Thanks to
aluyen for the below. He has quite a few good articles posted up on his LJ actually....
New Orleans’ fouled water going into river, lake (Reuters)
Reuters
Article Updated: 7:15 a.m. ET Sept. 7, 2005
PRIORITY OF PUMPING OUT CITY MEANS NO CHANCE OF CLEANING WATER FIRST
BATON
ROUGE, La. - The brew of chemicals and human waste in the New Orleans
floodwaters will have to be pumped into the Mississippi River or Lake
Pontchartrain, raising the specter of an environmental disaster on the
heels of Hurricane Katrina, experts say.
The dire need to rid
the drowned city of water could trigger fish kills and poison the
delicate wetlands near New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth
of the Mississippi.
State and federal agencies have just begun
water-quality testing but environmental experts say the vile, stagnant
chemical soup that sits in the streets of the city known as The Big
Easy will contain traces of everything imaginable.
“Go home and
identify all the chemicals in your house. It’s a very long list,” said
Ivor van Heerden, head of a Louisiana State University center that
studies the public health impacts of hurricanes.
“And that’s just in a home. Imagine what’s in an industrial plant,” he said. “Or a sewage plant.”
Gasoline,
diesel, anti-freeze, bleach, human waste, acids, alcohols and a host of
other substances must be washed out of homes, factories, refineries,
hospitals and other buildings.
“There is a disease risk," Mike
McDaniel, head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality,
told reporters Tuesday. He added, though, that it was premature to call
the floodwaters toxic, and that better data should be available
Thursday.
“Initial indications are that they are showing large
numbers of contaminants,” McDaniel said. “We are taking samples ... We
expect you're going to see quantities of fuel and gasoline. There are
sheens wherever you look.”
RUPTURE DANGERS
In Metairie,
east of New Orleans, the floodwater is tea-colored, murky and smells of
burnt sulfur. A thin film of oil is visible in the water.
Those
who have waded into it say they could see only about 1 to 2 inches into
the depths and that there was significant debris on and below the
surface.
Experts said the longer water sat in the streets, the
greater the chance gasoline and chemical tanks — as well as common
containers holding anything from bleach to shampoo — would rupture.
Officials have said it may take up to 80 days to clear the water from New Orleans and surrounding parishes.
Van
Heerden and Rodney Mallett, communications director for the Louisiana
Department of Environmental Quality, say there do not appear to be any
choices other than to pump the water into Lake Pontchartrain or the
Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, a key maritime
spawning ground.
“I don’t see how we could treat all that water,” Mallett said.
The
result could be an second wave of disaster for southern Louisiana, said
Harold Zeliger, a Florida-based chemical toxicologist and water quality
consultant.
“In effect, it’s going to kill everything in those waters,” he said.
How much water New Orleans holds is open to question.
Van
Heerden estimates it is billions of gallons. LSU researchers will use
satellite imagery and computer modeling to get a better fix on the
quantity.
RUSH TO GET IT OUT
Bio-remediation — cleaning
up the water — would require the time and expense of constructing huge
storage facilities, considered an impossibility, especially with the
public clamor to get the water out quickly.
Mallett said the
Department of Environmental Quality was in the unfortunate position of
being responsible for protecting the environment in a situation where
that did not seem possible.
“We’re not happy about it. But for
the sake of civilization and lives, probably the best thing to do is
pump the water out,” he said.
The water will leave behind more
trouble — a city filled with mold, some of it toxic, the experts said.
After other floods, researchers found many buildings had to be stripped
back to concrete, or razed.
“If you have a building half full of
water, everything above the water is growing mold. When it dries out,
the rest grows mold,” Zeliger said. “Most of the buildings will have to
be destroyed.”