NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Floodwater in New Orleans is contaminated with E. coli bacteria, a city official told CNN Tuesday.

The official in Mayor Ray Nagin's office declined to be identified.

The failures of the levee system after Hurricane Katrina's onslaught left about 80 percent of the city flooded with water up to 20 feet deep -- water that became a toxic mix of chemicals, garbage, corpses and human waste. (See video of restarted pumping station -- 2:14)

E. coli comes from human and animal waste and can be found in untreated sewage.

Drinking water contaminated with E. coli can lead to serious illness and death if not properly treated.

Authorities have warned it will take weeks to drain the water covering much of the city.

Lt. Gen. Carl Strock ... told CNN Tuesday that the Corps was working to minimize the environmental damage to Lake Pontchartrain.

New Orleans: The toxic timebomb


The devastation of Hurricane Katrina has created a vast toxic soup that stretches across south-eastern Louisiana and Mississippi, and portends the arrival of an environmental disaster to rival the awe-inspiring destruction of property and human life over the past week.

Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico...would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region.

The full extent of the danger is unknown and unknowable, but the polluted waters are known to contain human and animal waste, the bodies of people and animals, household effluence, and chemical and petrochemical toxins from the refineries that dot the Gulf coast in and around New Orleans.

Even before the pumping is complete, a process city officials said yesterday would take at least three weeks (some engineers believe it could last months), the consequences for all living creatures - humans, animals, fish and micro-organisms - are likely to be dire...

The waters now swilling around the streets and neighbourhoods of New Orleans will probably end up either in the Mississippi River or in Lake Pontchartrain, just to the north of the city, where they are likely to react with the oxygen in the water and deprive all living creatures, starting with the fish, of the means to life.

"We're looking conceivably at zero-dissolved oxygen, which will lead to the death of fish and other organisms," Dr Zeliger said. "If the migratory birds who pass through the area find any fish to eat, they will be contaminated so the birds will start dying in large quantities ...

The toxic consequences of the disaster will have a profound impact on New Orleans even after the initial clearing is done. Dr Zeliger pointed out that the only way to make the water remotely potable would be to chlorinate it, but given the degree of contamination, this would create its own devastating side effects.

"If one chlorinates poor-quality water, it creates categories of trihalmethanes and other compounds that produce their own nightmarish effects on human health, such as spontaneous abortions," he said. "You'll see the formation of chloroform and bromoform and other toxins. It will be a long time before decent potable water can be drawn - my prediction would be a minimum of one year."

Louisiana officials said the floodwaters in the New Orleans region certainly carry a risk of disease, but said until results from testing of air and water quality come in it is too early to declare the area toxic.

"It's a bit exaggerated," said Mike McDaniel, the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality on Tuesday morning in Baton Rouge. "When I hear 'toxic stew,' it sounds like instant death going in there. Let's get some better information before we cause" people to worry.

But McDaniel ticked off a long list of hazardous materials that officials know are in the water, and an even longer list of chemicals they expect to find in the floodwaters: oil, gasoline, pesticides, human waste, and bacteria.

Railroad cars are submerged. Containers of fuel remain in the city. And state officials said there is no choice but to pump the floodwaters back into the lake and river.

"We have to get the water out of the city or the nightmare gets worse," McDaniel said.

Nature has a way of restoring itself over a period of time, McDaniel added.

Environmental officials are concerned about possible radioactive materials unleashed during during the storm.

The region has 2,200 facilities with underground fuel storage tanks, with an average of three at each site.

Other aspects of the environmental toll wrought by Katrina are obvious to rescuers and others traveling the increasingly empty city. On such grand boulevards as St. Charles and Napoleon avenues, the foliage that drapes the majestic oaks and magnolia trees is suddenly turning brown. Birdsong has largely disappeared

Few choices to rid New Orleans of poisoned water

The toxic brew of chemicals and human waste in the New Orleans floodwaters will have to be pumped into the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain, raising the specter of an environmental disaster on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, experts say.

SECOND DISASTER?

Van Heerden and Rodney Mallett, communications director for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, say there do not appear to be any choices other than to pump the water into Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, a key maritime spawning ground.

"I don't see how we could treat all that water," Mallett said.

The result could be an second wave of disaster for southern Louisiana, said Harold Zeliger, a Florida-based chemical toxicologist and water quality consultant.

"In effect, it's going to kill everything in those waters," he said.

How much water New Orleans holds is open to question.

Van Heerden estimates it is billions of gallons. LSU researchers will use satellite imagery and computer modeling to get a better fix on the quantity.

Bio-remediation -- cleaning up the water -- would require the time and expense of constructing huge storage facilities, considered an impossibility, especially with the public clamor to get the water out quickly.

Mallett said the Department of Environmental Quality was in the unfortunate position of being responsible for protecting the environment in a situation where that did not seem possible.

"We're not happy about it. But for the sake of civilization and lives, probably the best thing to do is pump the water out," he said.

Katrina environmental issues "almost unimaginable"

Hurricane Katrina left behind a landscape of oil spills, leaking gas lines, damaged sewage plants and tainted water, Louisiana's top environment official said on Tuesday.

In the state's first major assessment of the environmental havoc in southern Louisiana, Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Mike McDaniel said large quantities of hazardous materials in damaged industrial plants, the danger of explosions and fires and water pollution were his main concerns eight days after the storm struck.

Preliminary figures indicate 140,000 to 160,000 homes were flooded and will not be recovered, he said. "Literally, they are salvageable," he said.

He said it would take "years" to restore water service to the entire city.

"It's almost unimaginable, the things we are going to have to deal with," he said.

Crews have found two major oil spills, one of 68,000 barrels at a Bass Enterprise storage depot in Venice and another of 10,000 barrels at a Murphy Oil facility in Chalmette, McDaniel said.

But huge amounts of oil also oozed from cars, trucks and boats caught in the flood.

"Everywhere we look there's a spill. It all adds up," he said. "There's almost a solid sheen over the area right now."

High-level radiation sources, including nuclear plants, have been secured, and authorities were trying to determine the status of rail cars in the area as well as searching out large caches of hazardous materials in industrial plants.

Hurricane Katrina: EPA Response

Search and rescue remains a high priority. EPA has 65 boats providing support to local response efforts by moving supplies and conducting search and rescue missions. Yesterday, our search and rescue missions resulted about 120 citizens assisted with evacuation.

EPA's Incident Management Team has joined the state of Louisiana's Emergency Response Center in Baton Rouge, Lousiana. The ASPECT aircraft continues to conduct over-flights to idenfity spills and collect data from fires burning in the hurricane-impacted area.

Yesterday's over-flight identified a large inland oil spill that resulted from a failed storage tank at the Murphy Oil company in Chalmette, Louisiana. The company and its contractors are working with EPA and Coast Guard officials to repair the storage tank, contain the oil and begin clean-up.

EPA and state officials continue to collect information from daily aerial helicopter inspections of facilities in the area. On-the-ground inspections of these facilities will provide additional information during the upcoming weeks.

EPA and Louisiana Department of Health and Human Services are working to restore off-line drinking water systems. Over 30 EPA personnel are assisting the state of Louisiana in inspecting local drinking water systems. Reports indicated about 100 systems have restored their operations.

EPA is sampling flood water for chemical and biological testing at EPA's Houston laboratory. EPA completed sampling at six locations in and around the Greater New Orleans area. Additional flood water sampling is scheduled for today.

SOCIETY OF ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISTS URGES EPA TO DISCLOSE POST-KATRINA POLLUTION REPORTS

SEJ officers wrote EPA September 6, 2005, urging quick action on FOIA requests for post-Katrina pollution reports from a growing number of journalists. EPA's Web site had bragged of 12 field teams doing "initial assessments of the environmental impacts including potential impacts from chemical facilities, oil refineries, and water treatment plants." But SEJ members requesting the results of those assessments filed FOIA requests after finding EPA "unresponsive."

At stake may be the health of hundreds of thousands of people still in the hurricane-stricken Gulf coast region, home to a major fraction of US petrochemical production and refining activity. State officials reported some 500 sewage plants in LA and 1223 drinking water plants knocked out in LA, MS, and AL. Four deaths of evacuees were attributed by the Centers for Disease Control to water-contact wound infections from a common vibrio bacteria. Meanwhile, engineers with little alternative pumped a brew of unknown pollutants from the flooded city of New Orleans into Lake Ponchartrain.

The letter, from Society of Environmental Journalists President Perry Beeman and SEJ 1st Amendment Task Force Chair Ken Ward Jr., sought to "encourage the U.S. EPA to quickly respond to requests for more detailed information about chemical spills and other environmental releases resulting from Hurricane Katrina."

EPA's reputation for providing prompt and candid information about post-disaster environmental conditions suffered a serious blow in 2001, when then-administrator Christine Todd Whitman offered public assurances at White House direction that the air in lower Manhattan was safe to breathe, when in fact the agency had inadequate data to support those assurances.

SEJ's letter noted: "Mark Schleifstein, reporter at The Times-Picayune and an SEJ board member, filed a Freedom of Information Act request on Monday, September 5, 2005, for information about the environmental consequences of Katrina, after his efforts to obtain answers without a formal request were unsuccessful." Schleifstein, a Pulitzer prize-winner, co-authored a 2002 5-part front-page series titled "Washing Away," which presciently warned of a disaster like Katrina's effects on New Orleans.