After 22 years, Joan Davis finally received the letter.
It arrived in January, informing her how much she would be getting under the terms of a class action lawsuit settlement filed against the city, the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Orleans Parish School Board.
No matter the amount, Davis knew it could never make her whole. But she hoped it would help to pay her rent and medical costs. And above all, she hoped it would send a message that the city was finally accepting responsibility for the nightmare that had been unleashed on the people who had made their homes atop the buried poisons in the Agriculture Street Landfill.
In the urban renewal drive of the 1960s and 1970s, the city and HANO built two communities in the 9th Ward — Press Park and Gordon Plaza — as part of an effort aimed at giving low-income families the chance to move out of the public housing projects and become first-time homebuyers. To many it seemed like a life-changing opportunity. The School Board even built a $6 million elementary school in the heart of the neighborhood.
Davis, whose family was one of the first to move into the community, said she experienced a normal childhood in Press Park. She remembers shooting marbles and playing Double Dutch while her mother spent hours in her garden, tending vegetables to feed her 13 children.
But there was something wrong with the land, she said. There was something in the soil that seemed to be making everyone sick.
What the city and HANO failed to tell the residents and what the School Board failed to tell the families of Moton Elementary School is that just a few feet below the grass was 20 feet of compacted industrial waste riddled with 49 cancer-causing chemicals.
The federal government confirmed the danger in 1994 when it declared the communities a Superfund site, one of the most contaminated in the country.
The residents sued in Civil District Court, and in 2006 former Judge Nadine Ramsey ruled in their favor, ordering the city, the school board, HANO and four insurers of the housing authority, to pay them for emotional stress and property damage.
Ramsey blasted the city for lying to the residents and doing “virtually nothing to address the fact that there are citizens of this city, in particular, children, the most vulnerable of the population, living on a toxic waste dump,” Ramsey wrote. “It was not the plaintiffs who developed low-income housing and a school on a former landfill. (They) were given the promise of the American dream of homeownership wrapped in a poisonous box.”
More than eight years later, after countless appeals and extended negotiations, thousands of settlement notification letters were sent to the residents of Press Park and Gordon Plaza.
The moment had finally come.
Sitting in her eastern New Orleans home during a recent week in March, with a scarf concealing the top of her head, made bald from repeated chemotherapy treatments, Davis said she has spent the past two decades fighting various forms of cancer — all of which she blames on the landfill — including breast, rectal, lung and brain. At 58-years-old, she is now battling stage-four terminal cancer of the lymph nodes.
Nothing would give her back her health, Davis said, but maybe she could use part of her settlement to start a foundation for poor people struggling with cancer. Maybe she could spend her remaining years traveling the world, trying to make up for the time she lost hooked to machines in various emergency rooms, undergoing countless surgeries and spending hundreds of hours in bed, immobilized with pain.
Maybe she could finally forgive, now that it seemed those responsible were trying to make things right.
And with those thoughts in her head, Davis said she opened her envelope and looked at the figure: $4,843.15.
That works out to $138.37 for each year she lived on a toxic dump.
And the worst part, Davis said, is that the money came from a handful of insurance companies that represented the housing authority more than two decades ago. The city and its agencies continue to deny responsibility and refuse to pay the residents.
“The people who are responsible for the Agriculture Street Landfill have never apologized, have never said, ‘We’re sorry you guys lived here and you didn’t know and some of you have health problems.’ You never hear nothing from nobody that knew that this landfill was toxic and it was cancer. I think they haven’t done that because I don’t think they feel they’re responsible. Nobody wants to face up to it.”
The School Board and HANO declined to comment for this story citing the ongoing litigation. The Landrieu administration emailed the following statement: “The City has made and will continue to make efforts to resolve this litigation.”
‘We didn’t know what was in it and found out it was poison’
In 1909 the city designated an area bordered by Almonaster and Higgins boulevards, Louisa Street and the Peoples Avenue Canal as its official waste site. This was the Agriculture Street Landfill.
Tons of garbage were dumped every day in the 95-acre tract of land, including medical and industrial waste, mounds of incinerator ash and the carcasses of dead animals including cows and horses. The landfill swarmed with rats and insects prompting the city to drench the area with now-banned pesticides.
Click graphic to view full size
Click graphic to view full size
The dump was closed in 1958 after widespread complaints from neighbors that the landfill was a public health hazard. The city temporarily reopened the site in 1965 to dispose of the debris left in the wake of Hurricane Betsy. An estimated 300 truckloads of trash and waste were dumped in the landfill and burned every day for nine months. Years later, the still-burning material would create underground fires that erupted through the surface in small spouts of smoke, flames and gases, earning it the nickname Dante’s Inferno.
This was the land on which the city and HANO chose to build low-income housing and where the school board built an elementary school. At the time, the federal government was providing billions of dollars to cities to develop new housing for poor families. The goal was to move people out of housing projects, give them an opportunity for first-time homeownership, and create jobs.
The city chose the dump site to build Press Park in 1969 because it was a large tract of undeveloped land next to the Desire housing development where the people who would benefit most from the new homeownership program lived. City officials said at the time that the presence of toxic chemicals in the soil never entered their minds.
Few residents thought about it either until the dangers became very obvious and real.
Shannon Rainey, who was one of the first homebuyers in Gordon Plaza, said it was an exciting time, being able to purchase her first home at the age of 26. But she said she suspected something was wrong when, shortly after she moved in, a large container popped out of her lawn one day like a watermelon.
“(We) didn’t know what was in it and found out it was poison, it was chemicals. And that’s when we found out it was a dumpsite,” she said.
Rainey, now 60 years old, recently underwent surgery after experiencing severe stomach pain, her third major procedure in the past decade. Prior to that she had an operation to repair the nerves in her legs that were growing around her spine. The doctors suspected radon poisoning, she said. Before that Rainey had a complete hysterectomy following a cancer scare.
The total amount of her settlement was $6,237.97 — $2,363.45 for property damage and $3,874.52 for emotional distress.
“I just don’t understand why they’re doing this to us,” said Rainey, who is one of a few dozen people who still live on the site. For the past 22 years, she said, they have begged their elected officials, from former mayors Marc Morial and Ray Nagin to current Mayor Mitch Landrieu, to buy them out or to pay for moving them from their now-worthless homes. No relocation money has been forthcoming.
“They’re just allowing us to sit back here on this dumpsite dying off,” she said. “I’ve been raising my granddaughter since she was 9 months old. She’s 7 now and I’m afraid she might get sick or get cancer. She talks about how her stomach hurts all the time.”
‘The Court finds the defendants’ conduct shocking’
The courts have ruled that the city, HANO and the school board are responsible for what happened to the people of Press Park and Gordon Plaza, and the families and employees of Moton School.
After a two-month trial, Ramsey found the city and HANO liable and ordered them to pay the people of the Agriculture Street Landfill for the full market value of their homes and up to $50,000 for emotional distress, depending on how many years they had lived on the site. She also ordered the New Orleans School Board to pay the students and employees of Moton $2,000 for each year they were at the school.
The residents weren’t awarded damages for any physical ailments because there wasn’t decisive medical evidence linking specific diseases to the contaminants in the soil, according to the judgment.
But, multiple tests conducted by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals in 2003 and the Agency for Toxics Study and Disease Registry found elevated incidents of breast cancer in the area with one study finding a 60 percent excess of the disease.
Other health surveys found that 86 percent of households suffered from stress, 67 percent had asthma, bronchitis, sinus problems, emphysema and upper respiratory problems, and 66 percent experienced dizziness or feelings of being faint.
The city, HANO and the school board pleaded ignorance, according to court documents, saying they had no idea that the site was contaminated, and said it was up to the residents to know about the landfill’s history.
Ramsey rejected that defense.
“Throughout 13 years of litigation, the defendants continually fail to comprehend that it was their failure to make a reasonable operational decisions that subject them to liability,” she wrote in her ruling.
“To this day, neither the city nor HANO took any steps to inquire about the safety of the residents. As for the school board, the risk of the toxic landfill was well known by the time Moton School was built in 1986.”
“The Court finds the defendants’ conduct shocking … and particularly offensive and egregious because of its heightened duty in the realm of elementary school children.”
The city, HANO and the School Board appealed Ramsey’s ruling, successfully getting the Louisiana 4th Circuit Court of Appeal to cut the emotional distress damages in half. But that didn’t mean they were committed to paying the judgment.
‘We paid for this death’
The city, and its related political entities, are protected by the state Constitution from having their assets seized, effectively rendering them immune to such judgments. That protection has created a long line of people waiting to get paid. Going back to 1996, the city owes $34.7 million in court-ordered judgments to more than 600 people on a variety of claims.
The only hope for the plaintiffs was to go after the insurers. And out of the three agencies being sued, only HANO had contracted with insurance companies between 1971 and 2002, the years they were found to be liable. The city and the School Board were self-insured.
The court ordered four former insurers of the housing authority — Republic Insurance Company, National Union Fire Insurance Company of Pittsburgh, Pa., U.S. Fire Insurance Company, and the Louisiana Guaranty Association — to deposit a combined $14.2 million into the court registry which would then be dispersed to the 5,053 people deemed eligible to receive settlement payments.
The amount the companies owed was based on the duration and nature of their coverage.
However, half of the $14.2 million went to the five attorneys who represented the class — Suzette Bagneris, Joseph Bruno, Linda Harang, George Roux and Stephen Murray — and the court’s administrative expenses that include the appointment of special master Paul Valteau. That left just $7 million for the residents. The settlement amounts paid to each person — based on the number of years they lived on the site and how long they owned their homes, among other criteria — amounted to a few thousand dollars each.
Since they can’t force the city, HANO or the School Board to pay, it’s likely the only money they will ever see from the case.
Samuel Egana, who purchased his four-bedroom home in Gordon Plaza in 1981, received $4,843.15 for emotional distress and $2,573.26 for the value of his property, which he said he couldn’t sell now for $1. His wife, Betty Jean, received the same amount. She died nearly three years ago from a multiple myeloma.
The settlement isn’t enough to fix his truck much less pay for a move, Egana said.
“They were doing us a favor, right? I lost my wife but hey, that’s one less mouth to feed. I guess that’s the way they see it. They probably don’t give a damn one way or another. Let all of them die. It’s all right. And they didn’t give us anything. We paid for this death.”
‘We want them to clear us out of here’
In September, Landrieu made his first visit to the Agriculture Street Landfill site since taking office in 2010. He met several community members in Rainey’s home and then took a tour of the neighborhood with HANO executive director Gregg Fortner and other city officials.
The community, once home to thousands of people, is now largely abandoned. After the neighborhood was flooded when the levees failed after Hurricane Katrina, HANO fenced in the 221 rent-to-own townhouse units that made up Press Park, later demolishing 154 that had not yet been purchased.
Today, all that is left of the Press Park community the city once touted as a gateway into the American Dream are 67 privately owned buildings — vacant, graffiti-covered structures rotting behind a chain-link fence affixed with HANO signs that threaten trespassers with prosecution.
Davis’ sister, Wendy Davis White, said that it doesn’t seem right that her family continues to pay taxes on a house they can’t even touch.
A HANO official, in an emailed response, said, “The fence was installed in 2009 for public safety reasons. The payment of property taxes is the law, and the city would have to forgive homeowner tax payments. This has nothing to do with HANO.”
The only residents still living on the landfill site are a few dozen people who own the single-family houses that make up Gordon Plaza, including Rainey and Egana. They returned after the storm only because, financially, they didn’t have any other options, said Egana who restored his home by himself.
“Basically, I couldn’t afford to do anything different. I would have liked to be able to move to English Turn but I can’t. Am I going to start over at 70 years old and try to pay a 30-year mortgage? And who the hell is going to buy my house?”
City officials declined to comment on the possibility of relocating the few remaining residents. They pointed, instead, to a number of improvements the administration made in the neighborhood after Landrieu’s September visit, including the clearing of 2,000 feet of sidewalks, repairing and converting 487 conventional streetlights to energy-efficient LED streetlights, eliminating blight, and removing overgrowth and illegal dumping.
But, old tires continue to litter the sidewalks and there is blight throughout the area. Moton School, Press Park, and the seven buildings that make up the senior apartment complex, are all abandoned. And there is a gaping hole large enough to drive a car through in the fencing that surrounds a 45-acre undeveloped tract of land that contains some of the most toxic soil in the area, according to government reports.
Rainey scoffed at the city’s response and said those who are left on the site don’t care about the minor improvements touted by the Landrieu administration.
“We’re not concerned about them clearing the sidewalks. We want them to clear us out of here. We’re concerned about them moving us,” she said. “Are they putting in new lights so they can see us dying more clearly?”
‘I got to hope and pray that nothing happens with them’
After Davis received her settlement letter, a series of hearings was scheduled in February before Judge Tiffany Chase in Civil District Court so the residents could contest the amounts being offered.
Chase listened patiently but overruled the majority of their objections. She said her hands were tied, that there was only a limited amount of money to disburse to the thousands of people affected.
“Some days I don’t like my job and this is one of them,” Chase said.
And then Davis appeared in court. She stood before the judge, her head wrapped in a bandana, her leg fixed in a brace, her frail body ravaged with cancer. She described how her life had been ruined by disease, how the $4,000 she had been offered was a slap in the face, how it made her feel like less than a person, someone the city felt it could so easily discard.
“I don’t feel I can ever be accommodated for what I’ve gone through,” Davis said as she bent over the podium and wept.
Chase called a recess, excused herself from the bench, and disappeared into her chambers as tears streamed down her face.
Davis said she tries to lean on her faith in God, to give her strength, but often she wonders why He chose her to endure what she has been forced to endure.
And then her thoughts turn to her family, and her two children, now in their 30s, who she raised on the Agriculture Street Landfill.
“I got to hope and pray that nothing happens with them. My daughter, she says, ‘Oh Ma, I’m so afraid because if I have to go through what you’re going through, I’m not going to make it.’ She’s very frightened.”
Davis wipes the tears away as she continues, her voice wavering.
“I just say, well, I guess this is what the good Lord put me here to deal with,” she said. “But it just confuses me so. Y’all don’t have an idea because the thing of it is, everybody else can just walk on, but I got this to live with the rest of my life. I’m tired of Press Park.”