Louisiana Ecological Harm Called Unprecedented
By Beth Daley
Knight Ridder
Monday 03 October 2005
New Orleans - The environmental damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita
is unparalleled in its scope and variety, scientists say, with massive oil
spills blanketing marshes, sediment smothering vast fishing grounds, and
millions of gallons of raw sewage scattered in New Orleans and along the
400-mile Louisiana coast.
The catastrophe extends from the heart of the Big Easy, where streets,
sidewalks, and floors are coated with a thick mud mixed with human waste,
to the fringe of protective marshland, sugarcane fields, and citrus groves
along the Gulf Coast that are beginning to die from the sea's salty surge.
Thousands of acres seem to have been swallowed forever by the ocean.
"This is an unprecedented event in terms of devastation and scale," said
Harry Roberts, director of the Louisiana State University's Coastal Studies
Institute. He says it will take time to fully evaluate the storms' impact.
"It's not like a spill on a river or a beach; you have small channels,
canals, towns, levees. Everything here is complicated . . . and it's not a
simple environment to assess damage in."
The scope of the cleanup ahead is most evident when seen from a plane.
In a three-hour flight, a Globe reporter documented scores of examples of
environmental damage from New Orleans 60 miles south: A shrimp boat,
one of more than 100 observed tossed on roads and earthen levees, leaking
a thin rainbow film of oil into the marsh. Two large white oil-storage
tanks,
one partially crumpled like a soda can, leaning precariously over the
Mississippi River with remnants of its black goo smeared on a nearby
beach. Boxcars, barges, and car ferries - their contents oozing - piled in
canals and along the riverbank. Acres of marsh grass, beaten down by
100-mile-per-hour-plus winds and poisoned by salt water, turning brown.
Nature is resilient, and most scientists agree that the Louisiana coast
will recover, as it has after past hurricanes. Oil will evaporate, toxic
compounds will be diluted, and fish will return. But it could take several
years or longer, and by then fishermen, hunters, and farmers could be
ruined, as duck hunting falls off because of the loss of wetlands, crawfish
farms fail because of saltwater in ponds, and high salinity in the soil
turns rice and cane fields barren. Finding new uses for the land could
take years.
"It will always come back to some stable system; we'll have shrimp and
oysters again . . . but the shock effect of the change and recovery time
could be great," said Paul Coreil, vice chancellor for the Louisiana State
University Agriculture Center.
The most immediate concern is more than 8 million gallons of spilled oil
in Louisiana - a total that could grow significantly in coming days as Coast
Guard officials continue to survey the spills. Just one Murphy Oil Corp.
tank spilled 1.5 million gallons that mixed with sea water and washed into
marshes, canals, sewers, and swimming pools over a square mile of the
community of Chalmette, southeast of New Orleans. The Exxon Valdez -
until now considered the nation's worst environmental disaster - poured
11 million gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989.
Despite the bigger volume, the Valdez spill was easier to deal with,
cleanup and environmental officials say, because it came from a single
source and largely stayed in one place. In Louisiana, oil has been found
seeping from pipes, tanks, and other containers at more than 48 locations.
Floodwaters allowed some of it to mix with the contents of underground gas
storage tanks and the hazardous contents of thousands of homes and schools,
including asbestos, paint thinner, and bleach, complicating the cleanup.
Near the oil spill in Chalmette, a thick sludge coats a cul-de-sac and
the tread marks of cars that tried to escape its clutches are visible from
1,500 feet in the air. Katrina's storm surge picked up the Murphy Oil tank
and pushed it 30 feet, buckling it and opening a leak. The neighborhood
resembles a war zone from Katrina, with roofs blown off and sheds resting
on their sides. Through it all, the sheen of oil snakes into canals and a
marsh. Federal officials have classified the neighborhood as a "hot zone" -
making it off-limits as they try to scrub oil from sewage pipes and
mailboxes, and decide whether the neighborhood is salvageable.
So far, cleanup workers have siphoned or removed more than 2.5 million
gallons of oil from marshes, canals, and land that spilled in the biggest
leaks. Most of the oil, however, has evaporated or was carried out to the
Gulf on Katrina's and Rita's retreating storm surge where it was broken up
and diluted, and will eventually biodegrade. Given the circumstances,
cleanup officials say, it was far better for the oil to go to sea than to
get caught in sensitive marshland.
"It could have been much worse," said Charlie Henry, lead scientific
adviser for the Katrina and Rita response for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration Office of Response and Restoration. Fewer than
100 birds have been recovered with oil on them, according to a US Fish and
Wildlife official, but assessments are not complete.
One-hundred forty oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico were
damaged by Katrina - 43 severely, including some that floated away or sank.
While oily sheens were reported in the Gulf after Katrina, the amount of oil
from platforms and pipelines appears to be negligible, federal officials
say. While rigs and pipelines have been reported damaged during Rita - and
some small amounts of oil spills - no final numbers exist yet.
Many Louisiana fisheries, which produce 15 percent of US seafood and 50
percent of the nation's oysters, are believed to be devastated. Katrina
dumped a thick layer of sediment east of the Mississippi Delta that probably
smothered oyster beds, and Rita did the same in the western part of the
state. Brown and white shrimp that spawn offshore and move inland to live in
marshes have had much of their habitat destroyed. Officials say they believe
the worst is yet to come: Decaying organic matter that is being stirred up
or washed into lakes and the Gulf will probably cause oxygen levels in the
water to drop, killing off fish.
In New Orleans, the mess could take years to scrub clean. Federal and
state teams are fanning out across the city, looking to identify and plug up
thousands of "orphan" 55-gallon drums and barrels that floated out of
industrial facilities. The barrels, many with labels peeled off by wind and
weather, litter banks of canals and warehouse sites. Worries about breathing
in particles released from the muck on the streets eased with Rita's
dousing, but as a dry-out occurs, federal officials are sampling air again
while residents complain of coughing. More than 22 million tons of debris
will have to be disposed of and workers are combing through streets trying
to separate hazardous waste from regular debris.
"I'm a glass-is-half-full kind of person, and there is significant
environmental impact," said Coast Guard Captain Frank Paskewich, the
commander of the New Orleans District who is overseeing the oil spill
cleanup. But he said many of the polluted areas have been contained, making
them easier to scrub clean. "I am optimistic we are going to mitigate it."
***
NY Times
Smaller Towns Bore the Brunt of Rita's Force
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: October 1, 2005
CAMERON, La., Sept. 30 - There used to be a hardware store here, as
evidenced by the paint scrapers, copper pots and pans, random power
cords and plungers that are buried in the muck and branches.
There were homes, too, where bedsheets are now strung through the
trees like Christmas ribbon. There is a disembodied roof, a shrimp boat
smashed to bits against a live oak tree, a file cabinet wedged in black
mud, its tiny, color-coded tabs intact amid the rubble.
They are all that is left of Cameron and nearby Creole. These towns,
which opened Friday to residents for the first time, are part of a cluster
of
settlements in rural Louisiana and Texas that were essentially wiped out
by Hurricane Rita, the power of which is only now beginning to reveal itself
a week after it struck.
Because the storm spared Houston, Galveston and other Texas cities that had
expected to be pummeled by its wind and force, Hurricane Rita was broadly
perceived as the Chihuahua to Hurricane Katrina's bulldog and something
dodged rather than survived. But looking at small towns like this one, it is
clear that from Shreveport in the north to Pecan Island in the south, from
Houston in the east to New Orleans in the west, Hurricane Rita was as strong
as its predecessor, or stronger.
It ended about 100 lives - many while people were trying to evacuate -
made pickup sticks of homes and businesses, upended more oil rigs
than Hurricane Katrina and took away electric power for hundreds of miles.
"The American people have seen so much damage they are saturated,"
said Charles Gibson, a national guardsman from South Carolina who was
one of the first outsiders to arrive here.
"There may not have been much incentive for people to get down to these
little towns," Mr. Gibson said. "But for the people down here who are
totally devastated, they feel left out and ignored, as if their story hasn't
been told."
Hurricane Rita brought indelible pain to the lives of people like the Pughs,
whose 50 family members lost every home among them but one. On Friday,
the first day she was allowed to come back to town, Wardella Pugh and
several members of her family picked through what was left of their store,
D's
Hardware and Tackle, trying to recognize a piece of roof and salvage things
like the little flower pot that strangely survived the winds that flattened
the rest of Cameron.
Cars snaked down Highway 27, with neighbors, staring in disbelief, calling
to each other from the windows. "I'm sorry, Wardella!" yelled a neighbor
from the bed of her pickup truck. Mrs. Pugh just stared back.
"You're born and raised somewhere and you want to come back," she said.
"But when all you see is a pile of rubble, I don't know anymore."
Having struck weeks earlier, Hurricane Katrina appears to have given this
region one gift with many dividends: fear. Seeing what that storm wrought
in New Orleans and beyond, hundreds of residents fled places like Jasper,
Tex., where Hurricane Rita took a fast, unexpected turn, according to local
officials and evacuees who later returned.
"If Katrina hadn't happened, I think everybody would have stayed," said
Shannon Van Gossen, who was buying a generator on Friday at the Lowe's
in Lake Charles, La. His family fled to McComb, Miss., and still spent days
without power.
After the embarrassing communications and response failures associated
with Hurricane Katrina, the local and federal government agencies appeared
to have been quick and aggressive in sending aid this way, officials and
residents concurred.
"I think FEMA is stretched, but the response is good at this point," said
Todd Hunter, the police chief of Jasper, where 95 percent of the electric
grid was destroyed. "This storm did something very unpredictable by turning.
It was an unprecedented deal here."
Jasper County has proved a difficult area for relief workers and government
officials to navigate. It is long and narrow and mostly rural, and Red Cross
workers describe arriving in small unincorporated areas where people have
been trapped in their homes behind a maze of trees.
"This is some of the most touching stuff I've seen in a long time," said
Brian Woodward, the site supervisor for the American Red Cross in Jasper,
his eyes welling. "When a man 80 years old who hasn't eaten in four days,
and you hand them a plate with corn and meat and bread and butter and
that man hugs you, that's something."
The two storms have created a diaspora, with evacuees from Hurricane
Katrina finding themselves on the move again, this time with the people
whose towns they had hunkered down in. "We had tons of Katrina people
here, and they all had to leave," Mr. Van Gossen said.
In recent days, scores of families have begun to tarp their roofs, saw at
the rubble in their yards, call the insurance companies and pray for a cold
front. Some were wavering between rage and disbelief. "Can I interest you in
an old, used shrimp boat?" said Leonard Aulds, who emerged from behind
what was left of his 40-foot boat, now wrapped around a tree, his orange
shock of hair blowing in the slight wind.
The boat, next to his camper that is no more, was docked on the river a
half-mile away from its current resting place in Creole. It rode a giant
wave across Highway 27 and into a tree, exploding in a mass of wood and
metal, its motor exposed, the bark of the live oak it hit totally stripped.
"They kept telling us on the weather station it was going to Houston, going
to Houston, and we might get 15-mile-an-hour winds," Mr. Aulds said. "We
might get some water."
That was the end of his shrimping business, and his town too. "All everyone
out there is worried about is Houston and New Orleans," he said, pulling on
a cigarette. "We're sick of it. This storm hit Cameron Parish 10 times what
it hit New Orleans, and nobody even knows it."
***
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