Eco-Justice Suffers as Hurricane Devastates New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on Monday August 29, 2005 as a Category 4
hurricane and passed within 10-15 miles of New Orleans, Louisiana. The storm's
heavy rains and strong winds caused much damage to the city as well as the breaching
of several levees protecting New Orleans from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.
The levee breeches resulted in the city being flooded over 80 percent of its
area. Flood depths reached 25 feet in some areas (three stories high!).1
The hurricane caused significant loss of life in New Orleans, flooded thousands
of homes and businesses, and disrupted power, water, sewage, natural gas, road
access and other essential services.
Environmental health is a significant challenge in the rebuilding of the city.
According to Darin Mann of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality
(DEQ), "The biggest short-term problem is what we're seeing from the air.
As you fly down to the mouth of the river along the river you see quite a few
oil spills. But in New Orleans, on the flooded area of Jefferson Parish and St.
Bernard, there's oil sheens everywhere. You have 2,000-plus gasoline stations
that are submerged with three underground storage tanks each. So that creates
an oil sheen. Cars. Every car's gonna create an oil sheen. You've got well over
100,000 cars that were submerged."2 Mann also noted that once the water
is drained from the city, New Orleans will have to dispose of some 25 million
tons of waste and debris.
Why was Katrina such a devastating hurricane that flooded so much of New Orleans
and the Mississippi delta? The New Orleans area was hit harder than neighboring
Mississippi, despite the fact that both endured high winds and storm surge.
New Orleans is an unusual city in that much of the city is below sea level,
and protected by a series of levees built over the last 300 years. The oldest
part of the city is 10-15 feet above sea level and is built on the highest part
of a natural levee of the Mississippi, but much of the newer part of the city
is built on land below sea level. Historically, annual floods deposited rich
silt across the flood plains, gradually building up the delta with alluvium more
than 70 feet deep. The flooding has kept the land more or less level as the silty
soils gradually compacted. At the time of its founding, cypress swamps and extensive
marshlands protected the city from the worst of the hurricane-force winds and
storm surges common to the Gulf Coast. The silt-loaded Mississippi also created
barrier islands that further protected the region.
Three devastations of the environment began to literally cut away the natural
protections against hurricanes. First, levees were built to channel the waters
of the river so that shipping would be improved. These levees provided some protection
against the annual flooding of the land around New Orleans, but they directed
the life-giving silt out over the continental shelf instead of the marshlands.
Next, the cypress swamps were cut for lumber. (The grove famous for the last
confirmed spotting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Louisiana was logged to
make caskets for the military in World War II.) Finally, oil companies cut canals
through the marshes that widened every season, so that canals that started out
only wide enough for the oil rigs to pass through eroded into mile-wide gashes
in the marshlands. No new silt came to replace the lost land and few cypress
swamps were left to protect the marshes.
Even before Katrina hit, Louisiana was losing more than 50 acres of territory
a day. Had Katrina hit New Orleans in the years immediately after the city's
founding, the winds and storm surge would have had little effect. Today, the
story is much different. In 2005, there was no land mass to protect New Orleans;
wide canals channeled winds and water into the city, and defective levees poured
the waters of Lake Pontchartrain onto the lowest lying areas of the city.
For years environmentalists have warned that a huge hurricane like Katrina
could devastate New Orleans. The havoc wrought by Katrina almost happened in
2002. Hurricanes Isadore and Lilly were like Katrina, huge powerful hurricanes
that weakened just before landfall. Unlike Katrina, they weakened enough to
spare much of New Orleans, but gave ample warning of what would happen from a
larger hurricane. Isadore dropped 15 inches of rain on New Orleans in 24 hours,
along Bayou Lafourche and New Orleans. Flood waters rose as high as four feet
in low lying areas. Tens of thousands of people were without electricity. Many
people could not evacuate New Orleans, as the main evacuation route was flooded.
Seven days later, Lilly came ashore. Even weakened to a Category 1 storm, Lilly
shattered ancient oaks and caused a loss of power for half a million people.
Barrier islands were swept away. Tens of thousands of acres of wetlands sunk
into the sea overnight. Most ominously, storm surges had raced faster and farther
than had ever been seen before.3 The storm surges pressed against the protective
levees and were within feet of overtopping them, this from a relatively small
storm.
In the 1950s, barrier islands, cypress swamps, and miles of marshlands would
have slowed the storms, but now it was clear that storm surges could reach New
Orleans. Louisiana officials knew it was only a matter of time before the "BIG
ONE" hit. State leaders began a public relations campaign (funded in large
part by Shell Oil Company) to convince people outside of Louisiana that restoring
the delta was in the interest of all people. A $14 billion restoration effort
was proposed to the U.S. Congress, but was not passed.
Years before, environmental justice advocates had labeled the area between
New Orleans and Baton Rouge "cancer alley." They worried that when
the BIG ONE came New Orleans and the surrounding parishes would be turned into
a toxic soup, with poor and minority people stuck in the mess.
For years, these advocates have been telling anyone who'd listen that blacks
in New Orleans were far more affected by environmental problems than the white
folks in, say, the Garden District — and would be far more vulnerable in a disaster.
They have long realized a truth that the response to Hurricane Katrina seems
to have proved: people in power viewed the city's poorest residents as, says
Robert Bullard, "expendable in some sense."4
Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta
University, and author of the forthcoming The Quest for Environmental Justice,
has been leading a research project on official responses to environmental disasters
(with Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental
Justice). Wright and Bullard say blacks and other people of color are all too
often overlooked in such crises.5
Environmental justice advocates fear that poor people and people of color,
who suffered the worst in the flooding of New Orleans, will now face continuing
difficulties from the toxics left in the wake of Katrina. The toxic dust may
be more damaging than the toxic soup of flood waters. The Dallas
Morning News has analyzed the preliminary
EPA data on the toxics to map the most damaging chemicals left behind. About 77 toxic
substances were found in the post-Katrina glop, at least 15 at potentially dangerous
concentrations. Unsafe amounts of arsenic appear at nearly every site tested;
petrochemical carcinogens at worrisome levels are widespread. The now-banned
pesticide dieldrin was found at 58 of about 300 spots, nearly all at potentially
dangerous levels. The Army Corps of Engineers is now planning one of the most
massive environmental cleanups ever.6
Environmental justice advocates worry that in the rush to clean up after Katrina,
environmental laws will be downplayed. The pressure on regional officials to
cleanse New Orleans of the trash and debris left by Hurricane Katrina is intense
- so intense that environmental groups say that officials are cutting corners,
sending garbage to areas not equipped to handle it, and are on the verge of creating
a Superfund-sized toxics problem. Illegal dumping in the swampland east of residential
New Orleans is already happening. Also, the state DEQ recently reopened a city-owned
garbage dump in the same area that was shut down by federal regulators years
ago. On October 31st, the Sierra Club and the Louisiana Environmental Action
Network (LEAN) 7 filed suit to stop most dumping in the landfill, charging that
it wasn't built to prevent groundwater contamination. Said LEAN lawyer Robert
Wiygul, "We don't want to respond to one disaster by creating another one." The
state claims the landfill meets "all the standards," and anyway, said
a DEQ official, "the ultimate goal is speed."8
Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell, believes that until the U.S. government
rebuilds the barrier islands and marshes and cleans up the toxic waste residues
it is irresponsible for the government to move people back to New Orleans. He
believes that we need to implement the $14 billion plan to restore the protective
natural barriers and worries that a lot of money will be spent to fix the levees
designed by the Army Corps of Engineers, but not enough effort will go to restoring
the natural systems. He notes that as of October 14, President Bush had not mentioned
barrier islands or wetland restoration as federal responsibilities.
Tidwell notes that two ethnic groups have received little attention in the
discussions of Katrina's effects on minority groups; namely the Homa Indian people
and the Cajuns, who both live in the marshlands and islands south of New Orleans.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita may have dealt a death blow to Homa and Cajun culture
by destroying the land and fisheries their cultures are tied to. Unless the marshes
are restored, these peoples will have no place to live.9
Global Warming and Hurricanes
New Orleans may be what the future looks like in any city built on the ocean.
Already, islands around the world - in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean, in Louisiana,
in the Sacramento delta region of California, and in the Chesapeake Bay - are
slipping underwater.
The Administration itself has confirmed this crisis to be real. Soon after
taking office in 2001, President Bush asked the National Academy of Sciences
to look into global warming and sea-level rise. Their report to the President
noted: global warming is happening, it is driven by our use of fossil fuels,
and one major consequence will be one to three feet of sea-level rise by 2100.
(The rise is from melting glaciers and the thermal expansion of the world's warming
oceans). The President's own 2002 "Climate Action Plan" drew the same
conclusion.
This means battered and fragmenting barrier islands worldwide on par with
those sinking in Louisiana. It means vanishing coastal marshes worldwide, and
the need for massive hurricane and flood levees. It means vulnerable ports and
other imperiled infrastructure. It also means the risk of massive human suffering,
death, and staggering refugee problems along every shore. If you want to know
what will consume the attention and resources of all the great coastal cities
in the not-so-distant future, turn on your TV right now. Look at New Orleans.
Penehuro Lefale, a native of Samoa and a meteorologist for the World Meteorological
Organization, warned that the islands of the Pacific are the 'canaries' for the
rest of the world - warning what will happen worldwide if we don't act to slow
climate change.10 In 2000, Lefale warned "We [the people of the Pacific
islands] may be the first victims of this phenomena, but your turn will come." It
may be that our turn has come.
As people of faith, we need to ask what lessons we might learn from these
hurricanes. We knew how to prevent the disaster of these huge hurricanes but
did not act in time. Implementing even a part of the plan to restore the natural
environment of Louisiana's wet- lands could have prevented the worst damage.
We failed because we had other priorities. The tunneling of the Boston freeway
to connect the airport with the city will cost more than the $14 billion needed
to repair Louisiana's wetlands. A few weeks of the Iraq war cost more than $14
billion. We now have a bigger task - to rebuild the wetlands and a 300-year-old
city that is a national treasure.
We must do it right. In the first days after Katrina, Sen. Inhofe (R-OK) proposed
S 1711, to waive environmental laws and speed the rebuilding of New Orleans and
the Gulf Coast. Rep. Barton (R-TX) proposed weakening environmental laws for
the oil companies and transferring regulatory responsibility of the oil industry
to the Energy Department. This proposal was rejected by Congress only days before
Katrina, but Rep. Barton saw Katrina as a reason to weaken environmental regulation
of the oil industry. President Bush used his authority to waive a number of environmental
laws in response to Katrina, including the Clean Air Act's provision to clean
sulfur from the emissions of oil refineries.11
Weakening environmental regulations is not an appropriate response. Rebuilding
New Orleans and the surrounding areas in a way that is more ecological and more
protective of the poor is a responsible way of "rebuilding the city." Going
still further and implementing programs to curb global warming is a necessary
step. The development of alternative energy sources will be needed, as will great
reductions in the production of toxic waste by the chemical industry and moving
toxic waste plants away from where people and endangered animals are living.
Our churches are helping to rebuild homes throughout the hurricane-ravaged
South. With adequate vision we can move from rebuilding homes to rebuilding the
cities and restoring God's creation. If we do this,12 we will fulfill the words
of National Council of Churches President and Christian Methodist Episcopal Church
Bishop of Shreveport. Louisiana, Thomas Hoyt, Jr. when he said that "this
kind of loving response to those who suffer is the best possible witness we can
make to the love of God and to God's continued presence among us."
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