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

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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

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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

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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

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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. 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

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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

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