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E. Coli bacteria detected in New Orleans floodwater
Floodwater in New Orleans is contaminated with E. coli bacteria, a city official told CNN Tuesday.
The official in Mayor Ray Nagin's office declined to be identified.
The failures of the levee system after Hurricane Katrina's onslaught left about 80 percent of the city flooded with water up to 20 feet deep -- water that became a toxic mix of chemicals, garbage, corpses and human waste.
E. coli comes from human and animal waste and can be found in untreated sewage.
Drinking water contaminated with E. coli can lead to serious illness and death if not properly treated.
Authorities have warned it will take weeks to drain the water covering much of the city.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/06/katrina.impact/index.html
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.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9227493/
The failures of the levee system after Hurricane Katrina's onslaught left about 80 percent of the city flooded with water up to 20 feet deep -- water that became a toxic mix of chemicals, garbage, corpses and human waste.
E. coli comes from human and animal waste and can be found in untreated sewage.
Drinking water contaminated with E. coli can lead to serious illness and death if not properly treated.
Authorities have warned it will take weeks to drain the water covering much of the city.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/06/katrina.impact/index.html
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.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9227493/
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Dead bodies, raw sewage and rusting vehicles were exposed as pumps finally made headway against the floods.
"It is almost unimaginable the things we are going to have to plan for and deal with," said Mike McDaniel, a Louisiana environment official.
Mayor Ray Nagin has now said there will be a forced evacuation of all citizens.
Late on Tuesday he issued an emergency declaration, authorising police and military to remove anyone who refuses to leave their homes.
"It is a health risk. There are toxins in the water, there are gas leaks where we may have explosions," he said.
Fuel and chemicals leaking from flooded vehicles has created a thin oil slick floating on the water.
If flammable oils mingled with flaming gas leaks, "God bless us", the mayor added.
Mr McDaniel, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said there was no option but to pump the contaminated water straight into Lake Pontchartrain.
"We have got to get the water out of the city or the nightmare gets worse," he said.
The flooding of the city's sewage system also has serious implications for health and the quality of the city's water supply.
Mr McDaniel said reconnecting residents to fresh water mains was a mammoth task.
"It will take years to restore everyone. Water is going to have to be brought in," he said.
With three of the city's 148 permanent pumps up and running the city authorities announced that 60% of New Orleans was still flooded - down from 80%.
The economic impact of Hurricane Katrina was estimated at $100bn (£55bn) and more by experts on Tuesday.
US Treasury Secretary John Snow said the effect on the wider economy could be to stifle US growth by half a percentage point.
He was optimistic, however, that the rebuilding effort would actually boost the economy next year by a similar amount.
US President George W Bush has said he will lead an investigation into how the Hurricane Katrina disaster was handled.
"I'm going to find out over time what went right and what went wrong," he said in reply to criticism that the authorities were too slow to respond.
Critics have pointed the finger at local authorities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the president himself.
But Mr Bush said he would not "play the blame game", and wanted to focus on the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the storm.
Thousands of people are estimated to have been killed in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4221310.stm
...
Heavy metals will sink into the sediment of the lake. The oil eventually will dissipate, and the impact will be felt for years, but some marshland may eventually recover. ''One of the things about nature is nature is resilient," McDaniel said. ''Nature will recover."
Health officials said that so far, their worst fears about outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid have not materialized. Their central concern was that many evacuees lack treatment for diseases such as diabetes and mental illness.
Reports of illnesses are ''all over the map," said Dr. Hilarie Cranmer, a Brigham and Women's Hospital doctor who is in Baton Rouge helping the Red Cross.
''The biggest issue," she said, ''is that you've had a million people displaced from their doctors -- the diabetics, the hypertensives, the pregnant, the mentally ill.
http://www.boston.com/news/weather/articles/2005/09/07/disease_fear_rises_in_new_orleans/?page=3
Results of the first round of testing by the Environmental Protection Agency were no surprise, but reinforced warnings that everyone still in the city take precautions to avoid getting the water on their skin — especially into cuts or other open wounds — much less in their mouths.
"Human contact with the floodwater should be avoided as much as possible," said EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson.
Health hazards from that water make it imperative that remaining residents comply with evacuation orders, added Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"If you haven't left the city yet, you must do so," she said.
Also found were elevated levels of brain-harming lead, a risk if people, particularly children, were to drink the water, something residents have been told to avoid since Hurricane Katrina struck.
The first tests for more than 100 chemicals and other pollutants so far turned up elevated levels only of E. coli and other coliform bacteria — markers for sewage contamination — and lead.
But, "we don't know what else is contained in that water," Johnson warned.
The first testing was done on water from residential neighborhoods, not industrial sites where other toxic contaminants may lurk. Moreover, oil is in the water, and it's likely that chemicals such as asbestos will be in debris from older buildings, he said.
Federal health officials stressed that rescue workers should wear protective clothing and gloves before entering flooded areas, and be careful not to splash the dirty water into their faces. Find clean water and soap to wash exposed skin as soon as possible.
"Always, always, always wash hands before eating," Gerberding stressed.
Symptoms of E. coli ingestion are vomiting, diarrhea, stomach pain and fever; anyone with those symptoms, or who has open wounds exposed to tainted water, should seek medical attention.
Wednesday's initial focus was on standing floodwater, but more than 1,000 drinking water systems in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama were affected by the hurricane. EPA testing is going on in the other states, too, and how quickly drinking water can be restored in part depends on the degree of contamination in water supplies those systems treat.
Each water-treatment plant will have to adjust levels of chlorine, filtration and other treatments to eliminate pathogens, such as E. coli bacteria or the parasite cryptosporidium, says water quality expert Charles O'Melia of Johns Hopkins University.
If chemicals are in water supplies as well, it's possible activated carbon could soak them up, he said; routine treatment would remove the carbon.
Many hurricane-stricken areas have issued boil-water alerts, and boiling will kill bacteria and parasites, O'Melia said. The CDC recommends a rolling boil for one minute; some health experts recommend the additional step of running the water through coffee filters.
For people who can't boil water, adding chlorine from unscented household bleach will kill bacteria, but not cryptosporidium, a diarrhea-causing parasite dangerous to people with weak immune systems, O'Melia cautioned. The CDC recommends one-eighth teaspoon of bleach per gallon of clear water, one-fourth teaspoon if the water is cloudy; let it stand for 30 minutes before drinking.
Also Wednesday, federal health officials said evacuees still in shelters later this fall will be among the first people vaccinated against the flu because of the risk that highly contagious influenza could sweep through the crowded facilities. Manufacturer Sanofi-Pasteur is making 200,000 of the first flu shots available to those evacuees, Gerberding said.
http://www.nola.com/newsflash/national/index.ssf?/base/news-18/1126120441293751.xml&storylist=hurricane