News Roundup

A New Landfill in New Orleans Sets Off a Battle

NY Times
May 8, 2006
By LESLIE EATON

NEW ORLEANS — Block after block, neighborhood after neighborhood, tens of
thousands of hurricane-ravaged houses here rot in the sun, still waiting
to be gutted or bulldozed. Now officials have decided where several
million tons of their remains will be dumped: in man-made pits at the
swampy eastern edge of town, out by the coffee-roasting plant and the
space-shuttle factory and the big wildlife refuge.

But more than a thousand Vietnamese-American families live less than two
miles from the edge of the new landfill. And they are far from pleased at
having the moldering remains of a national disaster plunked down nearby,
alongside the canal that flooded their neighborhood when Hurricane Katrina
surged through last year.

Environmental groups are also angry, accusing local and federal officials
of ignoring or circumventing their own regulations, long after the
immediate emergency has ended. The same thing happened after Hurricane
Betsy in 1965, they warn, and that dump ended up becoming a Superfund
site.

The new landfill, known as Chef Menteur after the highway that borders it,
sits across a canal from Bayou Sauvage, the largest urban wildlife refuge
in the country, with 23,000 acres of marshland, canals and lagoons that
are home to herons, egrets, alligators and, in the fall, tens of thousands
of migratory ducks.

Nonetheless, the landfill lacks some of the safeguards that existing dumps
do, like special clay liners. The government says they are not needed
because demolition debris is cleaner than other rubbish.

Residents and environmentalists think otherwise, because after Hurricane
Katrina the state expanded the definition of construction and demolition
debris to include most of a house’s contents, down to the moldy mattresses
and soggy sofas.

“It’s essentially the guts of your house, all your personal possessions,”
said Joel Waltzer, a lawyer representing landfill opponents. “Electronics,
personal-care products, cleaning solutions, pesticides, fertilizers,
bleach.”

State officials say that the new landfill is safe and that they are simply
moving quickly to protect public health and the environment, using
techniques that did not exist 40 years ago. The new site was chosen to
speed up the cleanup, they say, because the debris will not have to be
hauled far. The state estimates that 7.2 million tons of hurricane debris
remains to be cleaned up; the Chef Menteur landfill will take 2.6 million
tons.

“You cannot rebuild until you clean up,” said Chuck Carr Brown, an
assistant secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality,
which provided a permit for the landfill. “I’m still in the eye of the
storm.”

The state has agreed to do some extra monitoring of groundwater, Dr. Brown
said. But it has determined “there’s nothing toxic, nothing hazardous,” he
continued. “There will be no impact” on the community, which is sometimes
called Versailles.

Like so many disputes that have erupted since the hurricane, this one
involves some highly charged issues: politics, money, history and race.
Not to mention a highly developed distrust of government that almost all
Louisianians now seem to share.

Unlike most residents of eastern New Orleans, the Vietnamese have
returned, rebuilt and drawn up elaborate plans for their 30-year-old
community’s future. Now they feel unwelcome, said the Rev. Vien thé
Nguyen, the pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church and a leader
in the fight against the landfill, which opened on April 26.

“They’re threatening our very existence,” Father Vien said of the
government agencies that approved the dump site, which residents fear will
tower 80 feet or more above their neighborhood, dwarfing the new church
they are planning to build, once the Federal Emergency Management Agency
trailers are gone from the site.

Father Vien said he was particularly worried about the quality of water in
the canal and the lagoon that run through the neighborhood of tidy brick
houses. Residents use that water on the tiny waterside gardens that supply
the community with sugar cane and bitter melon and Vietnamese varieties of
vegetables, he said.

He and his parishioners are particularly angry at Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who
in February used emergency powers to waive zoning regulations for the
landfill.

“Maybe we’re not the right kind of people he wanted to return,” Father
Vien said. Neither the mayor nor his staff responded to requests for
response to the priest’s comments.

The state and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is handling cleanup in
the city, say that without the dump, the cleanup would take much longer.
The existing dumps would not be able to process all the debris fast
enough, officials say, and are too far from the blighted buildings.

And the need for the new dump will only increase, they say, as the cleanup
progresses. Maurice Falk, the corps official in charge of the cleanup,
said at a federal court hearing last week that only 115 houses have been
demolished so far.

Given that slow pace, critics question why the landfill had to be opened
so quickly, before environmental studies were prepared and the community
was consulted. The community would be willing to negotiate a compromise
and do its part in the cleanup of the city, said Kelly H. Tran, who lives
in the Vietnamese enclave and with her husband runs a construction company
that has been fixing damaged houses.

But, she continued, “It’s not fair for us to have no voice in this big
decision, this critical decision.”

State officials said they had reviewed the site for a landfill in the
past, when political opposition had blocked it, and now simply could not
wait two or three months to get through the public comment period. But on
April 28, after the opposition was in full cry, the state and the corps
put out a notice soliciting public comment on the landfill.

If residents or opponents “have something we missed, we’ll address it,”
said Mike D. McDaniel, the secretary of the State Department of
Environmental Quality. As for those who argue that there is no emergency
involved, he disagrees. “Some people can’t seem to understand this is not
business as usual,” he said.

Environmental groups are not happy. Adam Babich, director of the Tulane
Environmental Law Clinic, said government agencies in the region had never
been vigilant about complying with environmental regulations but had been
especially lax since the storm. This attitude is most apparent, he said,
when it comes to landfills. In nearby Plaquemines Parish, a longtime
dispute over a landfill has flared up because the dump is taking in
Hurricane Katrina debris.

And sparring continues over the Old Gentilly landfill, an old-fashioned,
unlined dump that the state closed in 1986 but reopened after the
hurricane. It is now accepting a limited amount of debris after a suit was
filed by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, one of the groups
represented by Mr. Waltzer, and it was criticized in a report commissioned
by FEMA.

The fight over the new landfill is by no means over, Father Vien said. On
April 27 he was showing visitors the site — and admiring the alligators
gliding through the adjacent Maxent Canal — when he got the news from Mr.
Waltzer that a federal judge had refused to issue a temporary injunction
against the dump.

At first he seemed stunned. “I cannot believe that,” he repeated several
times.

Then he rallied.

“The game is not over,” he said. “It just started, actually.”