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Katrina environmental issues "almost unimaginable"
Hurricane Katrina left behind a landscape of oil spills, leaking gas lines, damaged sewage plants and tainted water, Louisiana's top environment official said on Tuesday.
In the state's first major assessment of the environmental havoc in southern Louisiana, Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Mike McDaniel said large quantities of hazardous materials in damaged industrial plants, the danger of explosions and fires and water pollution were his main concerns eight days after the storm struck.
Preliminary figures indicate 140,000 to 160,000 homes were flooded and will not be recovered, he said. "Literally, they are unsalvageable," he said.
He said it would take "years" to restore water service to the entire city.
"It's almost unimaginable, the things we are going to have to deal with," he said.
Crews have found two major oil spills, one of 68,000 barrels at a Bass Enterprise storage depot in Venice and another of 10,000 barrels at a Murphy Oil facility in Chalmette, McDaniel said.
But huge amounts of oil also oozed from cars, trucks and boats caught in the flood.
"Everywhere we look there's a spill. It all adds up," he said. "There's almost a solid sheen over the area right now."
High-level radiation sources, including nuclear plants, have been secured, and authorities were trying to determine the status of rail cars in the area as well as searching out large caches of hazardous materials in industrial plants.
Although there is a disease risk from contaminated water in the streets of New Orleans, McDaniel said it was too early to call the stagnant liquid a "toxic soup." State and federal agencies had begun quality testing.
"I'm saying that's a little bit exaggerated," he said. "To say it's toxic, it sounds like instant death walking in it. Let's get some better data."
Independent experts have said the New Orleans flood water, may cause environmental damage as it flows from the city to Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
More than 500 Louisiana sewage plants were damaged or destroyed, including 25 major ones. There were about 170 sources of leaking hydrocarbons and natural gas, officials said.
Katrina damaged large areas of wildlife habitat but it was too soon to assess the long-term impact, McDaniel said.
"One thing about nature, it's resilient," he said. "Nature will recover."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050906/ts_nm/environment_dc
Preliminary figures indicate 140,000 to 160,000 homes were flooded and will not be recovered, he said. "Literally, they are unsalvageable," he said.
He said it would take "years" to restore water service to the entire city.
"It's almost unimaginable, the things we are going to have to deal with," he said.
Crews have found two major oil spills, one of 68,000 barrels at a Bass Enterprise storage depot in Venice and another of 10,000 barrels at a Murphy Oil facility in Chalmette, McDaniel said.
But huge amounts of oil also oozed from cars, trucks and boats caught in the flood.
"Everywhere we look there's a spill. It all adds up," he said. "There's almost a solid sheen over the area right now."
High-level radiation sources, including nuclear plants, have been secured, and authorities were trying to determine the status of rail cars in the area as well as searching out large caches of hazardous materials in industrial plants.
Although there is a disease risk from contaminated water in the streets of New Orleans, McDaniel said it was too early to call the stagnant liquid a "toxic soup." State and federal agencies had begun quality testing.
"I'm saying that's a little bit exaggerated," he said. "To say it's toxic, it sounds like instant death walking in it. Let's get some better data."
Independent experts have said the New Orleans flood water, may cause environmental damage as it flows from the city to Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.
More than 500 Louisiana sewage plants were damaged or destroyed, including 25 major ones. There were about 170 sources of leaking hydrocarbons and natural gas, officials said.
Katrina damaged large areas of wildlife habitat but it was too soon to assess the long-term impact, McDaniel said.
"One thing about nature, it's resilient," he said. "Nature will recover."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050906/ts_nm/environment_dc
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The devastation of Hurricane Katrina has created a vast toxic soup that stretches across south-eastern Louisiana and Mississippi, and portends the arrival of an environmental disaster to rival the awe-inspiring destruction of property and human life over the past week.
Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico - the only viable option if the city is ever to return to even a semblance of its former self -would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region.
The full extent of the danger is unknown and unknowable, but the polluted waters are known to contain human and animal waste, the bodies of people and animals, household effluence, and chemical and petrochemical toxins from the refineries that dot the Gulf coast in and around New Orleans.
Even before the pumping is complete, a process city officials said yesterday would take at least three weeks (some engineers believe it could last months), the consequences for all living creatures - humans, animals, fish and micro-organisms - are likely to be dire.
"We're talking about a mass of decomposing dead bodies and animals. This is going to produce a horrible festering of unknown consequences," said Harold Zeliger, a chemical toxicologist and independent consultant based in New York State.
The waters now swilling around the streets and neighbourhoods of New Orleans will probably end up either in the Mississippi River or in Lake Pontchartrain, just to the north of the city, where they are likely to react with the oxygen in the water and deprive all living creatures, starting with the fish, of the means to life.
"We're looking conceivably at zero-dissolved oxygen, which will lead to the death of fish and other organisms," Dr Zeliger said. "If the migratory birds who pass through the area find any fish to eat, they will be contaminated so the birds will start dying in large quantities ... Reptiles and snakes are going to be driven out of their nests and habitats, which has implications for human safety. We're going to see water moccasins [a highly venomous snake], which are nasty critters, and alligators threatening people."
The prospect of severe chemical fallout overshadowed the cautious progress made by army engineers and rescue workers yesterday. The flood waters began to recede in New Orleans after they successfully plugged the biggest breach in the city's levee system and managed to activate the first water pumps. The breach along the 17th Street Canal, at the eastern end of the city, was responsible for allowing the single biggest body of water to cascade into the city from Lake Pontchartrain, leaving 80 per cent of the city submerged.
But officials are fearful of what they will find once the water level goes down. The human death toll is expected to number in the thousands. Then there is the damage to buildings and artefacts, some of them of immense historical value, wrought by the storm. There is still no fresh running water or air conditioning, while daily temperatures are 90F (32C) or more.
Already, more and more bodies are appearing, floating in the water, or pointed out by people still being rescued from their homes. Some of the bodies have been loaded onto refrigerated trucks and mobile morgues before being identified.
"It's going to be awful, and it's going to wake the nation up again," said Ray Nagin, Mayor of New Orleans, who has suggested that 10,000 may have died in his city alone.
Mr Nagin said that once pumping was completed, it would take several weeks more to clear the debris. Some military engineers are measuring the process in months rather than weeks, and are warning that it could take a year or more before New Orleans was once again habitable in any meaningful sense.
The 17th Street Canal is, moreover, only one of the major problems facing the recovery operation. Other smaller levee breaks in New Orleans defences are still defying the best efforts of the army, which is dropping giant 16,000lb sandbags on damaged sections. Restoring electricity could take up to eight weeks.
The toxic consequences of the disaster will have a profound impact on New Orleans even after the initial clearing is done. Dr Zeliger pointed out that the only way to make the water remotely potable would be to chlorinate it, but given the degree of contamination, this would create its own devastating side effects.
"If one chlorinates poor-quality water, it creates categories of trihalmethanes and other compounds that produce their own nightmarish effects on human health, such as spontaneous abortions," he said. "You'll see the formation of chloroform and bromoform and other toxins. It will be a long time before decent potable water can be drawn - my prediction would be a minimum of one year."
Such warnings have not deterred a minority of New Orleans residents - perhaps 10,000 people - from trying to remain in their homes, or wherever they can find shelter. "We can't force them out," said a member of the Kentucky National Guard, one of thousands of armed guardsmen patrolling the streets alongside army and marines units.
Mr Nagin said it was essential that everyone left so that the repair and recovery could begin. "It's just not safe, leave for a little while," he urged.
Slowly but perceptibly, progress is being made by both federal and state agencies, helped by churches and charities. The emergency medical airlift from New Orleans airport is complete. In some areas, the first financial resources are being distributed to refugees who have lost everything. Across the ravaged region, some communications are starting to be restored.
But thousands of families, if not tens of thousands, remain separated. Many still search for missing relatives. And New Orleans is only one casualty of a storm that, in varying degrees, devastated a region almost as large as Britain. From south-eastern Louisiana across coastal Mississippi, towns and villages have been all but obliterated.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310814.ece
Fears are growing that the wrong choices now could spark environmental problems for decades to come.
Lake Pontchartrain, the large water mass north of New Orleans, is the focus of many of these fears.
Engineers need to pump out the water which swept in when Hurricane Katrina's storm surges from the lake brought down sections of its floodwalls on 29 August.
But the last thing the lake and the delicate wetlands of Louisiana and Mississippi need is a tide of urban filth.
The areas have already suffered decades of seeping pollution and erosion.
The Mississippi River might seem a more obvious channel than the lake for the mess, carrying it out to sea.
Yet the lake is the city's traditional drain, and it is impractical to try to pump all the water out to the south.
Sewage and unknown amounts of industrial chemicals float in the stagnant water - along with the unrecovered bodies of the victims. Oil, diesel and petrol from vehicles are adding to the mix.
Map of Lake Pontchartrain
And the facilities to treat the contamination before pumping the water away are just not there in a city without power.
Scientists cannot yet say for sure how poisonous the water actually is, and city officials have described reports of a "toxic soup" as exaggerated.
New Orleans has no large industrial base, says John Day, a professor at Louisiana State University's (LUS'S) Department of Oceanology and Coastal Studies - but for now scientists "just don't know" what full analysis of the waters will show.
If no major new source of toxins emerges, the biggest areas of concern will remain sewage, decaying human and animal remains and oil slicks.
While they may have a short-term impact, these elements should largely break down in the lake water in a matter of months, says Professor Day.
Field trips
Scientists from LSU have already begun field trips to New Orleans to collect samples for monitoring the level of toxins in the water.
Aerial photographs are also helping them to establish the volume of floodwater.
These images suggest the quantity of floodwater in downtown New Orleans on 2 September was 95 billion litres (21bn gallons, 25bn US gallons), Hassan Mashriqui of the LSU Hurricane Center told the BBC News website.
That represents about 2% of the volume of the lake.
Covering 1,632 sq km (630 sq miles), Pontchartrain is home to more than 125 more species of aquatic life, from anchovies to alligators.
Wildlife in the wetlands of the lake's basin includes otters and wild boar, ducks and eagles.
The lake is no stranger to pollution from its big city neighbour, but it had actually been getting cleaner in recent years. Six decades of dredging its shell beds to make asphalt and cement came to an end in 1991.
Pontchartrain's ecosystem may have been hit directly by Katrina at the very beginning, when surges of seawater from the Gulf of Mexico arrived, dangerously increasing its salt content.
Certainly, the hurricane itself did serious ecological damage further north, along the Gulf Coast, where a tidal wave with a peak of nine metres (30 feet) was recorded.
"On the Mississippi coast, the water went in and went out - in New Orleans, it went in and sat there," said Professor Day.
Warnings 'ignored'
The wetlands, which act as a natural brake on hurricane surges, have been reduced by about 25% over the last century by development.
As a rule of thumb, for every mile of wetlands that a storm surge passes, it reduces the flooding by a foot, the professor says.
He argues that if the US federal authorities had heeded ecological warnings and spent $20-25bn on restoring wetlands in the Mississippi Delta, America would not now be facing a bill of $100bn.
Washington, Professor Day says, must finally take global climate change seriously as the rising sea level and more frequent hurricanes many associate with it impact directly on low-lying areas like New Orleans.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4223426.stm