Reaction to discovery of contaminated soil in Gert Town
17th June 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
On March 31, 2008, Edwin Akujobi, then a staff scientist for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, surveyed a piece of land just north of Earhart Boulevard in New Orleans, and he liked what he saw.
At least that’s what he wrote in a form he filed with DEQ declaring that, at long last, it looked liked the contaminated soil and disrupted ecology at the Gert Town site had disappeared.
“The soil cover at the site was observed to have healthy grass cover,” Akujobi wrote, “which itself appeared to be well-maintained. No evidence of soil erosion or stressed vegetation was observed anywhere on the site.”
After adding that the restrictive fencing installed to protect the property appeared sturdy and the adjacent sidewalk looked ship-shape, Akujobi concluded his assessment by stating that the property – once part of the pesticide and chemical plant owned and operated for decades by Thompson-Hayward Chemical Co. that leaked the toxic contaminants triggering an intensive, environmental remediation project starting in 2006 at the site – was worthy of receiving a designation of “No Further Action At This Time.”
“Since site inspection did not reveal any problem, granting of NFA-ATT is recommended to proceed,” Akujobi wote.
Just more than two months later, DEQ administrator of remediation services Keith L. Casanova issued the memo officially bringing the remediation effort to a close and, very hopefully, ending the decades of lawsuits, multi-million-dollar settlements, citizen uproar, grass-roots activism and clean-up projects that had plagued the plot of land in the Gert Town neighborhood of New Orleans since the final shutdown of operations at the chemical plant in the late 1980s. Or so everyone thought.
More than a decade after the issuance of that DEQ ruling, residents in Gert Town last month discovered a flier on their doors informing them that the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Louisiana DEQ and the city of New Orleans were about to dig yet again into chemically-poisoned earth – what the notice called “radiation contaminated soil found in the 3400 block of Lowerline Street” – in the residents’ neighborhood.
The paper stated that construction and excavation would begin around May 28 and last roughly two weeks at the site, located at the intersection of Lowerline and Coolidge Court.
The document, by its very wording, presented an air of mysteriousness and uncertainty around this new discovery.
“The origin of the material is unknown,” it said, “and while it has been present for some time, it is being removed out of an abundance of caution.”
But some residents of Gert Town last week didn’t have to speculate from where the toxic material had come. For decades following the opening of the Thompson-Hayward plant in 1941, citizens of the surrounding community had lived with the looming specter and lingering fear of chemical contamination.
“I was a baby then,” resident David Reeder told The Louisiana Weekly last week as he and several friends gathered under the shade of a drooping tree on Olive Street.
“I remember playing over there near that plant,” Reeder added.
On the other hand, more recent residential arrivals to the Gert Town area had no idea they had immersed themselves in a neighborhood that for decades has been plagued by the lingering noxious effects of a massive pesticide plant.
For such newer residents, the revelation of radioactively contaminated property completely blind-sided them.
“In all my time of living here, I never thought there was something like that being back here,” said Brittany Earin. “I never even thought about it.”
After the initial news reports of the discovery and removal of the radioactive material in the residents of Gert Town were issued, city officials tersely confirmed the situation and tried to assure residents that federal, state and local staffers were on the job and addressing the contamination.
But for some, the excavation process that started a couple of weeks ago at Lowerline Street near Coolidge Court amounts to more than a simple fix-up of a minor problem. And it requires more than a basic, “oops, my bad,” on the part of governmental officials.
For some, this new situation – the revelation of yet another chemically-stained property on the former site of a pesticide facility in a neighborhood that, 11 years earlier, had been declared clean – is more proof of the type of bureaucratic apathy and governmental inaction that has seemingly always plagued neighborhoods with certain ethnic and socioeconomic demographics.
“That speaks to the environmental racism in this city,” said attorney Monique Harden, assistant director for public policy of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “It’s placed a multigenerational burden on this neighborhood. It’s happened time and time again.”
While the neighborhood has gradually become more diverse since Hurricane Katrina, Gert Town is still majority Black. According to numbers culled by The Data Center from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey, almost 80 percent of the Gert Town population is African American, while just 10 percent are white. Just under six percent are Latino. For all of Orleans Parish, about 60 percent is Black while roughly 30 percent is white.
The disparity, however, grows much more stark when looking at economic demographics. Between 2013-2017, the average household income for Gert Town was about $29,700, representing a drop of $3,000 during the 2000 U.S. Census. Overall, Orleans Parish’s average household income sits at roughly $67,200, a gap of almost $40,000.
Further, nearly one-quarter of Gert Town households bring in less than $10,000, compared to just 15 percent for the entire city. More than half of Gert Town’s residents earn less than $25,000, for all of Orleans Parish, that figure is less than 30 percent.
Perhaps most tellingly, nearly 47 percent of Gert Town’s citizens live in poverty, compared to about 25 percent for all of New Orleans.
Most Gert Town residents don’t need statistics to realize the nature of the neighborhood, and they don’t need data to tell them where they sit on the city’s socioeconomic ladder.
They also have no doubts that because of who many of them they are – poor and Black – Gert Town remains ramshackle, depressed, blighted and bleak. It’s also not entirely shocking to residents that their soil continues to be poisoned by a long-gone chemical plant that probably wouldn’t have been built in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods.
“You can tell,” said resident Brandon Earin, Brittany Earin’s brother. “The areas with the least income have the most problems. If this [radioactive contamination] had been in a white neighborhood, it would have been fixed in a week.”
Back on Olive Street, resident Lionel Patterson expressed cynicism and anger. “This is the way it’s always been,” he told The Louisiana Weekly, adding that just a quick scan of the neighborhood would apprise an observer of that stark reality.
“They got a lot to see,” he said.
While city officials haven’t revealed the exact nature or source of the contaminants, plaintiff advocates say the material is a particularly dangerous form of radium. While it remains unclear how the material seeped into the soil, the plaintiffs believe the source is obvious – the Thompson-Hayward plant.
But it’s not just the overt environmental racism and systemic neglect that have angered those affected by the latest news of contamination. It’s that city staffers and other governmental representatives had known about the radioactive material on Lowerline Street since 2013 – when city officials were preparing to host the Super Bowl by conducting comprehensive security-threat evaluations of the neighborhoods around the Superdome – but failed to inform residents for at least six years.
Because of this alleged secrecy, two New Orleans residents filed a lawsuit against the city in Orleans Parish Civil District Court, stating that officials should have done more to inform local citizens of the hazards and relocated the affected residents near the site.
“Despite having knowledge of the presence of hazardous radioactive materials in the subsurface soil…,” the legal action states, “the city took no action to warn and/or protect Plaintiffs, other residents or other business owners of the presence of soil contamination, the risk of exposure to Radium-226 and radiation; the reasonable steps to take in an emergency when exposed; the health effects that are common to exposure; how a person can tell if they have been exposed; and short and/or long term health effects associated with exposure to Radium-226 and radiation. The discovery of a hazardous condition was secreted from the public.”
The lawsuit continues by asserting that the impact of the radioactive material and its removal has been substantial.
“But despite assurances from the Defendants City, ARS [the company contracted by the city to perform the remediation], and governmental agencies,” it reads, “the residents and business owners in the subject area have been very alarmed and have experienced emotional distress regarding their exposure to radioactive materials at the site.
“Plaintiffs contend that the remediation has caused them adverse health effects and emotional distress because of the manner in which it was conducted by the Defendants … [Residents] should have been relocated during remediation; given an opportunity to relocate; and/or provided with personal protective gear during the remediation process.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs – who also own a business in Gert Town – are hoping more plaintiffs will be able to join the lawsuit and make it a class-action effort.
“This is a case of environmental racism,” Suzette P. Bagneris, a lead attorney for the lawsuit, told The Louisiana Weekly. “It’s another minority community being utilized as a dumping ground for many hazardous contaminants.”
Bagneris added that besides the flier placed on neighborhood doors, the city made no overtures of efforts to clue in the community of the situation.
“Beyond that piece of paper,” she said, “there was no communication with residents about what was going on.
“People need to know about the presence of radioactive materials in the community,” she added. “The city learned of it in advance of the [2013] Super Bowl… and the city was placed on notice [to clean up the contaminated soil] at the time. Now, here we are six years later, and the city proceeded to take absolutely no action to warn and protect residents.”
Bagneris said a meeting for potential class-action plaintiffs has been scheduled for 6 p.m. on June 17 at First Zion Missionary Baptist Church on Olive Street.
Virtually no governmental representatives answered requests for comment from The Louisiana Weekly about the radioactive discovery, last week’s lawsuit and a possible cover-up of the situation; several City Council members, as well as representatives from the EPA and the Louisiana DEQ, all either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.
But Harden of the DSCEJ said that “all the elected officials of the city of New Orleans need to be in Gert Town, talking to residents, telling them what happened and what went wrong, and how to move forward.
“The residents should not be left alone,” she added. “That’s the bottom line.”
But late last week, some residents of Gert Town felt just that – alone – with only each other to spread the word about what’s going on inside the stretch of street blocked off from the public and the EPA staffers ambling around the neighborhood.
“I just see them up there digging,” said one elder resident known as Pee Wee with a quizzical look on his face as he shuffled down Olive Street. “I don’t know what it is.”
Lionel Patterson, another resident who’d gathered together with friends last Thursday afternoon to commiserate and share news, wasn’t as delicate or muted. “They tried to hide the truth,” he said.
This article originally published in the June 17, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
