Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Oil Companies Toxic Compensation Matrix: Katrina

The disenfranchisement of White Orleanians
By Isiah Scott

Collectively the drivers of oil and chemical production in New Orleans regional economy would force to come up with the money. That is, the political economy of Southern Louisiana is B.F Goodrich, E.I. du Pont, Union Carbide, Reynolds Meals, Shell, Texaco, ExxonMobil, Mosanto, Uniroyal, Georgia-Pacific, Hydrocarbon Industries, Vulcan Materials, Nalco Chemicals, Freeport Chemicals, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, Stauffer Chemical, Hooker Chemicals, American Petrofina, and Total SA. These companies face the potential of a trillion dollar claim to toxic flooding of southern Louisiana following hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Alone with their interlocking banking counter parts, the major US international banks, are the most powerful lobby in American history.

Flood waters the agent of contamination
The oil and chemical companies studied the new hurricane threat and the cost potential to their operation years before Katrina. The five powerful hurrcanie in the last part 2004 was a bad year for oil compensation.

Just 10,000 victims being paid 5 million each would amount to an oil/chemical industry payout of 50 billion dollars. Over 300,000 people were left behind after Katrina.

The oil companies knew that the 35 feet storm surges would carry the toxic chemicals to many local communities costing the oil and chemical companies over a trillion dollars in legal claims and infrastructure damage to public schools, hospitals and public housing.

It would cost the oil and chemical companies tens of billions of dollars to protect oil and chemical infrastructure and near cities, towns and communities against the oil and chemical toxic spills.

A political fix with the White House was far cheaper.

The oil companies were defenseless against the new class of killer hurricanes and public opinion. The oil companies refused to make the necessary upgrade to protect the local communities.

The Oval Office and the US military were the cheapest and only sure way for the oil companies to manage this potential horrific legal and public relations crisis. The US military had demonstrated the strategic value of total information control and management in Iraq and 2004-hurricane season in Florida. The US military and EPA oil industry support operation would be easily hidden behind National Security political firewalls and kept out of court until public opinion died down.

When the oil lobby called the White House in the summer of 2005, the Oval Office crisis team overreacted.

Test conducted at 33 location s in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resource Defense Council, show especially elevated levels of arsenic, but also high amount of load, dioxin, chromium and other hazardous substance well above safe standards. New Orleans and its surrounding parishes host 66 chemical plants, bulk-storage facilities that contain 878 different chemical combinations. The nation’s most hazardous Superfund sites are in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina also flooded them.

According to Wilma Subra, a MacArthur Prize winner, the big problem is sediment that sat on the bottom of rivers and other bodies collecting industrial chemical contamination and agricultural runoff. The sediment was relatively harmless in situ, now it being deposited all over New Orleans by the storm.

According to Dr. Peter L. deFur, a biologist who conducts research on environment health and ecological risk assessment at Virginia Commonwealth Institute, says one of the possible longer-term effects (arsenics) are cancer and birth defects. Children are most at risk from exposure to the sediment, he says, “because they are both closer to the ground and more susceptible to toxic exposure because of their developing status.” A recent Columbia University/Mailman School of Public Health Study found that children exposed to arsentic-tained water from wells in Bangladesh faced reduced intellectual function.

According to E Magazine article “ARSENIC AND OLD WASTE” Federal inundation maps show that floodwaters reached 25 feet outside the Dupont southern Mississippi DeLisle chemical facility and may have engulfed retention ponds known to contain high dioxin levels. The Dupont was one of hundreds of cases that companies failed to protect the local communities from toxic spills. The nation’s most hazardous Superfund sites are in New Orleans, and Hurricane Katrina also flooded them. These five sites include the Thompson-Hayward chemical plant and the Agricultural Street Landfill. US PIRG reports that Thompson-Hayward produced pesticides and herbicides, including DDT and Agent Orange…

The Agricultural Street Landfill, 95 acres of municipal and industrial waste located between Lake Pontchartrain and the French Quarter, suffered from regular underground fire and was nicknamed “Dante’s Inferno”…. analysis shows that mold, some of it toxic, is widespread at very high levels. Sampling by NRDC in Mid-City neighborhood in November found outdoor spore count of 102,000 per cubic meter. The American Academy of Allergy and Immunology says any level above 50,00 per cubic meter is very high. Inside homes, levels of 640,000 spores per cubic meter were detected.

Katrina cough
The worst danger from the sediment is in New Orleans’ poorest neighborhoods. According to the Brookings Institution, 38 of the city’s 49 poorest districts were flooded. And 80 perecent of the neighthoods under water had non-white majorities.
New Orleans remains abashed in contamination and toxic debris.

As of December, New Orleans has gotten only 19 million in federal emergency funding

The oil companies, the US military, USDEP and Homeland Security had developed a hurricane compensation suppression template using the state of Florida to keeping claims under control. This template was used with increasing effectiveness in 2004 hurricane season. The key was to gain immediate transference of first responder’s toxic chemical recovery to the USDEP. The mission critical legal data and reports would be generated by the USDEP, not state or private reporting agencies out side the loop.

This would allow the oil and chemical companies the legal leverage to force victim to take their terms in out of court settlements. Using this de facto template, oil and chemical companies save billion of dollars in compensation.

As of this writing Murray Oil Company is paying flood victims 2,500 per person compensation and 12 dollars per square foot for 1,800 damages homes for oil and chemical toxic damages. For a 2,000 square foot home, the compensation would 24,000 dollars for the home and 10,000 for a family of four!

The power and scale of Katrina would stress the template, but did not break it.

The federalization of the Louisiana National Guard was the migration of the Florida template to Louisiana and Katrina. The imperative of the federalization was driven by the fear of the trillion dollar exposure of the oil/chemical companies.

The Oil Company’s enlistment of President Bush and the US military to contain its legal exposure during Katrina was a ruthless business decision driven by the scale of the potential exposure.

President Bush chief of staff was a lead man is compensation suppression under President Bush’s father.

White racism direct at Black Americans was a critical, but secondary aspect of a master plan to minimized exposure and compensation to the million people, most white effected by the oil/chemical spills. President Bush decision-making process was oil centric, not just white racism centric. These, who over focus on the white racism directed toward African Americans, miss the forest for a few trees for the trillion-dollar compensation.

The oil companies IOU the people of the New Orleans industrial region is over a trillion dollars in pain and suffering, long-term health cost, property lost and public infrastructure recovery.

Without the flooding of the Black ghettos of New Orleans and the real-time TV coverage of the abandonment of Black and poor white stranded in New Orleans, most Americans would be protesting the low amounts of oil company’s compensations to the flood victims, not the suffering of the poor Negro faced out New Orleans.

Anywhere in the New Orleans region that Katrina floodwaters hit people would most likely get fatally ill and homes were damages or destroyed. In the lower Ninth ward in New Orleans with a population of almost a 100,000 New Orleanian, homes sat in toxic chemical water for months. Over 200,000 home in the New Orleans region were impacted and hundred of thousands of people got sick.


“... Regarding toxicology, a number of these substances or chemicals
are hormone-disrupting chemicals (endocrine disrupters), that can be
carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction (CMRs) for human beings, and therefore susceptible to induce cancers, congenital malformations and/or
infertility; whereas some of these substances or products can be, among
other effects, allergenic resulting in chronic respiratory diseases, such as
asthma; whereas some are neurotoxic chemicals, leading to degenerative
diseases of the central nervous system in adult population and to
intellectual impairment in children; whereas some are immunotoxic, leading
to immunodeficiency, particularly in children, causing infections,
especially viral infections; whereas pesticides are deliberately spread in
large amounts in the environment, while a great number are toxic chemical
pollutants for animals and/or human beings and for the environment,...”

The oil lobby knew years before Katrina hit that the financial potential of the hundreds of toxic chemical and oil spills from a flooded Exxon Mobil refinery and other major oil and chemical plants would bankrupt many oil companies if not all major oil multinationals.

At the core of the financial threat to oil companies from a major hurricane was a trillion dollar potential personal claim compensation threat person burns from chemical spills.

The legal containment of the contamination from the mix of sewage, pesticides, fertilizers and other toxic chemicals in the waters in New Orleans and other communities ravaged by the Katrina was the top priority of New York City legal staff of the major oil companies with facilities in the North Gulf of Mexico.

The forces of Katrina and the 35-foot storm surge and 8 miles inland reach would attach most of the 350 oil and chemical facilities in the hurricane footprint. Most of these oil and chemical facilities were old and poorly maintained. Also these facilities store hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemicals that would endanger the health of any of the people left behind who came in direct contact via floodwaters.

With 90 perecent of the oil and chemical plants at risk in the Mexico Gulf from emerging military class hurricanes, oil companies remain at serious financial risk of bankruptcy from Katrina like hurricanes.

With no meaningful levees protection or drainage plans for most the oil/chemical plants and refineries they would leak massive amounts of toxic chemical into the floodwater, that would be then be carried to the 2.2 million people living in local cities, towns and communities far from the plant locations.

A fair and just Katrina compensations potentially would create tens of thousand of Black and poor white first time millionaires paid not by the taxpayers, but the oil companies. Over 100,000 people should get 500,000 dollars of compensation. The cities, towns and communities would easy get over a 125 billion dollar from the oil companies to clean up the toxic spills and waste. The oil companies would potentially be forced to payout tens of billions of dollars for many years.

New Orleans region 2.2 million people

Oil/Chemical toxic compensation
150 billion small businesses
200 billion homes
500 billion health claims
20 billion public schools
10 billion hospitals
125 billion environmental clean

1.05 Trillion dollars Total compensation

Oil companies fear of Hurricanes not destroying New Orleans

For many years the oil industry greatest fear was the financial consequences of a major hurricane event in the New Orleans region that left thousands of people with personal and property claims against oil and chemical companies. The higher level of the 9/11 compensation deepens the American Ruhr fear of a major man-made toxic event in the New Orleans industrial region.

Just 500 chemical burn claims at 2 million dollars each would total over one billion dollars. 9/11 made the million dollars level of compensation the moral expectation for most American outside the Deep South. Just 10,000 payable personal claim cases would potential expose the oil companies to 20 billion dollars.

There were over 300,000 people Black and poor white citizens who were forced to walk and drink chemically toxic water in the New Orleans region. Another two million mostly white citizens have homes flooded by oil and chemical toxic water.

The oil industry’s worse nightmare had developed in the early summer of 2004 and again in 2005. Powerful new class hurricanes were forming in the Atlantic Ocean and attacking cities in the Gulf of Mexico. These new classes of killer hurricanes packed 200 blastwinds; 35 feet storm surges that each eight miles inland.

The oil- centric architecture of the federal military deployment was designed to allow the US NORTH Command and Admiral Keating the military means to take direct controlled of the recovery phase of the any hurricane crisis in order to ensure that all critical and legal information from the crisis would flow through the US military chain of command and the US Department of Environmental Protection. The US Coast Guard and other federal forces would take over the first responder’s roles from the local states and FEMA.

Without US military command and control operational protection, the oil companies would be forced to work with weak state first responder agencies and courts to protect themselves. The US media and compensation lawyers would have field day.
According to the “Wall Street Journal”, the Pentagon had already carried out the necessary preparation to rescue New Orleans without any formal request by any state; Katrina related request from FEMA, or other authority. Naval forces of 21 ships had put to sea at the request of the oil industry.

US Space Command position layers of satellites and Special Forces secretly deployed military intelligence units into the target states at the request of the oil industry. Oilmen spooks from around the world were bought to New Orleans to help the US military and federal agencies cover up the degree and scale of the toxic contamination in the New Orleans.
According to Assistant Secretary of Defense, "The US military has never deployed a larger, better resource civil support capability so rapidly in the history of our country." This deployment was to provide the infrastructure for the US EPA cover-up operation, not to rescue people.

FEMA would not be entrusted to any aspect of this joint oil industrial/US military operation.

US Space Command SORC (Spectral Operation Resource Center) has developed detail street satellite imageries of target cities in Florida and New Orleans. Oil and chemical plants and refineries were targeted on the maps. These imageries would be critical for non-local forces conducting search and recovery and if need be military assisted clean up missions.

The New York-based oil lobby quietly moved on the mission critical Princeton NOAA findings and forced the White House to quietly deploy a massive federal military force to the Gulf of Mexico to be ready to contain and protected damage to oil interests. The deployment was done under the misinformation campaign of war games for a possible invasion of Northern Venezuela.

The power of Katrina like hurricanes would serve to mix and then carry deadly chemicals in floodwater eight miles inland exposing over a million people and putting the oil companies at greater legal risk.

The daily reports of US Space Command satellites surveillance over New Orleans region and NORTH Command ground units before and during Katrina came ashore that went to President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby from the Pentagon.

A key element of the US Space Command deployment to New Orleans a week before the storm was the Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) satellite network, which allowed US Space Command and North Command to view in real time video feed, the entire region of southern Louisiana. US Space Commands could see and track where the oil/chemical spills appeared and the rate they were spreading. Larger objects like levees and chemical plants could be tracked and analyzed in depth.

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