Polluted Waters Drown Environmental Efforts

The high-stakes effort to bail out New Orleans is sending plumes of contaminated, brown, stinking water into Lake Pontchartrain, setting back years of effort to restore the environmentally sensitive home of Gulf Coast marine life.

After festering for two weeks in neighborhoods, commercial districts and industrial zones, the water is laden with bacteria, silt, petroleum products and possibly toxic substances.

City officials confirmed Tuesday that they were also releasing untreated sewage into the Mississippi River from one of two treatment plants operated by the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board.

Hurricane Katrina has forced the abandonment of normal environmental and sanitation practices as workers scramble to preserve what’s left of the city and prevent a breakdown of public health.

“We are still trying to save lives,” said Col. Richard Wagenaar, who heads the Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans district.

The floodwaters are overrun with fecal material, silt and other substances that could damage the marine environment.

Martha Sutula, a senior scientist at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project who has studied the ecology of Louisiana wetlands, said nutrients in the floodwaters, such as nitrates and ammonia, would probably cause algae and phytoplankton blooms in the shallow lake and surrounding estuaries. The blooms can deplete oxygen and suffocate marine life.

“I would imagine that you’re going to have a pretty tremendous dead zone,” Sutula said. “This is going to set them back quite a few years.”

Al Naomi, senior project engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, agreed. “It will take years to clean up our estuaries. The lake was coming back with manatees and fish. Twenty years of effort has been wiped out in an afternoon storm surge.”

Although few experts criticize the extreme measures being taken to save New Orleans, the practices are believed to violate federal laws in normal times.

“We have multiple disasters in Hurricane Katrina,” said William R. Freudenburg, a professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. “Much of the disaster was caused by the initial decision of where to put the city’s levees. It was turned into a human disaster by the worst response I have ever seen by the government. Now we have a disaster on one of the most environmentally sensitive and valuable wetlands in America.”

Much of the nation’s seafood catch spends some portion of its life in the marshes of Louisiana, areas that were damaged by the storm surge. On the east flank of New Orleans, marshlands have been stripped clean of vegetation. “It looks like the surface of the moon,” Wagenaar said.

So far, tests have not discovered any toxic pollution.

The flood inundated at least one Superfund site, the Agriculture Street landfill. The cleanup was completed before the flood, although toxic residue remained in the soil. Tens of thousands of inundated homes are thought to have solvents, pesticides and other toxic substances stored in garages and under sinks that could be leaking.

The Environmental Protection Agency has tested floodwaters in six locations for more than 100 chemicals. Only one chemical has exceeded EPA standards. Lead in water near an Interstate 10 exit ramp was 15 times higher than the level allowed in drinking water.

Most of the hazardous chemicals -- including polychlorinated biphenyls, found in electrical equipment, and benzene, found in crude oil and gasoline -- were undetectable in the EPA’s first round of tests conducted Sept. 3.

Lake Pontchartrain, a brackish, shallow body of water that is affected by ocean tides, normally appears blue. But the view from a helicopter this week showed at least three large plumes of brown water leaving the 17th Street Canal, the London Avenue Canal and the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal.

Those waterways are the main channels for billions of gallons of floodwaters per day from the city’s pumping stations. Even several hundred feet above the city the air stinks of sewage.

The water pumped into the 630-square-mile lake eventually drains through two narrow outlets to Lake Borgne and then to the Gulf of Mexico. The sewage going into the Mississippi River flows into the gulf at the river’s mouth, about 80 miles from downtown.

Marcia St. Martin, executive director of the sewage board, said there was no evidence to support the contention that the water was a “toxic brew.”

Although it may contain bacteria, she said, the city never treated the massive quantities of storm water routinely pumped into Lake Pontchartrain.

“Fecal coliform in floodwater is normal,” she said.

New Orleans has two sewage-treatment plants, one on each side of the Mississippi River. The southern plant remains operational but the northern plant is underwater. It may require weeks or even months of repairs.

As a result, the city is releasing raw sewage into the river, St. Martin said. No EPA waivers are required under the circumstances, she said.

EPA tests show astronomical levels of bacteria in the floodwaters. The pollution could cause problems for downriver communities that draw drinking water from the river as well as marine life at the river’s mouth. That area is already a dead zone exceeding 8,000 square miles in some years, resulting from nutrients in the river.

Bacteria can live longer in the bottom sediment of the lake and gulf than in the water. “I think Lake Pontchartrain will serve as a reservoir for pathogens,” Sutula said.

Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to mitigate problems. “We are taking prudent measures,” said Col. Duane Gapinski, who leads the corps’ “dewatering” team. “We have set up [pollution containment] booms at all the outlets.”

Many of the worst pollutants, including petroleum products that give the floodwaters an oily sheen, have floated to the surface. That means the early pumping is removing relatively clean water.

“As you draw down the water, that top level of pollution will become more concentrated,” Gapinski said. “So we have to make some decisions about how to deal with that.”

Vartabedian reported from New Orleans and Cone from Los Angeles.