Left Adrift A Toxic Nightmare in New Orleans’ Marinas

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Left Adrift

A Toxic Nightmare in New Orleans’ Marinas

 

By Troy Gilbert

_http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3932_ (http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3932)

 

More than 200 children from around the country traveled to New Orleans in

June of 2006 to compete in a two-day youth sailing championship on Lake

Pontchartrain. The kids, some as young as eight, launched their seven-foot

sailboats

and sailed out to the course, dodging the nearly 200 derelict, foundered

sail and powerboats still littering the city’s largest marina, the Municipal

Yacht Harbor at West End.

The forest of masts rising from the dark, brackish waters only hint at the

environmental hazards concealed below. The Municipal Yacht Harbor has yet to

be cleaned up from the worst effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005,

highlighting a disconnect between all levels of government that still

continues. This

past summer, another youth sailing championship was held at the same marina,

with work only just begun on removing the dead boats.

Ben Goliwas, who lives aboard his boat at the marina, was astounded when he

finally returned to the city in May of 2006 and discovered the near-total

lack of progress and clean-up since the storm. He called upon the members of

the

New Orleans and Southern Yacht Clubs to volunteer their time removing

floating and submerged debris, and they responded. Taking time away from

rebuilding

their homes and businesses, the volunteers attempted to raise a few boats

blocking the channels, using truck inner tubes and inflatable racing marks, but

were severely under equipped. Goliwas says, “We only touched the surface. We

removed maybe 30,000 pounds of wreckage, but unfortunately that was only a

small part of it. Everything you could imagine was in that marina.â€

During the storm, several marine service yards and nearly 102 boathouses and

their contents were washed into the marina, along with more than 450 large

wooden dockboxes stationed at each boat slip. The boxes held a stew of paints,

solvents, oils, batteries, fiberglass resin and other chemicals. All of this

debris sat on the marina bottom alongside the rusting and deteriorating

boats, many with their fuel tanks full of diesel. Goliwas says, “You

wouldn’t

want any of that stuff down there in your living room. We were only able to

pull out hot water heaters, refrigerators, parts of walls and other

unidentifiable large wooden things.â€

Carlton Dufrechou, the president of the active environmental group known as

the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, wanted a thorough inventory. He

says, “We really needed to determine what and how much was down there. It’s

guaranteed that something was leaking. We just didn’t know the magnitude of

it,

but leaving it in place was never an option.â€

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), at the request of

Orleans Parish, took over the leadership role for the problem of removing the

estimated 125 sunken vessels remaining in Municipal Harbor at the end of

2006. But after several site visits, the DEQ began to grasp the extent of the

potential hazards. When Bruce Hammatt, the DEQ official managing the project,

saw the young racers, he came away convinced of the need to be thorough. “I

knew the cleanup had to include a sweep of the marina bottom,†he says.

“Kids

were out there having a regatta.â€

The Louisiana DEQ was ready to bid a marina clean-up contract at the

beginning of this year, but was dogged with delays from the Federal Emergency

Management Agency (FEMA) bureaucracy. The major snag was that the federal

government requires local governments to advance either the full amount or, in

some

cases, 10 percent of the costs for infrastructure reconstruction before it will

reimburse or release matching funds.

With the city of New Orleans nearing bankruptcy, with tax revenues from the

decimated population and businesses far below their pre-Katrina levels, the

city is forced to prioritize and juggle projects and dollars. This has left

FEMA sitting on billions of dollars in recovery aid with almost none of that

money making its way to the affected areas. It took nearly two years for

Congress to finally eliminate this local dollar match, a requirement that was

quickly eliminated for every other major disaster site including Hurricane

Andrew

in 1985 and the 9/11 attacks.

New Orleans’ officials who deal on a daily basis with their FEMA

counterparts call it “the million-dollar queueâ€â€”a giant stack of project

worksheets and

documentation for only the first step in a long list of steps to release

federal money for rebuilding damaged public infrastructure.

While the boating community has long understood that marinas are a low

priority when compared to the infrastructure needs of the city, they make an

argument for quality of life and protecting the jobs of marine service

companies,

all of which have reopened. They add that the West End and Lakeview

neighborhoods, inundated by more than 10 feet of water from the federal levee

failures, are nearing a critical mass in their recovery. The area needs only a

small

push from government to ensure the neighborhoods’ return to life. Rebuilding

the marina could very well be that push.