The Environmental Protection Agency’s new director of environmental justice for the New Orleans region took a brief tour Tuesday (May 26) of an Upper 9th Ward community that was built decades ago by the city on top of a toxic waste dump.
Standing in front of the vacant and blighted Moton Elementary School on Abundance Street, Arturo Blanco listened as several people peppered him with questions. But he had few answers to offer the remaining residents of the Agriculture Street Landfill.
Shannon Rainey, who lives in the Gordon Plaza development, asked Blanco if the EPA could help the remaining residents move from the contaminated site and into new homes.
“I am begging you to please help us because we are dying back here,” Rainey said.
“Our politicians, they don’t want to help us. They just turn their backs on us. We just don’t know where to go.”
Samuel Egana, who lives across the street from Rainey, said that they can never get a straight answer from their elected leaders, from all levels of government, and asked that the Region 6 Director of Environmental Justice and Tribal Affairs shed some light on their situation.
“It seems like every time we get a chance to speak with anyone with authority, for whatever reason they put their foot on your head and say, ‘You’re back to square one,'” Egana said. “Each time we try to get some kind of recognition, we get punched in the face and it’s really truly heartbreaking.”
Blanco, who declined to be interviewed, said that he was there to “listen and understand what’s going on” and that he would bring back concerns to people more familiar with the case.
As for Rainey’s question as to whether the EPA would pay to move the remaining residents, Blanco said, “Whether it’s a possibility or not is anybody’s guess.”
Between 1969 and 1980, the city and the Housing Authority of New Orleans built two residential communities–Press Park and Gordon Plaza–on top of land that was the city’s waste dump for more than five decades.
The residents, who were not told about the land’s history, filed a class action lawsuit in 1994 after the federal government declared the community a Superfund site, one of the most contaminated in the country. In 2006, the court found the city, HANO and the Orleans Parish School Board liable for emotional distress and property damage. They have denied responsibility, refusing to pay the residents compensation or the costs to move them off the landfill.
Blanco was making his first trip to New Orleans since being hired by the EPA in February. The trip was billed as an opportunity to “engage in meaningful conversation with (environmental justice) leaders on how to work collaboratively to address issues in Region 6 communities.” Region 6 includes Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and 66 tribes.
Blanco met with local environmental justice leaders and also toured the proposed location for the new Booker T. Washington High School.
The Recovery School District plans to spend $55 million rebuilding the school on top of the former location of the Silver City Dump in Central City. The RSD intends to remediate the land to protect future students from toxic chemicals found as deep as 15 feet below the surface. The plan has been approved by FEMA and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, but some community members and elected officials say it is too dangerous a risk to take.
Jim Raby, with the Walter L. Cohen Alumni Association, accompanied Blanco on the tour. He pointed to the shuttered Moton Elementary School that was built on top of nearly 20 feet of toxic chemicals and was forced to close by the federal government in 1994, just seven years after it opened.
“We’re saying you’ve got exactly the same situation, why duplicate it,” Raby said. “It didn’t work here, what makes you think it’s going to work now?”