Katrina also impacted environmental rules

Landfill and leaching
Meanwhile, environmentalists are challenging state regulators for sending much of the waste from gutted homes and businesses in New Orleans to an old city landfill that is not lined to keep contaminants from leaching out.

The trucks hauling debris into the landfill are inspected from towers at the dump’s entrance, but there are concerns that contractors are trucking in paint, household cleaners and chemicals by hiding the hazardous material at the bottom of their loads.

Similar questions abound. In hard-hit Plaquemines Parish, waste is being burned 24 hours a day and mounds of debris will be bulldozed into unlined pits.

“To get businesses and communities back and running, you have to kind of bend the rules to a certain extent, but not to the point where you are creating a situation where’s it’s unsafe for people,” said William Serpas, the parish’s director of public service.

Out in the Gulf of Mexico, the National Marine Fisheries Service waived the requirement that shrimpers use devices on their nets that let sea turtles escape. The agency said debris littering the Gulf made the devices impractical.

On land, a Georgia-Pacific paper mill was allowed to burn petroleum coke because of a shortage of natural gas. A chemical factory was given the go-ahead to dispose of a petroleum byproduct stuck in a storage tank by burning it off in a flare.

In the marshes, officials got rid of oil spills from broken pipelines by burning it off. Oil well operators hit by the storm were allowed to vent gas from their wells and move oil without filling out the usual paperwork.

‘Winging it’ mentality
The bottom line, many say, was getting the job done.

“We’re kind of winging it,” said Jeff Morgan, an independent debris removal inspector. He said Louisianans are “head-headed” people who “don’t want to be told how to do it.”

Michael Wascom, an environmental law expert at Louisiana State University, said the waivers were mostly limited in duration and related to an emergency.

“I don’t see anything scandalous in there,” Wascom said. “They all seem fairly innocuous and limited to their sites.”

But environmentalists worry. “We should do it right now rather than paying more money in the future to clean it up,” said Darryl Malek-Wiley of the Sierra Club’s Delta Chapter.

And Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said regulators need to ensure that companies did not take advantage of the waivers and that when the next catastrophic hurricane hits, industries are better prepared.

“I understand that we may need to run around and do these deals,” he said, “but the system has to shift.”

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