Official Cover-up: Toxic Waters Will Make New Orleans Unsafe for a Decade, page 1

Just to be clear, we seem to be talking about two separate issues here.

One is the effect of the flood waters on the city, and the other is the overall environmental issue with the gulf as a whole.

Since the title of this thread specifically mentions the city, I have limited my comments to that subject. Thus while I am aware that there have been reports of a couple of large oil spills along the gulf coast as a result of the hurricane, these are not in the city itself.

To me, there are two main problems with the issues addressed in this thread.

One is that it assumes that there is some sort of cover up, yet I can find no evidence to back up this assertion. Water tests have been taken and the results are being released. Keep in mind that a number of these tests can take a couple of days to complete, so that you don’t always get your results right away.

Secondly, is the use (not just in this thread, but in the media in general also) of the catch all term “toxic.” Without information on specific contaminant levels, the shotgun approach to labeling everything as “toxic” is nothing more than scare mongering, or sensationalizing.

The EPA has released some of the data from samples collected September 4 and 6th.

www.epa.gov...

I glanced through the data and frankly I didn’t see anything that was all that bad.

Keep one thing in mind, they are comparing the water results with drinking water standards. Suffice to say, no one is going to be drinking that water.

Furthermore I would be very interested to know what the background levels were like in the river and lake prior to the hurricane.

Originally posted by darkelf

You are talking about drying out a city that is almost never dry anyway. Annual rainfall in NOLA is over 60 inches. Add the fact that most of it is below sea level and must be pumped daily to prevent it from becoming a lake. Also things don't dry very well in that high humidity. All they are doing right now is pumping the standing water out.

So in other words, the rain washes down the city on a regular basis.

Yes there is sewage issues in the water. Yes they will have to clean it up, but they have to do that in every major city that floods anyway. They had to do that in the Mississippi river cities that flooded a decade back. Remember the flood that hit Des Moines?

Before we start complaining about a cover up and that the city will be inhabitable for 10 years, let’s try to get some hard data first, shall we?

I don’t doubt that there will be areas, especially in the industrial sectors, that will have some lingering issues that will have to be dealt with, but I doubt that they will be any worse than the issues that they were dealing with before the hurricane. This in not a pristine wildlife preserve, this is a major shipping port and oil terminal with refineries all over the place, and it’s in Louisiana, a state not known for the quality of it’s environmental protection program.