But Phil Bass, director of pollution control at the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said his agency and the EPA have conducted sediment and soil tests on the Gulf Coast and have not found anything to be alarmed about.

"What we're getting back looks pretty good," Bass said.

He said all of the samples have not been processed, but those that have failed to show "any huge issues." He also said that Mississippi normally has higher-than-average amounts of arsenic in its soil.

Bass said his agency did not test the soil at DeLisle Elementary School. But he said sampling of nearby areas showed there's no danger to the children who attend the school. "Unless the children are eating the dirt, I don't think there's a high risk," he said.

The Sierra Club has urged the EPA to conduct more tests and is warning residents returning to what it calls high-risk neighborhoods to take certain precautions, including donning protective gloves and smocks and using respirators.

Disaster preparation

The Council for Excellence in Government and the American Red Cross released poll results last week that showed that Southerners say they do the most to prepare for a disaster. Midwesterners report doing the least.

Only 52 percent of Midwesterners report doing a great deal or some things to prepare for a disaster, followed by the Northeast, 58 percent, the West, 64 percent and the South, 74 percent.

The survey also showed that 38 percent of Americans were not motivated at all by hurricanes Katrina and Rita to prepare for an emergency.

The poll was conducted before and during Hurricane Katrina (Aug. 26-31) and then repeated two months later (Oct. 26-30).

In August, about one in four Americans reported preparing a disaster kit of emergency supplies such as water, food and medicine.

But a majority, 59 percent, of people who live in areas affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita said they prepared such a kit. The percentage didn't increase after the storms.

The poll also found that people with at least some college education are more likely to have taken steps to prepare for a disaster than those with a high school degree or less education. Those with household incomes of less than $40,000 per year are also less likely than those with higher incomes to have taken preparedness steps, the survey found. But there was no difference in preparedness by race.

Seeking cures

Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., has teamed up with Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., to introduce a bill this week that would create a new division at the National Institutes of Health that would focus exclusively on finding the cures for cancer, diabetes and other diseases.

The American Center for Cures Act would authorize $5 billion to be spent on hiring more doctors and researchers and setting up new ways for NIH to collaborate with other government researchers.

"I'm excited about the Center for Cures. We know that where there is interest and a dedicated effort, there will be success," Cochran said.

Mississippi has the highest rates of some of the chronic diseases that would be targeted by the new center. The state has the highest percentage of population with diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It also has the highest percentage of overweight people, about 67 percent of Mississippians are obese or overweight.

Link to Reference: Kevin Spear, Sentinel Staff Writer, 12/12/05

Return to: watercenter.org sciencefaircenter.com watercenter.net

Highlights:
- Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere.
- The massive dose of pollution stands as one of the storm season's critical environmental lessons: The Gulf roils with looping, whirling currents able to turn one shore's mess into another's lasting misery. That message is growing more urgent with predictions that hurricanes will punch harder and more often in coming decades.
- Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites -- now and in years to come -- could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life. At the very least, hurricane batterings will heighten threats to an ecosystem already burdened with dead zones, toxic algae and mysterious plumes of pollution-laden black water off Florida's coast.

NEW ORLEANS -- Spilled chemicals, leaking gas tanks and city sewage all mingled with floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina that eventually drained into the Gulf of Mexico. The toxic soup went somewhere. But its destination remains a mystery. Scientists still don't know whether the slug of germs and chemicals is floating toward Florida's coast, drifting out to the Atlantic or lurking somewhere in between.

The massive dose of pollution stands as one of the storm season's critical environmental lessons: The Gulf roils with looping, whirling currents able to turn one shore's mess into another's lasting misery. That message is growing more urgent with predictions that hurricanes will punch harder and more often in coming decades.

Potential damage to cities, chemical plants and industrial sites -- now and in years to come -- could spell calamity for the Gulf's treasured wetlands, beaches, coral reefs, surf and sea life. At the very least, hurricane batterings will heighten threats to an ecosystem already burdened with dead zones, toxic algae and mysterious plumes of pollution-laden black water off Florida's coast.

"Where does the Gulf of Mexico reach the tipping point where it can no longer fix itself?" asked Enid Sisskin, legislative chair for the Panhandle's Gulf Coast Environmental Defense.

Shared sea

The Gulf of Mexico's expanse -- the world's fifth-largest sea -- is really an illusion. Shaped like a fishbowl, upside down and slightly canted, its widest span equals a line from Orlando to New York. But the distance is easily conquered.

A hummingbird migrates from Mississippi to Mexico in 18 hours. Ships laden with wheat steam from Beaumont, Texas, to beyond Key West in 48 hours. Natural-gas molecules surge through a pipeline under the Gulf from Mobile Bay to Tampa Bay in 59 hours.

It's not hard to see how a mess in one part of the Gulf can arrive quickly in others.

At Padre Island National Seashore, near Corpus Christi, Texas, researchers have traced trash to offshore rigs, shrimp boats, recreational boaters and more-distant sources, such as Midwest farms, said park science chief Darrell Echols.

After Mississippi River floods in the 1990s, crews hauled off everything from cow carcasses to roof trusses. After Katrina, workers returned to the park for truckloads of storm debris.

Yet how currents morph and whirl remains such a mystery that scientists aren't certain about how pollution travels. Predicting serpentine movements in the Gulf isn't nearly as reliable as forecasting a tropical storm.

"We have lots of weather observations on land," said Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington. "In the Gulf, we have a handful of buoys."

Pollution travels

Stress on the Gulf of Mexico began in earnest decades ago as increasing development contributed polluted runoff, and industries found it a convenient dumping ground. Catastrophes not only added to the mess but proved how trouble in one area can extend for miles.

The world's second-worst ocean oiling issued a wake-up call in 1979. Workers on a rig near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula lost control of a well, unleashing 140 million gallons of crude into the Gulf during the next nine months.

Despite efforts to skim, burn and dissolve the spill, slicks smeared Mexico's coast and drifted 600 miles to Texas, washing onto 160 miles of shoreline. In Florida, 900 miles from the blowout, officials feared tar balls on beaches and petroleum poisoning of fish.

Scientists found encouraging but worrisome news.

Mexican oil hadn't traveled to Florida. But their research at the time showed that crude from other faraway parts of the Gulf had made the journey. It came from tankers scrubbing out their holds. It wasn't a small amount of oil. The discharged oil had been swallowed by turtles -- green, hawksbill and loggerhead -- that washed up dead on Florida shores.

It was a clear sign that Florida needs to keep a lookout far beyond its own share of the Gulf's blue depths.

Mysterious currents


The unknowns of the Gulf have contributed to the mystery of what happened to the slug of pollution that flowed out of New Orleans.

Nobody can say how fast or in what direction it traveled. But they know more than 66 billion gallons drained out of the city -- more than enough to fill the 50-square-mile Lake Apopka west of Orlando.

The giant plume set off such worries that an unprecedented armada of oceanographers, marine biologists and chemists fanned out in several ships across the northern Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to west of the Mississippi River delta.

Health authorities already had reported that evacuees who waded in floodwaters in New Orleans were breaking out with rashes and blistered skin.

"We had no way of knowing what to expect," said Shailer Cummings, chief scientist for one of the cruises sponsored by NOAA.

A University of South Florida oceanographer, in a separate effort, offered a theory. Using computer calculations and satellite observations of sea-surface changes, he estimated the swiftest-moving New Orleans contamination could have traveled the Gulf in circular detours for a month before hooking around South Florida to the Atlantic Ocean.

NOAA deployed "drifters" -- floating electronic buoys -- that broadcast their locations while riding currents. Some migrated toward Texas. Others meandered toward Florida.

The scientists never found fish kills, tainted shellfish or the pollution. Perhaps toxic floodwaters were neutralized by exposure to sun, sank to the bottom, decayed or were diluted.

South Florida resident Robert H. Gore, a marine scientist who wrote a book about the Gulf's wonders and plight in the early 1990s, doesn't expect that many of the region's residents will see Katrina's mess as a warning.

He has marveled at how communities and industries that continue to crowd the region are so blind to their environmental risk-taking and the harm they cause the Gulf.

Link to Reference: Matthew Brown, West Bank bureau, 12/10/05

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Highlights:
- The soil, air and water across the region is mostly free of the toxic contamination once feared to be Hurricane Katrina's lasting environmental legacy, federal and state officials said Friday, as they declared the majority of the New Orleans area safe to live in, work in or visit.
- Following extensive environmental tests to gauge the public health threat, state and federal officials are saying their earlier fears have not been borne out.
- The risk level used by the DEQ and EPA was based on a 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-1,000,000 chance of developing cancer or other illness based on a lifetime of exposure to contaminants. The EPA's internal guidelines are much stricter for some contaminants, including arsenic. The agency has been using DEQ standards during its Katrina response.

The soil, air and water across the region is mostly free of the toxic contamination once feared to be Hurricane Katrina's lasting environmental legacy, federal and state officials said Friday, as they declared the majority of the New Orleans area safe to live in, work in or visit.

After analyzing hundreds of air and water samples and testing floodwater sediments left behind when many neighborhoods were inundated for weeks, the officials said only a few areas remain a concern for short- or long-term health risks. In most neighborhoods, levels of arsenic, lead and petroleum products are typical of any urban area, they said.

"With the exception of a few oil spills, there really aren't the levels of chemical contamination that we had expected," said state health officer Jimmy Guidry. "Certainly there's no toxic soup or toxic gumbo. As far as the long-term risk of living in the city, it's not any worse than what we had before Katrina."

The exceptions include an estimated 1,800 properties potentially polluted by a million-gallon oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, and four sites in New Orleans where scientists found elevated levels of arsenic and petroleum products.

But for the rest of the metropolitan region, Friday's announcement could remove a sizable hurdle in the recovery effort.

In the weeks after the storm, unnerving descriptions of floodwaters as a "toxic soup" laced with deadly chemicals and bacteria were frequently offered by elected leaders and local and national media outlets. As a result, thousands of displaced residents and businesses have waited for an official all-clear before coming back.

Now, following extensive environmental tests to gauge the public health threat, state and federal officials are saying their earlier fears have not been borne out.

The announcement came from officials with the state Department of Environmental Quality, the Department of Health and Hospitals, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the federal Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Report criticized

More tests are pending, and some environmental groups contend government agencies are ignoring serious health threats in their zeal to rebuild.

"We do not believe the tests done by DEQ and EPA are sufficient to make a statement like this," said Darryl Malek-Wiley, Louisiana environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club. "To say that levels of lead and arsenic are similar to what they were before the storm, that doesn't make it OK. There was a big effort to try to reduce levels of lead in New Orleans before the storm."

But Andy Kopplin, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, seized on Friday's pronouncement as evidence southeast Louisiana is moving past the nagging question of whether living and working in the region poses a health hazard.

"Our families, taking appropriate public health precautions against mold and dust, can move back into hurricane-affected areas," Kopplin said. "That's very important in getting our economy up and off the ground."

The Louisiana Environmental Action Network, New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council and several other groups contend as much as 75 percent of the city still is marred by dangerously high levels of heavy metals, pesticides and petroleum products.

The groups conducted their own soil tests and also analyzed EPA data. They warned last week that a wave of cancer cases and other illnesses are inevitable in coming decades without a widespread cleanup of floodwater sediment. They also urged families to keep children out of areas of St. Bernard and New Orleans that flooded.

Monitored for years

In a first round of 430 soil samples taken by the EPA, 145 had levels of chemical contamination that exceeded cleanup guidelines. Only 14 of those sites were retested. The EPA said sediment depths were too thin -- less than a ½-inch deep -- for accurate readings at the remaining 131 sites.

Five of the 14, including one in the Murphy Oil spill area, showed elevated levels of arsenic or petroleum contamination. The others include two in Gentilly, near the intersections of Warrington Drive and Mirabeau Avenue, and Wickfield and Rapides drives; and two in the 9th Ward, near Poland Avenue and North Villere, and St. Ferdinand and North Rocheblave. None of the four had levels high enough to pose a serious health concern, according to Guidry and others.

But Guidry said state and federal agencies will continue to monitor contaminants for years to come.

"The question still remains: Are there going to be hot spots as we do these future tests?" he said.

DEQ Secretary Mike McDaniel dismissed criticism from the environmental groups as overblown. "They have a different way they interpret the risk standards," he said.

The risk level used by the DEQ and EPA was based on a 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-1,000,000 chance of developing cancer or other illness based on a lifetime of exposure to contaminants. The EPA's internal guidelines are much stricter for some contaminants, including arsenic. The agency has been using DEQ standards during its Katrina response.

'Very gray area'

Along Crescent Drive in Lakeview, homeowner Calvin Schnyder said he does not buy into claims that chemical contamination disappeared when his street was cleaned. The first round of soil samples taken near his house Sept. 26 showed levels of arsenic more than five times state standards. Diesel- and oil-related products slightly exceeded state standards.

During the second round of sampling Nov. 19 and 20, EPA workers could not find enough sediment for retest.

"They should come in (and test) a couple of houses," Schnyder, a 54-year-old retired BellSouth employee, said from his living room, where a thick layer of crust covered the floor. "They could get a bucket of it off the floor and test it. It's all right there."

Paul Templet, a professor at Louisiana State University's School of the Coast and Environment and former DEQ secretary under Gov. Buddy Roemer, said the conflicting messages coming from environmentalists and government leaves residents such as Schnyder in an awkward position.

"You're in a very gray area here. It isn't black or white," Templet said.

On one hand, he said the government agencies are being driven at least in part by the political goal of repopulating Louisiana's largest city. On the other, he said the environmentalists appear to be highlighting risks for maximum effect.

"What you're getting from the agencies is generalized advice. It may apply to you, it may not. It's a question of how much risk do you want to take, do you want to accept to be back in the New Orleans area," Templet said.

"At this point, there's so much gray area, you have to use common sense," he said. "If you feel bad, you should get out of there. If you're breathing a whole lot of dust, and you can tell that's what you're doing, you should do something about it."

Link to Reference: Saturday, December 10, 2005

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Highlights:
- study looked for signs of chemical and microbial contamination in seafood tissues.
- “Hundreds of samples of fish and shellfish, collected and analyzed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, show no reason for concern about the consumption of Gulf seafood,”
- he good news is that no pesticides or petroleum derivatives and low concentrations of metals have been found in water samples. No metals, PCBs or pesticides have been found in fish, shrimp or crabs. Bacteria levels are much lower than had been expected.

OCEAN SPRINGS (AP) - Tests by several state and federal agencies have yielded some encouraging results for the Gulf of Mexico's commercial fisheries and seafood health.

The Mississippi Department of Environment Quality on Thursday released results of a comprehensive seafood study conducted in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The study looked for signs of chemical and microbial contamination in seafood tissues.

“Hundreds of samples of fish and shellfish, collected and analyzed in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, show no reason for concern about the consumption of Gulf seafood,” the report concluded.

The report also showed hopeful signs for the heavily affected oyster industry.

While some oystering areas are still closed until they can be tested, “many oyster harvest areas have already been tested and reopened,” said Robbie Wilbur, a MDEQ spokesman.

Officials recommended that people take normal precautions when eating seafood, including thorough cooking and not eating the skin, fat or organs.

A group of state and federal agencies conducted the survey in Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi Sound, Mobile Bay and the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Henry Folmar, lab director for MDEQ's office of pollution control, said less than half of the data has been analyzed so far.

Folmar said the good news is that no pesticides or petroleum derivatives and low concentrations of metals have been found in water samples. No metals, PCBs or pesticides have been found in fish, shrimp or crabs. Bacteria levels are much lower than had been expected.

“Chemical contamination seems to be very limited,” he said. “The real damage seems to be physical habitat destruction.”

Water samples revealed dioxin, a compound known to cause cancer, in the Escatawpa and Pascagoula rivers and in St. Louis Bay, though the levels they detected were below the limit set for residential soil.

Researchers also found a low dissolved oxygen environment in the Escatawpa River and St. Louis Bay near Bayou Lacroix. Measuring dissolved oxygen in water is a common way to understand the relative health of the aquatic environment.

Read Hendon, a fisheries biologist with the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, said that spotted seatrout and striped bass populations fared the storm well.

Jim Franks, also with GCRL, said the Mississippi's commercial fishing industry, including fishermen, processors and dealers, received as much as $200 million in damage.

Link to Reference: Tracy Idell Hamilton, Express-News Staff Writer, 12/12/05

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Highlights:
- Open to 10 New Orleans ZIP codes, allowing residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina to return home for good, provided they're willing to live with iffy water supplies, gasoline shortages and toxic dirt.
- Water in Algiers and on the East Bank is safe for drinking, according to officials, while water east of there is not — and not even boiling will make it safe to drink.
- "It's a toxic waste dump out there," he said, and residents have no reassurance that the neighborhood will even be rebuilt. "Why would I put my family at risk? Why would I rebuild with no guarantee?"

The doors have been thrown open to 10 New Orleans ZIP codes, allowing residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina to return home for good, provided they're willing to live with iffy water supplies, gasoline shortages and toxic dirt.

The other seven ZIP codes that make up the city will be open for residents to "look and leave," the Federal Emergency Management Agency reported Friday. That means residents may return to their homes from dawn to dusk every day to inspect or repair, but must not spend the night.

The agency is still paying for one-way tickets to the city until Dec. 31.

Water in Algiers and on the East Bank is safe for drinking, according to officials, while water east of there is not — and not even boiling will make it safe to drink. Those who return are urged to get a tetanus shot, and to wash with antibacterial soap and bottled water if they come into contact with dirt or water "as soon as possible."

Those warnings anger Vince Wilson, a lifelong resident of the lower 9th Ward who said he would not be returning to rebuild his house of 38 years until he is reassured it is safe. His ZIP code is one of the seven "look-and-leave" areas.

"It's a toxic waste dump out there," he said, and residents have no reassurance that the neighborhood will even be rebuilt. "Why would I put my family at risk? Why would I rebuild with no guarantee?"

Wilson, who now lives in Houston, has become an activist for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.

He spent Friday working the phones to bring other evacuees to the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston today to protest Mayor Ray Nagin's "Bring New Orleans Back Commission," which has been on a six-city "town-hall" tour touting its plan to rebuild the city.

Wilson is openly skeptical of the commission and its plans, which call for rebuilding the least affected areas of the city first, while the hardest hit areas, he said, "haven't even had the topsoil turned yet."

Rumors that the city may abandon low-lying neighborhoods like the 9th Ward infuriates Wilson and other long-time residents of the city, residents whose suspicions of government were only confirmed by the evacuation debacle.

Another protest Saturday will be caravanning back to New Orleans, the Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

That protest is organized by longtime activist Malcolm Suber, who like Wilson believes blacks have been excluded from planning the city's reconstruction.

So far, only a fraction of former residents have returned to the hurricane and flood-ravaged city, most to high-ground neighborhoods like the Garden District.

As residents and planners wrangle about the future of the city, officials warn of the restrictions residents must live under if they plan to return.

Many homes remains uninhabitable, so families are encouraged to have back-up plans. Some medical facilities are up and running, but non-active elderly and those with special needs are being asked not to return.

For New Orleans residents still living in Texas hotels, FEMA announced Friday that it will be extending the deadline for moving people into apartments until Jan. 7.

Link to Reference: John Hill, Shreveporttimes.com, 12/8/05

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Highlights:
- Although some federal officials have said they didn't know of devastating flooding in New Orleans until Aug. 30, communications have revealed that word went out to state and federal levels a full day before then
- Despite the fact that representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were in the state briefings in Baton Rouge, word did not reach Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in Washington, D.C., until nearly 24 hours later.
- Bahamonde said he personally talked with Brown at 7 p.m. to tell him about the breach, which had grown to 200 feet.

BATON ROUGE -- Although some federal officials have said they didn't know of devastating flooding in New Orleans until Aug. 30, communications have revealed that word went out to state and federal levels a full day before then.

About the same time Hurricane Katrina was making its landfall on the Mississippi-Louisiana border on Monday morning, Aug. 29, state and federal emergency responders learned a breach in the 17th Street Canal was flooding New Orleans. Documents released by Gov. Kathleen Blanco to Congress show the first report of the breach was in the official 11 a.m. state police status report to the state Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge.

Despite the fact that representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency were in the state briefings in Baton Rouge, word did not reach Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in Washington, D.C., until nearly 24 hours later.

Former FEMA Director Michael Brown has blamed the poor response to Katrina on "dysfunctional" Louisiana officials.

A spokesman for Chertoff said Wednesday it is "unfortunate" the information didn't make it to the secretary until the day after Katrina devastated New Orleans, southeast Louisiana and southern Mississippi.

In October, Marty Bahamonde, the only FEMA staffer in New Orleans, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that he had alerted Brown's assistant shortly after 11 a.m. Aug. 29 with the "worst possible news" that Katrina had cut a 20-foot breach in the 17th Street Canal levee and water was pouring into the city.

Bahamonde said he personally talked with Brown at 7 p.m. to tell him about the breach, which had grown to 200 feet.

Russ Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said Wednesday that it is "evident" there was a breakdown in communications at the FEMA emergency operations center. He also called it "a very frustrating time."

Louisiana state police Sgt. Kathy Flinchum said FEMA representatives were in the briefing that Monday morning when the breach was first mentioned, contained in the written state police report and highlighted in bold-faced red print: "Captain Mark Willow, NOPD Homeland Security, has reported a 20-foot break in the 17th Street canal. Fire Department is reporting authority. Levee board notified."

"After we received that information, the information was passed along," Flinchum said.

It was not even the first mention of flooding in Orleans, St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes.

Extensive flooding in New Orleans was reported during the 7:30 a.m. conference call between the state Emergency Operations Center in Baton Rouge and parish emergency offices in the 13 affected southeast Louisiana parishes. That's 70 minutes after Katrina made landfall across Plaquemines Parish at 6:20 a.m.

In the conference call, a tape of which is among the governor's documents submitted to Congress last week, flooding was reported in Orleans, St. Bernard and Jefferson parishes.

The National Guard headquarters in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward reported three to four feet of water, Jefferson Parish had flooding, Big Charity Hospital in downtown New Orleans reported flooding on the first floor and St. Bernard had three feet of water rising in Arabi.

In the 11 a.m. state police briefing report, "significant structural damage, heavy flooding and deteriorating weather" is reported in Orleans.

In a 5 p.m. bulletin by the national weather service, NOAA warns of flooding in New Orleans.

The 6 p.m. state Office of Emergency Preparedness' status report includes the notation that there were three breaches in New Orleans levees. The state OEP reported the 17th Street Canal breach was flooding the Lakeview area of New Orleans, while two other levee breaches in the 9th Ward were causing flooding.

Homeland Security's Knocke reiterated that Chertoff wasn't told of the breach until Aug. 30, some 20 to 22 hours after the first state police report.

"I don't think I could look back and tell you why," Knocke said. "It was unfortunate the information did not make it to the secretary."

When asked if he knew the breach had occurred within the same hour of the storm's landfall near Pearl River, Knocke declined to answer. "The (U.S.) Army Corps (of Engineers) would be able to have the best information."

FEMA is conducting an "after-action analysis" that is ongoing, Knocke said.

Link to Reference: CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer, 12/09/05

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Highlights:
- Federal and state agencies on Friday sought to quell fears that New Orleans was turned into a contamination zone by Hurricane Katrina by emphasizing few risks were found in the soil, air or water.
- From the outset of test results, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have denied that the region had become contaminated by arsenic, lead and other contaminants.
- Thousands of tests show there are no short- or long-term threats.

Federal and state agencies on Friday sought to quell fears that New Orleans was turned into a contamination zone by Hurricane Katrina by emphasizing few risks were found in the soil, air or water.

"We're pleased to be able to say that residents can return to the affected areas, that tourists can return to the affected areas," said Andy Kopplin, the executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Friday's announcement that New Orleans and the rest of southern Louisiana are safe to return to was the latest round in an ongoing disagreement between environmental groups and government agencies over the effects of the hurricanes on the environment.

Since shortly after Katrina hit Louisiana on Aug. 29 and flooded New Orleans, state and federal agencies began monitoring how dangerous the air, water and ground was to rescue workers and residents.

From the outset of test results, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have denied that the region had become contaminated by arsenic, lead and other contaminants.

The agencies also have said flooded Superfund sites did not create major problems and that seafood from the Gulf of Mexico was safe to eat.

At Friday's news conference, Dr. Jimmy Guidry, Louisiana's medical director, agreed that there are few risks. But he did caution that returning residents and cleanup workers should use good hygiene and limit their exposure to sediment.

He said that mold remains a problem for people with respiratory problems and others who are sensitive to mold.

The news conference, which was headed by Vice Adm. Thad Allen, the head of the federal recovery effort, was billed as an "environmental summary."

Mike McDaniel, the DEQ secretary, said thousands of tests show there are no short- or long-term threats.

He added that, in fact, the air in New Orleans is cleaner than ever because so many industries are shut down and because of the lighter traffic. And he said bacteria levels are now so low that it would be safe to swim in Lake Pontchartrain.

"Most of the contaminants are at pre-Katrina levels and are not expected to present health risks," he said.

Environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have urged a major cleanup of sediment in the hurricane-hit regions because flood waters churned up high levels of contaminants buried under industrial sites and urban neighborhoods.

But McDaniel said the data does not warrant a cleanup.

"These government agencies have shirked their responsibility to protect citizens," said Monique Harden, a lawyer with the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

Her group has been handing out protective gear to residents returning to the Lower Ninth Ward. She said the government should be handing out the suits and masks instead.

"It is safe for people to return if they are able to protect themselves and avoid contact with the sediment," Harden said.

Link to Reference: JOHN SURRATT, The Mississippi Press, December 09, 2005

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Highlights:
- Seafood from the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico is safe to eat and overall water quality of the Coast's bays and estuaries is good, despite the debris deposited in the water by Hurricane Katrina
- Preliminary test results by DEQ, Folmar said the state Department of Marine Re-sources, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration indicated that the overall water quality was good, that there no metals, PCBs or pesticides in the seafood to warrant seafood advisories. And, he added, bacteria levels were much lower than expected.
- Tests did indicate low dioxin levels in the sediment in the Escatawpa and Pascagoula River area and in St. Louis Bay near Bayou LaCroix and low dissolved oxygen concentrations in the Escatawpa and St. Louis Bay and elevated nutrient levels in Bayou Casotte and Back Bay Biloxi.

OCEAN SPRINGS -- Seafood from the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf of Mexico is safe to eat and overall water quality of the Coast's bays and estuaries is good, despite the debris deposited in the water by Hurricane Katrina, the director of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said Thursday.

Henry Folmar, who oversees the DEQ's laboratory activities, announced the news about Coast seafood and its waterways during a Thursday night post-Katrina update meeting on the seafood industry and recreational fishing at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory.

The announcement was part of a "good news, bad news" presentation, which was a central theme during the entire program. The presentation was held to give area residents and commercial fishermen an idea of how the Coast's seafood and recreational fishing industries have faired in the wake of Katrina's Aug. 29 assault on the Coast.

Katrina's passage across the Coast raised concerns by many environmentalists, commercial fishermen, biologists and residents about the quality of Coastal waters and seafood.

But according to preliminary test results by DEQ, Folmar said the state Department of Marine Re-sources, Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration indicated that the overall water quality was good, that there no metals, PCBs or pesticides in the seafood to warrant seafood advisories. And, he added, bacteria levels were much lower than expected.

However, Folmar said tests did indicate low dioxin levels in the sediment in the Escatawpa and Pascagoula River area and in St. Louis Bay near Bayou LaCroix and low dissolved oxygen concentrations in the Escatawpa and St. Louis Bay and elevated nutrient levels in Bayou Casotte and Back Bay Biloxi.

Folmar also said fish kills were found in several areas of the Pascagoula, which he said were primarily caused by vegetation being blown into the river and dissolving the oxygen.

But while the Coast's seafood is in good shape, there are few people and equipment to harvest it.

GCRL scientist Jim Franks told the residents that the damage to the Coast's commercial and recreational fishing industries could total an estimated $170 million to $200 million, not including the damages to structures like marinas, piers, wharves and commercial support businesses, which he said could total an extra $10 million.

"Preliminary information based on interviews with 25 percent of the commercial fisherman indicate that the total estimated damage to the fleet is $50 million," Franks said. "Interviews with 30 percent of the processors and dealers put the total estimated damage to Katrina at $120 million."

A similar problem exists in the Coast's oyster industry, which took a major hit from the hurricane.

Bradley Randall, DMR biological program coordinator for shellfish, said preliminary reports indicated that 90 to 95 percent of the Coast's legal --three inches or larger -- oyster crop was killed by Katrina.

"The rest were scattered to where we can't find them," he said. "But the spats (oysters less than legal size) survived."

He said oyster larvae, which formed before Katrina hit, managed to stay in place, leaving the potential for another oyster crop to develop. But Randall said the spats won't reach legal size for another 18 to 24 months, meaning that the next money oyster crop could be two years away.

"It could be sooner than that," he said. "We're still investigating. We could find other beds that were never affected by the storm."

Randall said, however that Coast's offshore areas could benefit from the storm, because the water churned up by the hurricane could help refurbish the fisheries and stir up and redistribute nutrients. It could also create new areas for oyster larvae to attach themselves and induce them to spawn.

But even if the oyster beds were in good shape, the facilities to process and sell the crop would be few and far between. Many of the processing and dealer facilities were severely damaged by Katrina.

"Right now, we only have one processor in operation in Pass Christian," Randall said. "And it's processing Texas oysters."

Link to Reference: Executive Summary

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Highlights:
- After 25 years of experience, the Superfund program has evolved to protect Americans from toxic chemicals released when industry collides with nature, such as hurricanes and floods. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now must use this experience to face its biggest challenge yet—cleaning up the toxic pollution left behind after Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, funding shortfalls plague the Superfund program and may hinder its ability to respond to Hurricane Katrina and address the thousands of other polluted sites littered across the country.
- Hurricane Katrina presents EPA and the Superfund program with its biggest challenge yet – cleaning up after a flood of epic proportions. Hurricane forces and floodwaters that hit the heavily industrialized Gulf Coast in August 2005 created a stew of chemicals, sewage, oil, and pesticides that dispersed and settled widely.
- Unfortunately, the Superfund program must confront the challenge of cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina—and addressing thousands of other still contaminated sites across the country— with inadequate funding.

Since 1980, the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program has worked to protect the one in four Americans, including more than 10 million children, who live within four miles of the nation’s most polluted toxic waste sites. After 25 years of experience, the Superfund program has evolved to protect Americans from toxic chemicals released when industry collides with nature, such as hurricanes and floods. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now must use this experience to face its biggest challenge yet—cleaning up the toxic pollution left behind after Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately, funding shortfalls plague the Superfund program and may hinder its ability to respond to Hurricane Katrina and address the thousands of other polluted sites littered across the country.

In the 1970s, parents in Love Canal, New York, a community built upon a toxic waste dump, galvanized the nation when they demanded action from their elected officials to address the health problems afflicting local children. In response, Congress created the Superfund program in 1980 as the preeminent cleanup program for the nation’s most contaminated and toxic sites. Since its inception, the Superfund program has performed more than 7,000 emergency removal actions and permanently cleaned up 294 sites on the National Priorities List of the most toxic sites. Over the years, the Superfund program has evolved beyond just conducting cleanups at traditional hazardous waste sites; the Superfund program now supports response actions triggered by terrorism, natural disasters and other catastrophes. The Superfund program helped respond to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the anthrax contamination in the U.S. Senate, the devastating Midwest floods in 1993, and the initial federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In addition, the Superfund program has functioned as a safety net in hundreds of lesser-known situations when hazardous substances threatened communities after nature and industry collided. For example:

• The Gurley Pit Superfund site is situated in the floodplain of 15 Mile Bayou in northeast Arkansas. When 15 Mile Bayou flooded in 1980, water surged into Gurley Pit, releasing 500,000 gallons of hazardous waste onto residences and farmland. The Superfund program cleaned up the site and ensured that heavy rainfalls and flooding will no longer present a threat to local residents.

• In 1999, Hurricane Floyd dumped seven inches of rain over a 24-hour period in southeastern Pennsylvania. The resulting floodwaters carried toxic contaminants from an upstream industrial area into a residential neighborhood. Using the Superfund program, EPA identified two old landfills that were leaching a toxic brew into adjacent waterways. In 2001, EPA began planning long-term cleanup actions at these two sources to protect downstream residents.

• In 1997, a severe flood at Milo Creek washed toxic mining waste from the Bunker Hill Mine and Metallurgical Complex in northern Idaho onto 50 homes. The Superfund program removed the toxic waste from the homes and is stabilizing the Milo Creek channel to prevent future floods from dumping more toxic mining waste on downstream residents.

Hurricane Katrina presents EPA and the Superfund program with its biggest challenge yet – cleaning up after a flood of epic proportions. Hurricane forces and floodwaters that hit the heavily industrialized Gulf Coast in August 2005 created a stew of chemicals, sewage, oil, and pesticides that dispersed and settled widely. In the days and weeks after the hurricane, the Superfund program helped officials sample water for toxic chemicals, contain oil spills, remove barrels containing hazardous substances, and collect and dispose of hazardous waste. The full extent of these toxic releases will take years to understand and even longer to clean, but Superfund will continue to play a pivotal role in making the area safe again for local residents.

Unfortunately, the Superfund program must confront the challenge of cleaning up after Hurricane Katrina—and addressing thousands of other still contaminated sites across the country— with inadequate funding. The “polluter pays” fees levied on industries and chemicals that contribute to Superfund sites expired in 1995, leaving the program without a dedicated source of funding. Consequently, financial reserves in the Superfund trust have declined from a surplus of $3.8 billion in 1996 to levels that approach or reach zero at the end of each fiscal year, forcing average American taxpayers to shoulder more of the cost for toxic waste cleanups. In addition, Superfund’s financial demands have outstripped federal appropriations, leading to program funding shortfalls that slow or stop site cleanups and hinder EPA’s ability to address the backlog of contaminated sites.

As a result, the eve of Superfund’s 25th anniversary comes at a time when the program faces an uncertain future. To ensure that polluters, rather than regular taxpayers, pay to clean up Superfund sites, the polluter pays fees must be reinstated. Reinstating these fees will once again ensure that the Superfund program receives the funding it needs to function properly. In addition, a fully-funded Superfund program will be able to meet and overcome future emergencies and program challenges. In an era of federal budget deficits and program spending cuts amounting to billons of dollars, providing a reliable source of funding for the Superfund program with the polluter pays fees is sound public policy that will do much to protect public health and the environment.

Link to Reference: Melinda Liu, msnbc.msn.com, 12/6/05

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Highlights:
- Heads are rolling in the wake of the Harbin toxic spill, but it’s not Big Industry that’s getting the chop. Bungling, delay, cover-up.
- The flurry of finger-pointing isn’t just about local authorities blaming the central government—the same issues that erupted post-Katrina—in Beijing, the deeper controversy is also about economic priorities.
- China is notoriously polluted. Direct environmental damage is believed to cost the government nearly 10 percent of its $1.4 trillion economy.

Heads are rolling in the wake of the Harbin toxic spill, but it’s not Big Industry that’s getting the chop.
Bungling, delay, cover-up. When such missteps follow a major disaster, officials often have to resign.  We saw it unfold in the United States after the killer hurricane Katrina. Now we’re seeing heads roll in China, following the Nov. 13 chemical plant explosion that killed five people and spilled 100 tons of benzene-like carcinogens into the Songhua River.

There are sackings, and then there are sackings.  In China, who’s getting the axe and how—bureaucratically speaking, that is—holds greater symbolic and political significance than in many other countries.  Here, all eyes are focused on the fallout of the massive chemical spill that forced Harbin city’s four million residents go without running water for five days—and that now is slated to float by the Russian city of Khabarovsk this weekend.  

Much is at stake. Even Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, on an official visit to Paris, referred to the Harbin pollution in a lament over the high number of industrial accidents on the mainland, and confessed that he’d stayed up until nearly midnight “reviewing documents” about the chemical spill the night before leaving for France. “I was still reviewing them this morning before getting on the plane.”

In Beijing, the Chinese blame game is raging something fierce. The flurry of finger-pointing isn’t just about local authorities blaming the central government—the same issues that erupted post-Katrina—in Beijing, the deeper controversy is also about economic priorities. Which is more important: the helter-skelter red-hot growth of China’s GDP or more balanced and green efforts to save the environment?

China is notoriously polluted. Direct environmental damage is believed to cost the government nearly 10 percent of its $1.4 trillion economy. The post-spill personnel reshuffling, as one Beijing-based reporter put it, could signal whether mainland leaders intend to “sacrifice environmental protection for the sake of GDP growth, or vice versa.”  (The reporter refused to be quoted by name because the topic remains so sensitive that he could lose his job for speaking to a foreign journalist.)

In the behind-the-scenes tussle between the pro-environment faction and the pro-GDP lobby, the greens are losing so far. Oh sure, on Monday the general manager of Jilin Petrochemical was sacked by its parent company, the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), one of the country’s largest oil firms. Two workshop managers at the Jilin plant, where the blast occurred, were also fired.  Senior CNPC official Jiang Jiemin blamed the three for causing “great casualties and economic losses” which led to “bad publicity from the international community and hurt the whole image of CNPC.”

But by far the most senior official to lose his job, up to now, is the head of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency, Xie Zhenhua, 56. Xie’s forced resignation last Friday triggered a howl of protest among environmental activists and political analysts who fear he’s being made a scapegoat. Prof. Mao Shoulong, an outspoken mainland academic and an expert in governance, likened Xie’s fate to that of a traffic cop who responds to the scene of an accident only to be sacked even before anyone manages to figure out who’s at fault.

A high-level probe is underway. It’s already becoming evident that provincial authorities in Jilin—where the explosion took place—and senior CNPC figures downplayed the extent of the catastrophe, hindering official responses. The day after the blast, Xie had received a phone call from a senior Jilin provincial official who told the environmental protection agency head that the Songhua River contamination was not that serious and could be handled by provincial authorities on their own, says a source close to SEPA officials who requested anonymity because he wasn’t cleared to speak publicly about the incident.

The other problem, he says, is that the “local environmental protection department… reports to local authorities.” It’s supposed to notify SEPA in Beijing about environmental matters—but its salaries are paid by the government in its region, not by Beijing. So the local environmental protection department didn’t report the results of water quality tests from the Songhua River to SEPA until Nov. 17—a full four days after the explosion, according to SEPA deputy director Wang Yuqing, who also charged that China’s blind pursuit of economic growth has led to a quarter century of growing environmental degradation.

The state environmental protection agency didn’t immediately dispatch its own inspectors to Jilin. And while Jilin authorities informed downstream communities in their own province about the toxic spill, they at first neglected to inform their counterparts further downstream in neighboring Heilongjiang province. Jilin provincial authorities even ordered enormous amounts of water to be released from a dam into the Songhua river in an attempt to dilute the pollution within Jilin’s borders “which served to push the slick towards Heilongjiang even faster,” says the source.  When Premier Wen visited the region on an emergency inspection tour in late November, Xie was among a group of government and party officials who accompanied him. The same Jilin boss was among those who met Wen at the Harbin airport, and in a subsequent briefing he at one point turned to Xie and said something to the effect of "Didn't I call you right afterwards?", according to the source close to SEPA. Xie was reportedly stunned and could only stammer "Yes, yes" in response, says the source, who adds, "What else could Xie say?  That he knew [about the extent of the pollution] but helped the Jilin people cover it up?  This obviously made a bad impression on Wen."

Last Friday the State Council—the equivalent of China’s cabinet—stated that SEPA “has failed to pay sufficient attention to the incident and underestimated its possible impact.”  Still, Internet blogs and bulletin boards have begun to express sympathy for Xie. That may be due partly to SEPA’s surprising transformation from a toothless bureaucratic backwater into an agency that dares to challenge Big Industry. 

Recently, SEPA has been engaged in a David-and-Goliath tussle against powerful interest groups. Earlier this year, Xie’s outspoken deputy Pan Yue successfully waged a high-profile campaign to temporarily freeze 30 major construction projects, including prestigious hydropower plants on the Yangtze River, because they had proceeded illegally without the required environmental impact studies. Pan and SEPA were seen to have won the support of Premier Wen in this endeavor. But their success antagonized what political insiders call the “GDP lobby”, including key ministries and industry giants such as State Power, the Three Gorges Dam Group, CNPC and above all the State Development Planning Commission, a powerful super-ministry.

Will heads continue to roll within the ranks of local authorities and CNPC officials? Much depends on results from the current probe—and on how far President Hu Jintao intends to push his campaign to boost official accountability. In 2003, his regime sacked the then-health minister and Beijing mayor when they initially tried to cover-up China’s deadly SARS outbreak.

The big difference today is that some very important interests of some very important players—both government and industry heavyweights—hang in the balance. Even the speed of GPD growth may be affected; China’s pro-environment faction is pushing for adoption of a new measure called “green GDP” which would help gauge the health and sustainability of economic growth, not simply its speed.  All this is undoubtedly complicating the investigation. It make take some time for us to know precisely who knew what, and when—and what they didn’t do about it.

Link to Reference: MIKE KELLER, 12/3/05

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Highlights:
- "Based on over 40 samples I saw taken at the plant, contaminated areas were clearly subject to flooding and added to the contamination coming out of DeLisle. "
- FEMA surge inundation maps revealed a 25.1-foot outdoor high-water mark recorded within the plant, beyond several retention ponds known by a former DuPont employee to hold high levels of dioxin, a chemical by-product that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states is "one of the most toxic and environmentally stable" compounds in its class.
- "When the surge carries mud in, it carries it out, too," said Al Hopkins, a former Army general and one of the lawyers bringing suit against DuPont DeLisle. "The water came over those piles of ore and dust. TCDD (dioxin) was in those piles."

"Based on over 40 samples I saw taken at the plant, contaminated areas were clearly subject to flooding and added to the contamination coming out of DeLisle. " Some DuPont sampling results expected Monday

As Katrina's surge slammed the Coast, three ore and tank freight train cars sitting atop a 25-foot-high railroad berm careened a fifth of a mile inland. Speeding water laid Bay of St. Louis mud down in a thick coat on Diamondhead, Pass Christian and the DuPont plant at DeLisle.

As the surge receded, so did the water from the DuPont plant, located near the very edge of where land meets water.

Recently released FEMA surge inundation maps revealed a 25.1-foot outdoor high-water mark recorded within the plant, beyond several retention ponds known by a former DuPont employee to hold high levels of dioxin, a chemical by-product that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states is "one of the most toxic and environmentally stable" compounds in its class.

But dioxin is not the only concern. The DeLisle plant was the largest producer of toxic chemicals in the state and the 34th largest in the nation, according to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory figures for 2003, the last year publicly available.

On Monday, an environmental chemist will release findings from an independent assessment of toxins around the DeLisle community.

The TRI program reported that DuPont's DeLisle plant pumped 12.6 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the ground through injection wells, almost 2.1 million pounds into the air and almost 300 pounds into the water in 2003. DuPont also put several hundred thousand pounds of heavy metals - including zinc, vanadium, and lead- into its landfills and into surrounding waters and pumped over half a million pounds of hydrochloric acid into the air.

"Based on over 40 samples I saw taken at the plant, contaminated areas were clearly subject to flooding and added to the contamination coming out of DeLisle," said Glenn Evers, a 22-year employee of DuPont who worked at its sister titanium dioxide plant in Delaware and who testified this summer in the first of 2,000 lawsuits brought against DuPont.

A jury awarded $14 million to a Bay St. Louis oyster fisherman for a rare cancer that his lawyers argued was a result of dioxin coming out of the DeLisle plant. "Any mud that went through that facility and came back out was contaminated," he asserted.

In 2000, 1,270 people lived within a three-mile radius of the plant, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Just over a quarter of those people live below the poverty level. Over half are white, about a third are black and 15 percent are American Indian.

Over 50 percent of the population are children under the age of 18 and senior citizens, the two age groups most likely to suffer from pollution.

U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aerial photos reveal the wind-damaged and mud-covered plant, where raw ore, brought in by freight car from the port at Gulfport, is transformed into super-white titanium dioxide, a pigment used to whiten everything from paint to Oreo cookie filling.

The freight cars themselves tell a story of what happened that day, with entire lines of ore, coke and chlorine carriers knocked over by the velocity of the surge. The cars that were hurled into the facility were deposited into a watery part east of vital equipment and buildings.

Did any of the mud, possibly contaminated by plant chemicals and by-products, wash out of the facility? If so, where did it go?

"Our environmental containment and severe weather systems withstood the impact of Hurricane Katrina," wrote Nathan Pepper, a DuPont spokesman, in an e-mail response to questions about surge inundation. "As a result there was no release with any on-site or off-site impact. This has been confirmed by MDEQ and EPA inspections, and most recently by EPA and MDEQ's 10/28/05 Mississippi Bay and Estuary report. These agencies also have an on-site sampling report that is due to be completed soon. DuPont is confident that it too will reflect our determination of no environmental impact from Hurricane Katrina."

That response has been backed up by Mississippi's Department of Environmental Quality, the government agency responsible for oversight and regulation of the DuPont plant.

"Debris went to the levels of the levees," said Rick Sumrall, who is in charge of compliance within the chemical manufacturing industry. "It was clear that impoundments had not been topped."

Sumrall also said that the landfill area, in the northwest corner of the plant and where some waste is stored, stayed above surge waters.

But Sumrall did not mention any of the open areas where dioxin-laced intermediary chemicals and products dusted the ground and buildings.

James Durant, an environmental health scientist with the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said that the government has taken samples around the DuPont plant and that they are finishing a report on the findings.

Even if the mud was contaminated, "getting it on the skin does not necessarily mean it is going to get in the body," Durant said. "My concern would be dioxin getting into the food chain."

Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant and chemist in Louisiana, took several soil and sediment samples in Mississippi and Louisiana, including several around DuPont. She will release her findings Monday.

Those samples will either vindicate the company and prove that they were able to maintain control of their plant through Katrina, or show that the community of DeLisle, and through the movement of coastal waters the rest of South Mississippi, has something more to worry about.

"When the surge carries mud in, it carries it out, too," said Al Hopkins, a former Army general and one of the lawyers bringing suit against DuPont DeLisle. "The water came over those piles of ore and dust. TCDD (dioxin) was in those piles."

Link to Reference: Patrick Jackson, BBC News,

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Highlights:
- The filthy floodwaters that have engulfed much of New Orleans are posing a fresh challenge for the city - where should the toxic mess be deposited?
- These images suggest the quantity of floodwater in downtown New Orleans on 2 September was 95 billion litres (21bn gallons, 25bn US gallons),
- As a rule of thumb, for every mile of wetlands that a storm surge passes, it reduces the flooding by a foot, the professor says.

The filthy floodwaters that have engulfed much of New Orleans are posing a fresh challenge for the city - where should the toxic mess be deposited? Fears are growing that the wrong choices now could spark environmental problems for decades to come.

Lake Pontchartrain, the large water mass north of New Orleans, is the focus of many of these fears. Engineers need to pump out the water which swept in when Hurricane Katrina's storm surges from the lake brought down sections of its floodwalls on 29 August. But the last thing the lake and the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Mississippi need is a tide of urban filth.

The areas have already suffered decades of seeping pollution and erosion.

The Mississippi River might seem a more obvious channel than the lake for the mess, carrying it out to sea.

Yet the lake is the city's traditional drain, and it is impractical to try to pump all the water out to the south.

Sewage and unknown amounts of industrial chemicals float in the stagnant water - along with the unrecovered bodies of the victims. Oil, diesel and petrol from vehicles are adding to the mix.

And the facilities to treat the contamination before pumping the water away are just not there in a city without power.

Scientists cannot yet say for sure how poisonous the water actually is, and city officials have described reports of a "toxic soup" as exaggerated. New Orleans has no large industrial base, says John Day, a professor at Louisiana State University's (LUS'S) Department of Oceanology and Coastal Studies - but for now scientists "just don't know" what a full analysis of the waters will show.

If no major new source of toxins emerges, the biggest areas of concern will organic waste and oil slicks. While they may have a short-term impact, these elements should largely break down in the lake water in a matter of months, says Professor Day.

Scientists from LSU have already begun field trips to New Orleans to collect samples for monitoring the level of toxins in the water.

Aerial photographs are also helping them to establish the volume of floodwater.

These images suggest the quantity of floodwater in downtown New Orleans on 2 September was 95 billion litres (21bn gallons, 25bn US gallons), Hassan Mashriqui of the LSU Hurricane Center told the BBC News website.

Wildlife in the wetlands of the lake's basin includes otters and wild boar, ducks and eagles.

The lake is no stranger to pollution from its big city neighbour, but it had actually been getting cleaner in recent years. Six decades of dredging its shell beds to make asphalt and cement came to an end in 1991.

Pontchartrain's ecosystem may have been hit directly by Katrina at the very beginning, when surges of seawater from the Gulf of Mexico arrived, dangerously increasing its salt content.

Certainly, the hurricane itself did serious ecological damage further north, along the Gulf Coast, where a storm wave with a peak of nine metres (30ft) was recorded.

"On the Mississippi coast, the water went in and went out - in New Orleans, it went in and sat there," said Professor Day.

Warnings 'ignored'

The wetlands, which act as a natural brake on hurricane surges, have been reduced by about 25% over the last century by development.

As a rule of thumb, for every mile of wetlands that a storm surge passes, it reduces the flooding by a foot, the professor says.

He argues that if the US federal authorities had heeded ecological warnings and spent $20-25bn on restoring wetlands in the Mississippi Delta, America would not now be facing a bill of $100bn.

Washington, Professor Day says, must finally take global climate change seriously as the rising sea level and more frequent hurricanes many associate with it impact directly on low-lying areas like New Orleans.

Link to Reference: BRETT MARTEL, Associated Press Writer, 12/1/05

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Highlights:
- Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday.
- The Corps cannot explain the disparity between what its 1993 design documents show was supposed to be there and what they've found.
- But LSU computer models showed that even if the pilings had gone to 17.5 feet below sea level at 17th Street as design documents said they should have, they still would have failed.


NEW ORLEANS - Government engineers performing sonar tests at the site of a major levee failure confirmed that steel reinforcements barely went more than half as deep as they were supposed to, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday. "We've come up with similar results" to those from earlier tests performed by Louisiana State University engineers, said Walter Baumy, the Corps' chief engineer for the New Orleans District.

Baumy said the Corps intends to pull out pieces of the remaining wall along each edge of the breach at the 17th Street Canal to verify the sonar test results. The canal itself is now mostly dry at the breach site, with temporary walls holding back water from each side.

Baumy said the Corps cannot explain the disparity between what its 1993 design documents show was supposed to be there and what they've found.

The documents indicated that the steel reinforcements in the levee, known as sheet piling, went to a depth of 17.5 feet below sea level. Sonar tests indicated the pilings went only to 10 feet below sea level, meaning the flood wall would have been much weaker than intended.

The LSU team is working on a report for the state that will say there were serious, fundamental design and construction flaws at both the 17th Street and London Avenue canals. Both broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding much of the city.

The team's leader, Ivor van Heerden, said Wednesday that the levee design ensured failure under the type of water pressure exerted by Katrina's storm surge.

The team's computer modeling showed that the designs failed to account for loose, porous soils such as sand and peat that were prone to allowing water to seep from the canal through to the dry side of the levee.

Much deeper steel pilings driven well below the canal bottoms likely would have stopped seepage to the dry side, engineers have said. The bottom tip of the pilings, at 10 feet below sea level, did not reach the canal bottoms.

But LSU computer models showed that even if the pilings had gone to 17.5 feet below sea level at 17th Street as design documents said they should have, they still would have failed.

Engineering studies prior to construction of the flood wall were performed by Eustis Engineering, Modjeski and Masters Inc. and the Corps. Members of the LSU team have expressed shock that all three could have missed what they characterized as fundamental flaws.

Calls to Eustis and Modjeski and Masters were not returned Wednesday. Van Heerden said the federal government bears ultimate responsibility.

Link to Reference: Scott LaFee, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER, November 30, 2005

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Highlights:
- Scientists and engineers, politicians and environmentalists are talking about restoring and re-creating hundreds of square miles of wetlands along America's Gulf coast, which many contend would have saved New Orleans and the region from much of Katrina's wrath.
- When European settlers first arrived in what would become the United States, there were an estimated 220 million acres of wetlands
- Some two centuries later, the total wetland area in the United States has been cut in half to less than 103 million acres,
- Natural phenomena are partly to blame: erosion, subsidence, rising sea levels, drought, hurricanes and other storms. But the damage done pales in comparison to human-induced causes: drainage, dredging, stream channelization, the dumping of fill material, damming, levees, logging, mining, construction, runoff, air and water pollutants, changes in nutrient levels, the release of toxic chemicals, the introduction of invasive, nonnative species and farming.
- Twenty-two states have lost more than half of their original wetlands; six have lost more than 85 percent. California is down to just 5 percent of what it once had.

There's a news photo, taken a month after Hurricane Katrina, that depicts a storm-tossed Chevy lying upside down beside a marsh near Venice, La. Beyond the car and some open water, a row of somewhat scraggly trees – a remnant of what was once a much-larger and more robust wetland – strips across the horizon.

But in the wake of an unforgettably destructive hurricane season, scientists and engineers, politicians and environmentalists are talking about restoring and re-creating hundreds of square miles of wetlands along America's Gulf coast, which many contend would have saved New Orleans and the region from much of Katrina's wrath.

The talk is insistent, sincere and old. Scientists have been attempting to restore – and create – wetlands for decades, from the Tijuana River estuary to the Florida Everglades to Casco Bay in Maine. The results have been mixed at best. There have been many failures. Restoration researchers say they've learned a lot from those failures about how to build a healthy, functional wetland, but clearly nature still does a much, much better job.

People are better at the other end: destroying wetlands. When European settlers first arrived in what would become the United States, there were an estimated 220 million acres of wetlands, a word that encompasses a surprisingly diverse array of ecosystems, from coastal salt marshes and riparian habitat to cypress swamps, forest bogs and prairie potholes.

Some two centuries later, the total wetland area in the United States has been cut in half to less than 103 million acres, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Natural phenomena are partly to blame: erosion, subsidence, rising sea levels, drought, hurricanes and other storms. But the damage done pales in comparison to human-induced causes: drainage, dredging, stream channelization, the dumping of fill material, damming, levees, logging, mining, construction, runoff, air and water pollutants, changes in nutrient levels, the release of toxic chemicals, the introduction of invasive, nonnative species and farming.

Twenty-two states have lost more than half of their original wetlands; six have lost more than 85 percent. California is down to just 5 percent of what it once had.

Losses were greatest in the 1950s through 1970s when public policies broadly encouraged the elimination of wetlands in favor of economic development. Then came the realization, emboldened by a growing database of research, that wetlands were and are valuable in their own right.

They are the Earth's kidneys, filtering and cleansing water systems. They are home and hearth to thousands of species of birds and fish, particularly as a safe haven for reproduction. Their presence helps moderate temperatures, cooling days and warming nights.

In 1997, a team of ecologists, economists and geographers attempted to establish the monetary value of nature. Their answer: $33 trillion, of which wetlands accounted for $14.9 trillion, or 45 percent.

Part of that value, as residents of Louisiana will tell you, is protective. In coastal areas, wetlands buffer the effects of hurricanes and other destructive storms. They do this in two ways.

No. 1: They block storm surge. The rule of thumb is that every mile of marsh reduces the height of a storm surge by 1 foot. A Danish study published in October found that in areas of India where coastal mangrove forests remained, damage from last year's deadly tsunami was significantly less than in areas where the trees had been removed for commercial development.

The mangroves are like a bumper on a car. They take the brunt of the wave. It trashes the forest, said John Pernetta, a project director for the United Nations Environment Program, but reduces damage to infrastructure behind.

Computer models suggest 30 mangrove trees per 120 square yards in a 109-yard belt can reduce a large tsunami's power by more than 90 percent.

A number of Asian nations have announced plans to replant the lost mangrove forests. The Sumatran government, for example, says it will replant thousands of acres of mangroves in the northern province of Aceh, where more than 110,000 people were killed in the tsunami.

No. 2: Coastal wetlands act like giant sponges, soaking up storm water, which, in turn, reduces the chance of flooding. According to American Rivers, an environmental group, a single acre of wetland, saturated to a depth of one foot, retains more than 330,000 gallons of water – enough to flood 13 average-sized homes thigh deep.

Blue bayous

Louisiana has long been the poster child of wetlands loss. Between 1932 and 2000, almost 2,000 square miles of wetlands were eliminated, an average of 34 square miles annually. In recent years, that rate has been reduced but still stands at about 25 square miles of wetland destroyed each year. If the current rate of loss is not slowed, researchers estimate an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will disappear by 2040.

Earlier this month, a committee of the National Research Council (part of the National Academies of Science) issued a public assessment of a plan developed in 2004 by the state of Louisiana and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to begin to restore and protect the state's coast and wetlands.

The analysis was restrained and cautiously optimistic. Four of the five restoration projects proposed were "scientifically sound," but the NRC declared that the plan fell short of the "the type of integrated, large-scale effort needed for such a massive undertaking."

"It's a start," said Robert Dean, committee chairman of the NRC report and a professor of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida, "and we recommend that the work move forward with the understanding that long-range programs need to be developed."

To be fair, the Louisiana/Army Corps plan – called the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) study – was never intended to be a grand solution. Its goals were purposefully limited by time and funding to five projects that could theoretically be accomplished within the next five to 10 years.

These projects focused on repairing and restoring specific sections of Louisiana's coast and infrastructure, such as restoring shoreline along Barataria Basin, diverting the Hope Canal and mitigating environmental damage caused by the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a large navigation channel.

Educated guesses

Restoring a wetland is like putting together a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle with only the vaguest notion of what the big picture looks like. They are extraordinarily complicated, perhaps the most dynamic ecosystems on Earth. Ecologists struggle to even quantify the variables that determine whether a wetland is functional and healthy.

Take the issue of water, arguably the single most important and defining factor in all wetlands. For any preservation or restoration scheme to work, scientists must assess and understand how much water is present in a particular wetland, how it behaves, the purposes it serves. Is it primarily surface water or ground? What's the source: rain, river, sea? How does it move? Where does it go? How much is present at any particular time?

AdvertisementFor example, the MRGO was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s as a major shortcut for oceangoing vessels traveling between the Gulf of Mexico and the port of New Orleans. The 76-mile-long channel required the dredging of more than 290 million cubic yards of earth, 60 million more than were excavated for the Panama Canal.

One result of the MRGO has been a massive intrusion of Gulf seawater deep into the surrounding wetland. Increased water salinity has wiped out more than 5,000 acres of cypress forest and decimated once-flourishing populations of alligators, fish, birds and muskrats. It's estimated that MRGO has destroyed more than 27,300 acres of wetland.

Local scientists are now trying to stop and reverse some of the damage by funneling part of New Orlean's storm water and treated sewage back into the remaining marsh. If all goes as planned, the "fresh" wastewater will push back the saltwater intrusion and provide needed sediment and nutrients for plants and animals.

But water poses just one set of questions and problems. What about local topography, the slope of the land? How much lies above the water? What is the soil quality? What kinds of plants live there? What animal species? How do they all interact?

Actual restoration is an educated guessing game, said Joy Zedler, a professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who has spent more than 30 years studying and restoring wetlands, in particular the Tijuana River estuary south of San Diego.

"There are so many working parts, and conditions are always changing," she said. "There are always surprises you didn't predict."

Two examples:

One of Zedler's projects while she worked at San Diego State University was restoring the Sweetwater Marsh south of downtown San Diego for two endangered species of birds – the clapper rail and the least tern – and one endangered plant called bird's beak.

Previous efforts to create suitable habitat involved transplanting Spartina cordgrass from nearby wetlands. But the transplants failed. The grass refused to grow tall enough to provide adequate nesting sites. Researchers eventually discovered that the marsh's sandy soil lacked sufficient nutrients, so fertilizer was added to encourage grass growth.

And it did, but the fertilizer also spurred the growth of pickleweed, a less desirable marsh plant that outgrew the cordgrass, leaving the birds with still no suitable place to nest.

In the early 1990s, Oregon scientists tried restoring a coastal marsh that had been diked off from tidal action to create pastureland in the Salmon River estuary. They presumed that, once re-exposed to ocean tides, the land would soon return to its original wetland state.

Ten years later, it looked nothing at all like the surrounding, untouched wetlands. Absent water for all those years, the land had subsided. More water flooded it, changing the kinds of plants and animals that would live there. It was a kind of wetland, but not like the wetland originally lost. Scientists now estimate it will take nature 50 years or more to build up sediments and return the land to what it once was.

Subsidence is merely one kind of glitch in restoration. Researchers have had to learn through trial and error (euphemistically called adaptive restoration) which species of plants are good colonizers – that is, which ones will move into a restored area naturally – and which must be hand-seeded and painstakingly nurtured. Similarly, some plants have proved to be strong competitors, able to hold their own, while others quickly succumb to problems like soil compaction or invasive species. How restored vegetation fares is a strong determinant of whether birds and other animals will return and thrive. Plans to replant lost mangrove forests in Indonesia, for example, have drawn criticism because they oversimplify nature. Alfredo Quarto, executive director of the Mangrove Action Project, a U.S.-based environmental group, said similar mangrove restoration projects in Thailand resulted in "plantation-style" forests that harmed biodiversity and eventually failed. The mangroves, he said, were often planted in places where they didn't naturally grow and died after a few years.

Indonesian government ecologists say they realize mangroves are only part of the solution, and promise to plant other kinds of trees, such as pine.

Likewise, Greg Stone, a professor of coastal geology at Louisiana State University, says future efforts to repair the Gulf Coast's swamps and bayous will not be sufficient or successful unless the coast's barrier islands – long, narrow strips of sand forming islands that protect inland areas from ocean waves and storms – are also restored.

"The islands are like the first layer of armor," he said. "We've allowed them to be eroded away over the years. We've probably lost three to five years of land in just this one hurricane season. If we're going to restore and preserve coastal wetlands, I think we've got to think first about how to restore the barrier islands that protect the coast."

Small steps, big needs

A handful of small-scale projects have begun to hydraulically pump sand and sediment onto existing barrier islands with some success, but Stone says this effort needs to be massively expanded.

Which means spending money, a lot of it. No one can yet say exactly how much will be needed to repair and restore the Gulf coast's barrier islands and wetlands. The current estimate, developed before Katrina, is roughly $14 billion, but some estimates have doubled the amount. The Louisiana Coastal Area plan, in fact, isn't even funded. Though the Bush Administration supports a plan to spend $2 billion over 10 years on the most promising restoration projects, Congress has yet to authorize any funding.

Even when the money comes, success won't immediately follow. Wetland restoration takes time, said Zedler and others. Real success is measured in decades, a fact that has frequently doomed projects where funding was mandated for only a few years.

Zedler cites an example:

Several years ago, an effort was made to create wetland habitat near the San Diego River for the least Bell's vireo, an endangered migratory bird. Millions of dollars were spent diverting the river into this new habitat.

Then a winter flood destroyed the diversion levee. The river returned to its old route; the restored wetland withered away.

"It turned out that the breached berm that shunted the water was built in the wrong place, but by then all of the project obligations and liability had passed. Nobody was responsible for the project anymore. Everybody just walked away from a wetland that had no water."

That happens a lot. From California to Louisiana, the idea of wetland restoration has become widely accepted and supported. Everybody's in favor of restoring their neighbor's wetland, said Dan Walker, Louisiana Coastal Area study director. They can understand the long-term benefits. But when it's their property or immediate economic interests that may be affected, people balk, and things get complicated.

"There are always competing and conflicting interests. What we're trying to do is get everybody on the same map."

No one, of course, believes wetlands restoration and creation will ever resemble what was lost. Louisiana environmentalists say their ultimate goal is to simply slow the ongoing erosion of their state. Something is better than nothing, whether it's looking out over a coastal lagoon in North County or across a bayou toward the Gulf and, inevitably, another incoming hurricane.

Link to Reference: Ron Scherer, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, 11/30/05

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Highlights:
- Hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused $1.6 billion in damage to the state's farm economy.
- "The state will have to test the soil for salt and crude oil,"
- "Most of the trees were under 14 feet of water."

Hurricanes Rita and Katrina caused $1.6 billion in damage to the state's farm economy.
NAIRN, LA. – This is the time of year when Emmett Fowler would be pulling bright navel oranges, sweet satsumas, and juicy grapefruit from his citrus trees. Instead, Mr. Fowler expects he will be plowing under his 2,000 lifeless fruit trees.

"The state will have to test the soil for salt and crude oil," says Fowler as he looks out at his groves - now not much more than leafless pieces of wood with stray, discolored oranges - and talks about whether he will be able to recover. "Most of the trees were under 14 feet of water."

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have left similar scenes of devastation across the state. State economists now estimate the losses to Louisiana's farm economy at $1.6 billion - ranging from strawberry fields that were washed away to entire forests that had 10 to 15 years' worth of timber destroyed. And, because of the salt-water flooding, agriculture experts say the damage could stretch on for years.

"The losses are bigger than anything else we've ever had," says Kurt Guidry, an agricultural economist with the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center in Baton Rouge. "There was nothing that we grow that was not impacted."

Crops lost

In the southern part of the state, the vegetable and citrus industries were heavily damaged. For example, in Plaquemines Parish, farmers lost their crop of bell peppers, tomatoes and eggplant, says Regina Bracy, a professor of horticulture at the LSU Ag Center. Most strawberry growers had already put down costly plastic mulch, most of which got blown away. "Vegetables are a $40 million crop, strawberries are a $10 million crop," says Ms. Bracy. "That may not be big by California standards, but it's significant in this particular parish."

For some farmers, the damage to their crops is coming from an unusual source - wild animals that are hungry because their normal food is now missing. That's the case with Lester L'Hoste in Braithwaite, La. As he walks through his citrus groves, he points to damage done to his trees by hungry deer. "They eat the leaves and the fruit," he says.

Further south in the state, the damage is much greater. LSU Ag Center's Citrus Research station in Port Sulphur was totally destroyed as the storm surge wiped out equipment and buildings.

Many farmers in the southern part of the parish have suffered the same fate as Fowler, who has lost his yearly income of about $57,000, depending on prices. The loss of the trees hurts Fowler more than the money. His product was so good, he says, that a local oil man and baseball fan used to ship cartons of his citrus to people like George Steinbrenner, owner of the New York Yankees.

His house may be lost, as well. "You can see where the water level hit - about 14 feet up," he says.

Some of the small farmers, such as Fowler, may get some aid from the Louisiana Small Farm Survival Fund, which is run by Baton Rouge Economic and Agricultural Development Alliance (BREADA). So far, the Survival fund has raised about $175,000, which will be distributed to subsistence farmers.

"Our hope is to keep them on the farms, keep them from being displaced like the residents in urban areas," says Copper Alvarez, the executive director of BREADA.

Elsewhere, some farmers whose crops withstood the wind and floods watched their produce wither after weeks without electricity meant they couldn't irrigate. "We're still in a drought situation," says Professor Bracy. "We've had no significant rain since Katrina or Rita."

For farmers, the problems seem never-ending. After the hurricanes, there were shortages of diesel. This prevented farmers from using their generators, which could have powered their irrigation pumps. Dairy farmers, also without electricity, lost milk sales.

Other farmers have had trouble finding workers, many of whom are stuck in Houston or other cities. "They are scrambling to find people to plant their crops on top of everything else," says Bracy.

Heavy toll on timber industry

On a dollar basis, the largest agricultural losses are in the timber industry, which lost $1.1 billion in product, Mr. Guidry estimates. In some parishes, some 80 percent of the trees were either knocked down or broken. Historically, only 20 to 25 percent can be salvaged. "It goes from a price based on saw timber to a price based on pulp wood and the difference is pretty substantial," says Guidry.

However, Wade Camp, an economist with the Southern Forest Products Association in Kenner, La., estimates the total damage to the timber industry is less than 10 percent. He's worried about the shortage of loggers since many are now working for FEMA. "How long will that last?" he asks.

Some farmers will eventually receive federal money. The Emergency Conservation Program will pay to have debris removed from land in production.

Even before the hurricanes hit, Guidry says it was going to be a tough year for the farmers, struggling with higher fuel and fertilizer costs and stagnant prices. "But, now the hurricanes have turned a bad situation into a terrible situation."

Still, Ms. Alvarez is optimistic that small farmers such as Fowler will fight to survive. "They don't take things lying down," she says. "I think most think they will be back."

Link to Reference: National Aeronautics and Soace Administration - Hurricane Resource Page

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Highlights:
- Hurricane path video is TERRIFIC!


http://www.nasa.gov/mov/133273main_katrina_GOES.mov

Link to Reference: Gulf of Mexico Sea Surface temperatures and location of Loop Current waters affecting recent strong hurricane crossings

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Highlights:
- The LSU Earth Scan Lab is deeply pained by the events wrought in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
- Hurricane Katrina's Aftermath is being monitored, and studied with satellite imagery acquired at the ESL, and obtained from outside sources.
- Warm water provided by the Loop Current plays a role in the strengthening of hurricanes as they traverse the Gulf of Mexico

The LSU Earth Scan Lab is deeply pained by the events wrought in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Our thoughts are with the victims of this tremendous natural disaster, and our hopes are for a safe and rapid recovery for the victims, the city of New Orleans, and the State of Louisiana.

Our lab has served the the emergency relief efforts, state-wide, and at the LOHSEP since before Katrina made landfall, and, will continue to provide satellite-based analysis and operational support throughout the recovery effort. Hurricane Katrina's Aftermath is being monitored, and studied with satellite imagery acquired at the ESL, and obtained from outside sources. Links to other sites related to the post-storm analysis are also provided.

Warm water provided by the Loop Current plays a role in the strengthening of hurricanes as they traverse the Gulf of Mexico. For more information on the Loop current visit our research page.

For information concerning the effects hurricanes have on the Loop Current, read Dr. Nan Walker's recent work on cold-core cyclones in the Gulf of Mexico here.

Link to Reference: NASA Hurricane Resource Page

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Highlights:
- The warming of the Pacific Ocean waters which is commonly referred to as El Nino, deters hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean because the warm water creates strong westerly winds which disrupt tropical depressions before they can develop enough intensity.
- El Nina has the opposite effect encouraging more hurricanes then typical.

The warming of the Pacific Ocean waters which is commonly referred to as El Nino, deters hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean because the warm water creates strong westerly winds which disrupt tropical depressions before they can develop enough intensity.

El Nina has the opposite effect encouraging more hurricanes then typical.

Link to Reference: The impact of spiralling pollution on the planet poses a threat to civilisation just as catastrophic as much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction, Britain's top scientist warned., LONDON (AFP)

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Highlights:
- "The impacts of global warming are many and serious: sea-level rise ... changes in availability of fresh water ... and the increasing incidence of extreme events -- floods, droughts, and hurricanes -- the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with weapons of mass destruction,"
- agreeing to a pollution analysis calculating the potential costs of corrective action -- and the fallout if nothing was done
- The scientist pointed to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US jazz capital of New Orleans in August, as an example of what could happen more often if politicians failed to tackle global warming.

The impact of spiralling pollution on the planet poses a threat to civilisation just as catastrophic as much-vaunted weapons of mass destruction, Britain's top scientist warned.

Robert May, president of the country's leading scientific body, the Royal Society, issued the warning as a 12-day conference was set to get underway Monday in Montreal to decide the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations' troubled treaty for curbing greenhouse gases.

"The impacts of global warming are many and serious: sea-level rise ... changes in availability of fresh water ... and the increasing incidence of extreme events -- floods, droughts, and hurricanes -- the serious consequences of which are rising to levels which invite comparison with weapons of mass destruction," May said in an advance copy of a speech released Monday to coincide with the start of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change on the same day.

The Montreal meeting is the first by the convention since the UN's pollution-cutting Kyoto Protocol, signed by 156 countries, took effect on January 16.

But a notable non-signatory of the pact committing industrialised nations to reducing or offsetting emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases is the planet's heaviest polluter: the United States.

Observers are gloomy about the prospects of the Montreal round coming up with a post-2012 deal that satisfies the European Union, green groups, business and US President George W. Bush, who argues Kyoto penalises the oil-dependent US economy.

But May said the convention attended by up to 10,000 delegates from 180 countries could help by agreeing to a pollution analysis calculating the potential costs of corrective action -- and the fallout if nothing was done.

"The Montreal meeting could be constructive if there at least emerged agreement to initiate a study of target levels for atmospheric concentrations, as a basis for discussing appropriate plans of action," he said.

"We need countries to initiate a study into the consequences of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at, below, or above twice pre-industrial levels, so that the international community can assess the potential costs of their actions or lack of them.

"Such an analysis could focus the minds of political leaders, currently worried more about the costs to them of acting now than they are by the consequences for the planet of acting too little, too late," May said.

The scientist pointed to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US jazz capital of New Orleans in August, as an example of what could happen more often if politicians failed to tackle global warming.

Studies undertaken before the storm suggested rising sea temperatures would mean more severe hurricanes, May said.

"The estimated damage inflicted by Katrina is equivalent to 1.7 percent of US GDP this year, and it is conceivable that the Gulf Coast of the US could be effectively uninhabitable by the end of the century," he said.

May is set to deliver his last address of his five-year term as the head of the Royal Society on Wednesday.

Link to Reference: MIKE DUNNE, Advocate staff writer, 11/27/05

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Highlights:
- The 2005 season was only a week old when the first tropical depression formed in the Gulf of Mexico and began drifting north
- Before the season began, the National Hurricane Center predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine hurricanes and three to five major hurricanes with winds of more than 111 (Category 3).
- At that point in the season, there had already been more activity than ever before -- eight tropical storms and two hurricanes. Gray bumped his earlier prediction to 20 named storms, including 10 hurricanes -- six major ones. That's more than double the long-term average of 9.6 named storms, 5.9 hurricanes and 2.3 intense hurricanes per year.
- To put this past season in a long-range perspective, one could consider that a Katrina-style storm would hit southeast Louisiana only once every 300 years, on average

When hurricane season 2005 ends Wednesday, Louisiana should be able to rest a little easier.
At least until June 1.

The 2005 season was only a week old when the first tropical depression formed in the Gulf of Mexico and began drifting north, eventually landing along the Alabama coast as Tropical Storm Arlene. That storm made all the predictions of a very active hurricane season look on target.

Life in Louisiana changed dramatically on Aug. 29, nearly three months ago this week, when Hurricane Katrina became the new standard for "bad hurricane." Step aside Audrey, Camille, Andrew. Katrina could be 10 times more costly than 1992's Andrew.

Hurricane Rita, nearly a month later, slammed into the western part of the state and would be considered with those other "big ones," except it, too, was dwarfed by Katrina's incredible destruction.

And who even remembers Tropical Storm Cindy running ashore at Grand Isle the first week of July?

Before the season began, the National Hurricane Center predicted 12 to 15 tropical storms, seven to nine hurricanes and three to five major hurricanes with winds of more than 111 (Category 3).

William Gray of Colorado State University, who makes hurricane predictions every year, forecast a 77 percent chance of a major storm hitting the United States in 2005 and a 44 percent chance for the Gulf Coast, from the Florida Panhandle to Brownsville, Texas. Normally, the chances of the United States being hit is 52 percent and the Gulf Coast is 30 percent, Gray said.

By early August, both Gray and the National Weather Service had raised their predictions.

The National Weather Service increased from 18 to 21 its prediction for tropical storms.

Gray said data gathered through July caused him to "foresee one of the most active hurricane seasons on record."

Katrina and Rita were yet to come.

At that point in the season, there had already been more activity than ever before -- eight tropical storms and two hurricanes. Gray bumped his earlier prediction to 20 named storms, including 10 hurricanes -- six major ones. That's more than double the long-term average of 9.6 named storms, 5.9 hurricanes and 2.3 intense hurricanes per year.

Even that prediction fell short of reality.

Dodging the hurricane bullet

State climatologist Barry Keim said statistics indicate that any point on the north central Gulf Coast will be hit by a hurricane once every 10 years and by a severe hurricane once every 30 years. That means both New Orleans (Betsy in 1965) and southwest Louisiana (Audrey in 1956) were both overdue for a monster storm, said Keim of the Southern Regional Climate Center at LSU.

"In a statistical sense, they were both ripe. New Orleans has been dodging bullets," he said. "They went longer than the 30 years." The north central Gulf Coast is one of three statistical hot-spots – third behind south Florida and North Carolina, both of which stick out into the sea, Keim said.

To put this past season in a long-range perspective, one could consider that a Katrina-style storm would hit southeast Louisiana only once every 300 years, on average, according to LSU geography professor Kam-bui Lui. He specializes in paleotempstology, the study of storms through geologic history.

While this year may look like a wild one, Lui said, the geologic record shows that the last 1,000 years have been relatively quiet when it comes to catastrophic hurricanes in Categories 4 and 5.

Between 1,000 and 2,500 years ago, catastrophic hurricanes were more common, Lui said, based on sand cores he has pulled for spots on the Gulf Coast. He also is studying the Atlantic Coast and parts of the Caribbean Basin.

Scientists said the busy season is caused by a combination of factors.

First, the surface temperatures were warmer than normal in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. Nan Walker of LSU's Coastal Studies Institute and EarthScan Lab said that water along the Louisiana shore and other near-shore waters in the northern Gulf of Mexico were as much as 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than in 2003.

The water was warmer sooner and August saw the hottest water in the Gulf of Mexico -- right before Katrina passed over them, Walker said. In 2005, that warm water was also deeper than normal, she said.

Water in the Atlantic was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit warmer than normal. That may not sound like a lot, but warm water fuels hurricanes, helping them grow bigger and more intense.

Pollution or variability?

The sea has been warmer each year since 1995 and many scientists think that is because of natural variability. Others see the signature of global climate change caused by industrial and automotive emissions.

Sea surface temperatures run in cycles, Keim said. From the late 1920s until the 1960s -- a period of almost 40 years -- temperatures were warmer than normal and there was more tropical storm formation.

From about 1965 until 1994, temperatures went down to what is considered normal and the intensity and frequency of tropical storms fell as well, he said.

"During that same time, we had a rapid expansion of development along our coasts."

Those warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures returned in 1994 and the trend is expected to last for decades.

Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico also were above normal this season, which turbo-charged storms like Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Katrina, for example, formed near Bermuda and hit the eastern Florida Coast as a Category 1 hurricane.

After crossing the tip of Florida, it entered the Gulf of Mexico. It drifted slowly southwestward before taking a northern turn. That put it right over the warm Loop Current.

The Loop Current is a stream of warm water coming from the Caribbean Sea north through the pass between Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba. It moves toward Louisiana then bends back like a bobby pin to flow out the Florida Straits, between Florida and Cuba. Occasionally, the top of the loop breaks off and becomes a "warm core ring," a pool of warmer-than-normal water drifting in the northern Gulf.

Katrina's slow movement over the loop current and then over a warm core ring grew it into a monster. At one point, winds were 175 miles per hour. "There aren't many storms that get up that high," Keim said.

Considering other factors

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech said the Atlantic Ocean current that brings warm water north affected weather systems between Iceland and Africa. That created an upper atmosphere that steered storms to the western Atlantic – into the Gulf of Mexico or along the eastern seaboard of the U.S.

The Pacific Ocean played a part, too, she said. When water is cooler or warmer than normal along the equator, weather patterns change -- called La Nina and El Nino, respectively, for the cool and warm phases.

The two phenomena can affect winds in the upper atmosphere. El Nino can slice off the tops of the thunderstorms that fuel a hurricane, reducing its ability to grow in intensity.

This year was a "neutral" year and last year's El Nino was not very strong. "Coming out of a weak El Nino makes storms more intense," Curry said. "That's conventional wisdom."

The predictors, however, are not perfect, she said.

"The bottom line is: There are no simple answers. There is no easy explanation and there are no certain answers," she said.

Phil Klotzbach assists Gray at Colorado State University in predicting hurricanes and tropical storms each year.

In 2004, a lot of storms formed in the far eastern Atlantic Ocean west of the Cape Verde Islands. That portion of the ocean had wind shear this year, so storms often didn't form until they were further west – helping steer them into the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico.

The Caribbean Sea, where many of the storms that hit the Gulf Coast formed, had low crosswinds or shear, Klotzbach said. "In the Caribbean, water was a little warmer than last year, but not a whole lot. It was warmer earlier."

He and Gray believe the increase is the result of the multidecade variation that Keim also talked about.

"Since 1995, we have had a lot of active seasons. These last few years they have been more active than others," he said.

"It is a pretty clear signal . . . coming and going on a 20-25 year cycle. So for the next 10-15 years, it will likely be pretty active," Klotzbach said.

So, if the multidecade signal is correct, Louisiana and the Gulf Coast can look for a near future with greater-than-normal tropical storm activity.

Colorado State will be releasing its 2006 projections Dec. 6. When asked what the next season might be like Klotzbach said, "We're still looking at our numbers."






mdunne@theadvocate.com

Link to Reference: Melanie M. Sidwell, The Daily Times-Call, 11/26/05

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Highlights:
- it took two weeks for the waters to recede, and since then the remaining sludge has baked into toxic concrete.
- FEMA canceled the family’s claim after the agent found no one at home two weeks after the storm
- The children’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are all making new lives in Longmont.

Kristin and Tim Ellis’ only son, Ben, feared running water would fill his house to the rooftop in Kenner, La. As a toddler, he grew anxious when the bathtub filled too high. Once, a toilet overflowed, causing 6-year-old Ben to grow hysterical.

“He used to think the water would just keep going up to the roof,” Kristin Ellis said. “It’s like he had a premonition,” said his grandmother Karen Thorne.

The Ellises owned a house and an art studio, both sandwiched between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. They always thought the studio — which they had owned for two years and where Kristin and her 8-year-old daughter, Kindal, taught art classes and art appreciation to children, teens and young adults — was the most vulnerable.

That’s why they had moved supplies from the studio to their home before evacuating for Hurricane Katrina. But it was their home, two blocks from the levees of Lake Pontchartrain, that was hit hardest; floodwaters measured 3 feet high on the walls of the one-story home.

“Some say there may have been a breach (of the levees) in Kenner,” Tim Ellis told the Daily Times-Call in a phone interview from Louisiana.

A photographer, Tim Ellis has made several trips home from Colorado since the storm and was there for the past two weeks trying to finalize insurance claims. He said it took two weeks for the waters to recede, and since then the remaining sludge has baked into toxic concrete.

“There is a glaze on everything,” he said. On his latest trip to the New Orleans suburb, he has spent time gutting his home, showering by garden hose and sleeping on a top bunk bed mattress placed on top of a plastic sheet. Like his father-in-law, Tim Ellis has been trying repeatedly to contact insurance company and Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives.

Kristin Ellis said FEMA canceled the family’s claim after the agent found no one at home two weeks after the storm. The Ellises called FEMA the day of Hurricane Katrina to receive aid. They say they are now at the bottom of the list.

The Ellises, while in Longmont, said they received a $600 electricity bill for their Kenner home, which they hope to gut and sell.

Kristin Ellis and her family will move into her brother’s Longmont home in two weeks. Her brother, Lester Thorne Jr., and his family plan to move to Johnstown.

The destruction down South, though, is not far from the family’s thoughts. While in Louisiana, Tim Ellis has been busy chronicling the devastation with his camera. Blue tarps from FEMA cover damaged roofs. Mold spores carpet the drywall inside homes. Refrigerators conceal once-frozen cubes of rotted food.

The city does not mirror the photographs of New Orleans that Tim Ellis took two weeks before the devastation: a church steeple next to holy statues. A trumpet player on the street. Trolleys and bicycles in the French Quarter.

Tim Ellis had lived in the New Orleans area since he was 3 years old. His wife was born and raised in Kenner. So were their three children: Kindal, Ben and Kiley, who celebrated her first birthday in Longmont.

The true shock of the Thorne family’s exodus from Kenner is the Ellises’ decision to call the Front Range home.

“I’ve always said I’m a gypsy. I can always move around,” Kristin Ellis said. “But Tim, he wasn’t ever going to move. He loves New Orleans. He still does.”

Tim Ellis’ love for his children, however, supercedes any affinity for geography, especially considering the environmental consequences of Hurricane Katrina on soil, water and buildings.

“We wanted my kids to have as close to a normal life as possible,” he said. “And as I keep coming down here, I can’t see betting my kids’ futures on the unknown.”

The children’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins are all making new lives in Longmont. The two older Ellis children are enrolled at Sanborn Elementary.

“I’m the baby sitter,” Kristin Ellis said, watching her brood and their cousins at the “big house” provided by the Margaret and Steve Strong.

The Strongs, who own Sun Construction, offered their six-bedroom home to the Thorne family in September.

The Ellises don’t want their children to inherit a lifetime of running from storms. But they also don’t want their children, or anyone else, to forget what a storm like Hurricane Katrina can do.

“I don’t want to harp on how bad the storm was, but how strong the people were here,” Tim Ellis said. “I want to teach (my children) that the people down there, in the face of the worst natural disaster of the United States, didn’t give up. That’s what I’m learning here.”

He sees the tenacity in residents who remain and in volunteers who want to rebuild.

“I’m lucky to live in a country where people step up and help if they can,” Tim Ellis said. “The people of Colorado have done this for us. People all over this country have done this, and they’re still doing it.

“When people need to look for hope, it’s there in the face of disaster.”

Link to Reference: Mackenzie Ryan, St. Cloud Times, 11/24/05

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Highlights:
- It's been three months since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, submerging Persons' house under 6 feet of water and forcing her to evacuate.
- Saltwater lines are apparent on streetlights, cars and building facades. Inside, mold is everywhere.
- "I just remember when the levies broke," Persons said, her voice falling to a whisper, "I was like, no, no, we were OK. We were hit, but we were OK."

When Natalie Persons flew to Minnesota on Monday and drove to St. Cloud to spend Thanksgiving with her family, she was struck by how clean the streets were.

No refrigerators or broken appliances line the curbs and no spray-paint marks were on buildings — all sights she's become accustomed to in New Orleans, where she lives.

It's been three months since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, submerging Persons' house under 6 feet of water and forcing her to evacuate. But life is not even close to being back to normal.

National Guardsmen still patrol the streets to curb looting of abandoned buildings and stores, and a city-imposed curfew is still in effect.

And while the water has receded, it has left its mark. Saltwater lines are apparent on streetlights, cars and building facades. Inside, mold is everywhere. People regularly use mouth covers to avoid the toxic fumes that have led many, including Persons, to catch the "Katrina cough."

"It smells like death," she said.

Moving ahead

The 26-year-old school teacher is in St. Cloud visiting her parents, Zena and Ken Persons, for the holiday. The Minnesota native moved to New Orleans four years ago as part of the Teach for America program, which places college graduates in low-income schools nationwide.

She now teaches fourth grade at Lake Pontchartrain Elementary in LaPlace, La.

The school re-opened about two weeks after the hurricane hit. And while the building received little damage — it's about 20 miles west of New Orleans — it swelled with the number of displaced children enrolling there. It went from about 650 students in the pre-kindergarten class through eighth grade to more than 1,100 students, she said. At one time she had 36 students in her class, and she quickly ran out of space and supplies.

Children sat in beanbag chairs, at computer stations and at her desk — wherever there was space, she said — and donations from across the country helped meet the need for notebooks and other supplies.

About seven of her students are from the New Orleans school district; their schools were flooded, damaged by the wind and remain unusable.

Many received counseling through the school, but Persons also incorporated their experiences into lessons.

They wrote and shared stories of escaping the flood, evacuating the city or losing loved ones, so the children know they are not alone, she said.

The school's staff was hit just as hard. Some teachers, forced from their homes, slept at the school.

Persons, homeless herself, lived with a woman who offered a room to hurricane victims on craigslist.com, she said.

"It was really hard for me to focus on teaching after finding out I had lost most of my belongings," Persons said, "but the kids needed the structure, more than anything ... to have some sense of normalcy."

All she had with her was what she packed: mostly T-shirts, flip-flops and tank tops. She bought work clothes that she wore several times a week those first few weeks.

Evacuation

Persons packed her house the Saturday before the hurricane. She moved furniture to walls to protect it from wind and stored important documents upstairs.

At the time, it was only a precaution — she thought Hurricane Katrina would follow the path of Hurricane Ivan, that it would take the turn and head to Florida.

But her parents called, prompting her to leave town.

"We were worried about it," her mother, Zena Persons, said. "My husband called her up to tell her to get (out of town)."

She made a reservation at hotels in Macomb, Ga., and Tupelo, Miss., before cramming the trunk of her '87 Nissan Maxima and leaving town with her boyfriend and her two dogs.

"It was very, very strange leaving. All the gas stations were running out of gas, there was long lines to get gas at the stations that still had it," she said.

But the most striking sight, Persons said, was the red glow of taillights.

"It's bizarre when you see the contraflow of traffic, where all the traffic was out of the city. ... That's when I really started getting worried," she said.

Once they reached the hotel, they were glued to CNN, she said.

"I just remember when the levies broke," Persons said, her voice falling to a whisper, "I was like, no, no, we were OK. We were hit, but we were OK."

On the Internet she found a flood map of New Orleans that showed water levels in different neighborhoods — she rents a house in Mid City, in the heart of New Orleans — and realized the extent of the damage, mostly caused when the 17th Street Canal levy broke.

"I was shocked," she said. "That's when I knew we weren't going to be able to live there for quite some time."

Damage

Persons returned to her house about five weeks after the hurricane struck. The house sits about 4 feet off the ground, but the water rose at least 6 feet — "just enough to get in," she said.

She wore a mask, rubber gloves and boots before going inside. She prepared for the worst.

"We had to kick the door open," she said, because the water warped the wood.

Mold grew up the walls so thick that the walls were dark green. Maggots grew out of her fridge. The smell was almost unbearable.

She lost most of her furniture, her books and other possessions. But her photographs, which she kept in a large plastic container, made it through.

Her three goldfish also survived — five weeks without food, but they were alive, she said.

Her neighbor hooked up the fish tank to his generator — a small but thoughtful type of gesture that was repeated by many neighbors in the city.

"Everybody's reaching out and helping everybody else," she said.

Neighborhoods are banding together to clean up debris, one street at a time. And there are small victories — people decorating their damaged homes for Christmas, or writing "free lunch" on an abandoned fridge — that have helped keep spirits lifted.

"I see progress every day. It's really exciting when you see power restored to parts of the city," she said.

It will be another three months before she can move back into her home, as contractors are ripping out most of the main floor and are replacing the pipes in the century-old house.

But despite the damage — she sublets a three-room cottage now in New Orleans — she said she plans to stay in the city.

"I want to be there to help rebuild and help clean up, to show people it's safe," Persons said. "The city will rebuild and it will be better than it was before."