Alabo Wharf deal gets slippery
23rd December 2024 · 0 Comments
By Delaney Dryfoos
The Lens
The narrow Holy Cross Historic District sits on high ground, spanning the Mississippi River side of the Lower 9th Ward, an area of town that’s isolated from the rest of New Orleans by the Industrial Canal.
Though the Alabo Street Wharf itself is outside the National Register historic district designation, the train tracks connecting the river warehouse to Saint Claude Ave are laid along a residential street that runs through the middle of the historic district.
In late September, the Port of New Orleans signed a lease with Sunrise Foods International and Norfolk Southern to revitalize the property by quickly converting the wharf warehouse into a space fit to unload, store and transfer organic grain shipped from Turkey.
Grain transfer was the extent of what would be done there, neighbors were told.
The project seems to be moving quickly. Train tracks are already being replaced. At public meetings, officials explained that the Alabo Wharf would be the place where Sunrise would dock its ships of organic grain, to unload into the wharf’s warehouse, which would hold the grain until it could be loaded onto railcars and sent away by rail, through New Orleans to the broader American market.
From the start, residents were concerned that the Alabo Wharf was more than a grain transfer station.
A vocal group of neighbors has been pleading with the Port to stop the grain train since the community heard about the project in September. They organized to “Stop the Grain Train,” making signs and social-media posts and imploring officials and neighbors to stop the development.
This month’s Port of New Orleans Board of Commissioners meeting, held on Thursday, opened with an hour of emotional public comment, all of it strongly opposed to the Alabo Wharf grain terminal.
“We are a community united to defend our neighborhood against this grain terminal project and the reindustrialization of our historic neighborhood,” said Holy Cross resident Amanda Thompson. “You, the Port of New Orleans, may have already sold us down the river but you will not steamroll us.”
In recent weeks, the crescendo of fear in Holy Cross had raised concerns from others neighbors, who felt like an organic-grain terminal was a fairly harmless way to bring back the Alabo Wharf as the working port it once was, when longshoremen and dockworkers could walk to work from other parts of the Lower 9th Ward.
They also suggested that maybe, with all the money being poured into the wharf, Holy Cross residents could sit down with Sunrise representatives to discuss whether the company could invest in improvements to the surrounding neighborhoods, perhaps a community center, since Holy Cross lacks a public place to convene meetings. In its other locations across the globe, Sunrise Foods has built soccer fields and playgrounds, and in Turkey, after a major earthquake, the company helped to provide local crisis counseling and educational resources and delivered first-aid tents to quake victims.
Emails reveal Sunrise making plans for “Phase 2,” involving vegetable oil
Holy Cross residents have been sharing an August email exchange between Sunrise Foods and the Port of New Orleans, which describes a second phase of revitalization, confirming neighbors’ concerns that they were not being given the whole story.
Holy Cross Neighborhood Association board member Jeffrey Wittenbrink Jr. had received a copy of the message from the Port of New Orleans as part of a Freedom of Information Act request he’d submitted, asking for emails related to the project.
According to the message, once the wharf begins processing organic grain from Sunrise Foods’ port in Giresun, Turkey, the company plans to start docking with cargoes of sunflower oil. The sunflowers would be sourced throughout the Black Sea region and shipped to Corum, Turkey, where Sunrise Foods operates an oilseed refinery. Emails show that Phase 2 includes a “vegetable-oil terminal” that will be relocated from the Port of Houston to the Alabo Wharf and “will include storage tanks and a deodorizer, ideally built out and done by 2025.”
Though the plans are unclear, import data shows that Sunrise Foods regularly imports sunflower oil into the United States. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s descriptions of national sunflower oil markets note that imported crude sunflower oil is typically “refined and re-exported to neighboring markets.”
A deodorizer is typically used in the refining of crude vegetable/nut oil. Industry documents describe how its refined in stages that include degumming, deacidifying by adding an alkali – which sheds a byproduct called soapstock, typically sold off to make soap – followed by a decolorization stage where the oil is run through white clay to remove pigment, and finally, a deodorizing phase with steam to remove odors.
Online photos of modest vegetable-oil refineries look like the microbreweries that dot parts of New Orleans, with shining metal vats connected by networks of pipes.
Yet neighbors had not been told about a Phase 2 or even heard the words “vegetable oil” from planners or Port officials. Because of that deception, they say, they are not even able to have a frank debate about the advantages or dangers of Phase 2.
During a community open house in early December, Paul Calder, a Holy Cross resident, had asked directly about the rumored “Phase 2” of the project to create a vegetable oil facility. He was told that no expansion plans existed. “I was lied to at the public forum,” Calder told Port officials last Thursday.
After the Port’s meeting, the Port issued a statement about the Holy Cross situation. “The Alabo Street Terminal has been a vital maritime asset since 1921. The facility has been used to move cargo like lumber, copper, and sugar,” the statement read. “While we understand that there are concerns about the new development, we are confident that environmental stewardship will be prioritized.”
After the end of the public comment period, the board continued with its regular meeting, seemingly unphased.
The board, including new President & CEO Beth Ann Branch, voted to approve a resolution that seems to pave the way for Phase 2, by demolishing more of the empty warehouse space surrounding the Alabo Street Wharf.
The five-acre span of land and warehouses touch the city at Bienvenue Street on the lakeside of the Alabo Wharf. In 2017, the Port’s engineers determined that the buildings had deteriorated beyond repair.
But now, the derelict structures have a promising purpose. Or so it seemed to Holy Cross residents gathered at Thursday’s meeting, where the Port’s board approved an agreement with the tenant, Brandon International, to take ownership of the buildings and demolish them for a termination fee of $1.25 million. “Once the rest is debated, we can make a determination as to the best use of the property going forward,” said Jean-Paul Escudier, executive counsel for the Port of New Orleans.
As Wittenbrink sat in the audience, listening, he couldn’t help but speak up. “This is for expansion of the grain terminal,” he said, loudly. Since the public comment period was complete, he was not allowed to speak further.
Reviving train tracks in a historic district
The railroad tracks are not new to Alabo Street. The cargo terminal was built more than 100 years ago, as one of the stops on the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad. The Port of New Orleans bought the Alabo terminal in the 1970s and has worked with Norfolk Southern to transport river cargo since 1982.
From the Alabo Wharf, the railroad meanders amidst the paved residential street, avoiding sewer and water pipes hidden below. At a community open house to discuss the project, Norfolk Southern said the new tracks would be laid in the same imprint as the old tracks, to avoid straining the pipes.
The streets would also be outlined with the width of the railcars to warn pedestrians and motorists, Norfolk Southern officials said. And though residents in Holy Cross, like the city’s other historic districts, are prohibited from changing the front of historic homes or anything else that alters the streetscape, the revitalized railroad tracks won’t trigger new regulatory studies because the footprint across the streetscape remains the same, railroad officials said.
Some Holy Cross residents see the revitalization of the wharf in the same light – as new development that follows historic patterns, in this case, a return to the neighborhood’s working river environment.
“The trains are a usual nuisance – that is an adverse effect of living in the river neighborhoods,” said former Holy Cross Neighborhood Association board member Doreen Piano, who lives close to the wharf and directs the women and gender studies program at the University of New Orleans.
“[The Port] could have done a better job communicating, obviously,” Piano said. But she wanted to get some facts straight.
She was particularly bothered that this grain terminal has been equated with heavy industrial projects upriver that posed much more serious health concerns, such as the recent fight in St. James Parish over Formosa Plastics and in St. John the Baptist Parish over the Greenfield grain terminal, which included a grain elevator that stood as high as the Superdome and sparked concerns about grain-dust explosions.
To Piano, comparisons of the Alabo Street Wharf grain terminal project, which does not include an elevator, to Greenfield’s plans did a disservice to those in the River Parishes who are battling to preserve the health and safety of their communities.
Concerns about creeping crawling pests, and shaking trains
Holy Cross residents have raised some concerns about dust and rodents – which are always a concern along the river, even when there is not a grain storehouse nearby.
By early 2025, Sunrise Foods has promised to release results from a detailed environmental evaluation specific to dust control and pest management. But Sunrise officials explained that the warehouse would be equipped with a comprehensive “three-layer defense system” for pest management, which includes a network of control devices and stations positioned both inside and outside the facility. Dust suppression and dust-exposure reduction are also central to the design of their facilities and operations, they said.
To Peter C. Cook, an education policy writer who lives nearby, Sunrise’s proposed revitalization project sounds like an improvement from the most recent tenant in the Alabo Street Wharf, Gulf Stream Marine.
During this time, he said, the wharf was used to transport lumber that was “smelly and messy” and loaded onto idling trucks that would rumble down the residential street.
“One train a day is far more environmentally friendly than trucks, and a lot less dangerous,” Cook said.
The trains still raised concerns for Calvin Alexander, president of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, who has also served on the Historic District Landmark Commission. Though he understands that heavy trucks are also a problem, he questions whether heavy freight like grain should be running on tracks that curve through a residential neighborhood.
A friend of his, Alexander said, was born in a house 96 years ago just feet from the tracks on Fats Domino. Over that time, he said, her family rebuilt the house with a stronger foundation, hoping it would stop shaking as the train passed. But the new home still shook.
Of course, residents get used to the shaking, he said. But there’s no way to assert that freight trains traveling the revitalized tracks wouldn’t cause damage to surrounding homes, Alexander said. “We don’t need that in this historic neighborhood.”
From Community Open House to Stop the Grain Train Protest
On Dec. 4, a large group assembled at the community open house hosted in the Lower 9th Ward by the Port of New Orleans, Norfolk Southern and Sunrise Foods.
Holding protest signs reading Stop the Grain Train, more than 50 people marched into the gymnasium at once. Company representatives watched, while seated at tables they’d set up to allow individuals to walk up and ask them questions.
“No train, no grain,” the crowd chanted. Urged by the group, company emissaries left the tables and switched to a different format, to answer questions posed by the group.
One of the earliest speakers was a tall woman. “We welcome Sunrise to New Orleans, just not at this location,” said Sandra Stokes, the chair of advocacy for the Louisiana Landmark Society. “We ask you to look at alternatives that do not go through a National Register district or a community this cohesive.”
At one point, the Sunrise Foods International representative responded, but no one could hear him. He spoke quietly and did not use the microphone the residents had provided so that crowd members could speak.
Nana Nantambu, another speaker, lives about two blocks from the Alabo Wharf and one block from the proposed train route in Villa St. Maurice, an affordable, 77-unit apartment building.
In a community that already must connect to the rest of New Orleans by toggling from North Claiborne to St. Claude, depending on which lift bridge is open, Nantambu was concerned that a train that stopped near the wharf to pick up or drop off cargo could cut off ambulances or fire trucks from her complex, threatening timely emergency responses.
Further traffic disruption concerns spur from the Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to replace the locks in the Industrial Canal, which would impact the two bridges connecting the community to the rest of the city.
To Natambu, the worst part of the situation is that Sunrise Foods had started off on the wrong foot. As each of the company representatives stood quietly listening, she chastised them for holding the open house after the contract for the Alabo Wharf was signed.
Long before they signed, they should have consulted with people who live nearby, she said. To her, that was the gravest mistake they’d made.
“The issue for me,” Nantambu said, “is more about coming into my home and not asking.”
In response to an inquiry from The Lens, Sunrise Foods said that it currently operates similar vessel-discharge operations at nine North American locations – eight in the U.S. and one in Canada – as well as 10 international locations. They did not confirm whether those facilities are serviced by a railroad that runs through a residential area.
This article originally published in the December 23, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
