Did some in New Orleans return too soon?

Was return too soon?
Wilma Subra, a chemist who has advised the EPA on pollution issues over the years, criticizes the EPA for not keeping residents out of certain areas longer.

“There is a need for the Environmental Protection Agency to establish cleanup levels and require that the cleanup levels be met before community members are allowed to return to the currently contaminated areas,” she said last month in releasing results of sediment sampling done for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Benzene, toluene and other contaminants turned up in the soil samples, the group said, not only in Chalmette but also New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward and a neighborhood around a Superfund cleanup site. Both those areas are where many of the city's poor live and they were under water longer than most parts of the city.

The EPA has also tested soil and concluded that the contaminants detected were not an immediate health hazard.

Breathing it all in
Chapital told the Senate that “Katrina is still there” — in the pockets of water, dust and sediment.

A hazardous waste technician by training, Chapital said that right after Katrina hit she went to Red Cross centers, handing out respirators she had bought because officials weren’t doing so.

Residents “think they’ll have what they need” to deal with the cleanup, she said, “when in many instances they don’t.”

Activists say homes are the most immediate risk. “It’s kicked up in the form of dust and people are breathing it,” said Olson, the lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “People breathe it all together, and when you get that type of combination it’s particularly dangerous for people with respiratory illnesses.”

But a longer-term hazard could be the lawns and playgrounds laced with contaminated sediment.

New Orleans officials have yet to decide on a plan for what’s been called “debris management.”

“The whole question of debris management is an open one,” Olson said. “Are you going to replace half the topsoil of New Orleans?”

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