City claims no liability in Gert Town contamination
11th November 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Regardless of what ultimately happens as a result of a lawsuit filed by residents of the Gert Town neighborhood over possible exposure to radioactive materials, many citizens living in the blighted, pock-mocked, working-class section of New Orleans feel like their city leaders and elected officials have failed them.
Tony Wallace, a resident of Gert Town, said last week that practically no one connected to the city administration has personally come to his neighborhood since the summer, when radioactive radium was discovered near Coolidge Court and Edinburgh Street, a few blocks southeast of South Carrollton Avenue.
“I guess it’s the way we live,” Wallace said when asked why city officials haven’t come by. “It’s everything we’re living in. The city doesn’t care about us or our health.”
City workers and private contractors worked to remove the radium and remediate the property, but residents and attorneys representing them say the city and other involved governmental agencies delayed informing Gert Town residents for months after the discovery of the materials, and when the city did reach out, residents say, the effort was limited and insufficient for the gravity of the situation.
“They ain’t doing nothing,” one woman said last week as she ambled down Olive Street with a walker. “I heard from [city officials] once [since the summer], that’s it.”
Now, many months after the clean-up of the hazardous material, residents say their challenges and problems continue to be overlooked by the powers-that-be, and that the situation simply represents part of an overall apathy and callousness toward Gert Town and other poorer, struggling sections of the city.
As a group of Gert Town citizens gathered on the porch and front steps of a residence on Olive Street last week, some of them said that in general, few people — or at least those with the power to change things for the better — have little regard for the people of the neighborhood.
“Simply, they don’t care,” one woman said. She added that elected officials “need to get out in the neighborhood. They only care when they want our vote.”
A man in the group seconded those sentiments. “That’s how we all feel,” he said.
He added that when his child swims in the nearby natatorium or plays in Norwood Thompson playground, he worries that his son might get sick from toxic materials left by the various heavy industries that operated in the neighborhood for decades in the 20th century.
The woman pointed to the discovery of radium just blocks away as exhibit A in the city’s alleged callousness.
“They’re not doing anything,” she said. “They keeping overlooking things. They knew the [material] was there, and they kept it from us for months. They kept if from us for years.”
She said the diagnosis of numerous Gert Town residents young and old contain proof that the radioactive waste that sat buried in their neighborhood for years has caused many illnesses and health crises.
“Check the medical records,” she said. “It’s in there.”
(Many residents declined to give their names for this article because they feared legal reprisals.)
Representatives of the city administration have either declined to comment on the situation or have not responded to inquiries from The Louisiana Weekly. The newspaper again reached out to Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s office for this story but hasn’t heard back as of press time.
A representative from the City Attorney’s Office deferred all comments to the Mayor’s Office.
While neighborhood residents continue to wait for help from the city, they might have a beacon of hope working its way through the court system. Shortly after the discovery of the radium this past summer, two neighborhood residents and business owners, Eric and Patricia Lassair, filed suit against the city and two private contractors hired by the city to undertake the removal of the radioactive material and subsequent remediation of the site.
The suit alleges that residents were placed in danger when city officials and other governmental representatives allegedly dragged their feet in responding to the discovery of the toxic substances — a discovery that first took place in early 2013 — and failed to remove the radium in a timely manner. The lawsuit alleges that the city failed to adequately inform Gert Town residents of the presence of the materials.
Since the filing of the legal action earlier this year, several additional plaintiffs have been added to the lawsuit, making it a class action effort that might eventually benefit a larger amount of neighborhood residents, said attorney Madro Bandaries.
The city has asked for the dismissal of the case, which is in front of Judge Triche Milazzo, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, based on the application of the 1957 federal Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, which spells out liability for any non-military nuclear accident or waste contamination. According to city officials, the PAA shields the city from liability in the Gert Town case because the city was not responsible for or did not cause the original contamination.
A hearing on the city’s motion for dismissal was held Oct. 30 in front of Judge Milazzo. At that time, Milazzo heard arguments on both sides and is now considering her ruling in the motion to dismiss. Bandaries said he expects the judge to make a decision soon. (At the hearing, the plaintiffs dropped one of the private contractors, Weston Solutions, from the lawsuit, but Bandaries told The Louisiana Weekly last week that a new defendant will hopefully be added soon.)
Bandaries said last week that he feels confident that the judge will rule in the plaintiffs’ favor and that the suit will be allowed to continue.
“We believe we presented a very good case to the judge to the effect that the suit has merit and does not come under a specific federal law that the city claims that would preclude them from liability,” he told The Louisiana Weekly. “The City of New Orleans, through their leaders, knew that this was a dangerous area since 2013 and told not one resident about it and then earlier this year attempted to secretly, under the guise of road work, remove the radium-226 from the site.
“As a citizen of New Orleans,” he added, “I question when the other citizens who live here every day and deal with no power, deal with water they can’t drink and deal with other environmental issues, will not rise up and remove the current political leaders. We believe we will prevail in this lawsuit for the citizens of Gert town, some of whom have passed away since the filing of this lawsuit, with us believing that their demise was affected by their exposure over the many years that the toxic radium has been there.”
However, in a supplemental memorandum filed following the Oct. 31 hearing, the city, buttressing its denial of liability in the Gert Town case under the Price Anderson Act, stated that the 2011 ruling in Controneo v. Shaw Environment & Infrastructure, Inc. also relieves the city from liability. Both the PAA and the subsequent ruling in Controneo establish that the PAA’s language regarding liability for contamination of exposure to nuclear materials is so vague and non-specific that it absolves the City of New Orleans in the current Lassair case.
The filing states that the plaintiffs in the Lassair case can’t claim the city is indeed liable in the Gert Town situation simply because city officials failed to adequately notify residents or to remove the radium in a timely manner.
Essentially, the city is arguing that it isn’t specifically liable in the case because although the city might have failed to rectify the discovery of the radium or did not adequately warn residents about it, the city was not responsible for the radioactive materials being there in the first place. The city argues that the “public” is liable and not the city in particular.
“Plaintiffs cannot remove this case from the mandatory coverage of the PAA by couching their claims in terms of failure to warn and failure to remove,” wrote assistant city attorney Michael J. Laughlin in the Nov. 4 filing. “Their complaint is that as a result thereof they were exposed to radiation and they seek damages based on that exposure and what they will seek to prove are the consequences of that exposure. This case clearly asserts ‘public liability’ or ‘any legal liability arising out of or resulting from a nuclear incident’ regardless of who may have caused that nuclear incident and, therefore, it is a public liability action.”
This article originally published in the November 11, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
