In Post-Katrina America, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) became a four-letter word for ineptness—fueling mistrust of government. Millions of Americans asked, “Can we trust the government to protect us?” This question is now directed at the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by thousands of first responders and volunteers who in September 2001 worked at “ground zero” at the World Trade Center in New York City. Cate Jenkins, a scientist for the EPA, says her agency lied about the WTC site when it claimed air at ground zero was safe to breathe in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. EPA is accused of a cover-up.

On the Fifth Anniversary of 9/11, thousands of workers are sick and several have already died from what doctors believe are the effects of breathing the air at ground zero. Just this past week, Mount Sinai Medical Center released findings from the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, the largest multi-center clinical program providing medical screening examinations for the workers and volunteers who worked at Ground Zero and other sites following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. Specific findings included:

• Almost 70 percent of World Trade Center responders had a new or worsened respiratory symptom that developed during or after their time working at the WTC.
  
• Among the responders who were asymptomatic before 9/11, 61 percent developed respiratory symptoms while working at the WTC.
  
• Close to 60 percent still had a new or worsened respiratory symptom at the time of their examination.
  
• One third had abnormal pulmonary function tests, much higher than expected.
  
• Severe respiratory conditions including pneumonia were significantly more common in the six months after 9/11 than in six months prior.

An estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers were exposed to caustic dust and airborne toxic pollutants following 9/11. The report concludes that continuing long term medical monitoring of responders will be needed to track the persistence of the abnormalities discovered in the study and to identify late effects, including possible malignancies.

Eleven months after Hurricane Katrina struck, the federal EPA issued its final sediment report giving New Orleans and surrounding communities a clean bill of health. EPA deemed New Orleans safe. Government officials concluded that Katrina did not cause any appreciable contamination that was not already there. The agency pledged to monitor “pockets of contamination” and toxic “hot spots.”

Although EPA tests confirmed widespread lead in the soil – a pre-storm problem in 40 percent of New Orleans – the agency dismissed residents’calls by residents to address this problem as outside of its mission. Federal and state officials see no need to scrape up the three million cubic yards of mud left by Katrina. The sole EPA recommendation for soil removal include soil near the million-gallon Murphy Oil spill in St. Bernard Parish and a 6-foot by 6-foot plot in Audubon Park—where lead contamination was found near a playground that did not flood.

This is not the first time government officials have assured New Orleans residents that their contaminated neighborhood was safe. EPA officials assured the Agricultural Street community residents that their neighborhood was safe after the “clean-up” in 2001. The community was built in the early 1980s on top of the Agricultural Street Landfill site. The 95-acre site was used as a municipal landfill (that included debris from Hurricane Betsy in 1965) for more than 50 years prior to being developed for residential and light commercial use. It closed in 1966.

In 1993, EPA found metals, pesticides, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in surface and subsurface soils in the area during environmental studies. EPA added the Agricultural Street Landfill, as a Superfund site in 1994. Residents immediately pushed for a property buy-out and relocation. But the federal EPA disagreed, and ordered a $20 million “clean-up,” which began in 1998 and was completed in 2001.

Concerned Citizens of Agriculture Street Landfill did not trust EPA’s “clean-up” and filed a class-action lawsuit against the city of New Orleans for damages and relocations costs. In January this year, after thirteen years of litigation, Seventh District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey ruled in favor of the residents, describing them as poor minority citizens who were “promised the American dream of first-time homeownership,” though the dream “turned out to be a nightmare.”

Today, a dozen or so FEMA trailers now house Katrina survivors in the contaminated neighborhood—where EPA announced in April 2006 it had found the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene at levels almost 50 times the health screening level. No decision has been made to cleanup the contamination found near the old Agriculture Street landfill.

Independent tests conducted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have also found dangerously high airborne mold levels inside and outside of homes, especially in the New Orleans neighborhoods that flooded. Such high concentration of mold spores is likely to be a significant respiratory hazard. Unfortunately, federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), have not monitored mold levels in areas that flooded, and have not helped residents cope with the mold problem.

A broad coalition of scientists, health experts, environmentalists, and local residents view EPA’s post-Katrina decision to simply monitor—rather than clean up the contamination—as a missed opportunity. It appears that few lessons were learned from Katrina—the single most catastrophic natural disaster in U.S. history. It’s business as usual. Residents need a clean-up, not a cover-up. A year after Katrina, government inaction is allowing another unethical and immoral “human experiment” to unfold before our eyes.

Robert D. Bullard is the director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and co-author of In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster and Race After Katrina (Russell Sage Foundation 2006).

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