Oil Lobby makes move on next toxic nightmare in New Orleans
Oil lobby makes move on next Petrochemical “Dante’s Inferno” in East New Orleans
Oil industry master plan for a group of toxic waste dumps in New Orleans move closer reality.
East New Orleans today, Lower Ninth Ward after the first major flood
By Isiah Scott
On Fed 14, Mayor Ray Nagin used his emergency powers to suspend the city’s zoning ordinance and grant a condition use permit to Waste Management for the Chef Menteur landfill in exchange for a donation of 22 perecent of the gross revenue of the new landfill to the city of New Orleans. This "thing for a thing "political arrangement was a national embarrassment for the mayor. Even lewis Libby could have doe a better job of coving up his mistake
Having been publicly discredited in the national media, the mayor, so-called diamond in the rough Margie Eugene-Richard and the rest of New Orleans city government is now forced to process a second multinational waste management group, Newport Environmental Services (NES) LLC, which owns a 700-area parcel along Paris Road. The NES landfill project is 9 times the size of the Chef Menteur and would be the largest in the country. The NES Group has also applied for a state permit and two federal permits needed to open the landfill and apears to have connection all the way to the Oval Office.
The new landfills in East New Orleans are the latest in a series of pre-Katrina carefully designed backroom political moves by the oil lobby to fast track removal of toxic petrochemical debris removal from the New Orleans in order to save paying out billions while limiting their legal exposure.
Over five million cubic yards of debris has been force into the city dump at Gentilly and other dumps located in the city.
The New Orleans region has reportedly over 55 million cubic yards of waste that must be removed and nowhere to legally dump in the city of New Orleans.
The existing and plans dumps cannot legal handle all the additional waste. Abandoned industrials parks and flooded ghettos in the inner city flooded by Katrina and Rita offer the oil companies the cheapest solution to their need for landfills for their oil and chemical toxic waste.
An unknown but very toxic amount of petrochemical waste must be disposed secretly to limit legal claims to oil and chemical companies.
The cost of making the contaminated inner city communities livable by humans and replacement of the schools, colleges, hospitals and other public infrastructure would cost the oil and chemical companies hundreds of billion of dollars. The oil lobby to date has refused to even acknowledge, much less pay this multi billion-dollar social infrastructure cost. The oil lobby has quietly build support within the business community, Black city leadership and the state leader for local creation of toxic waste dumps within the city of New Orleans in order to saving money in clean up costs while hidding the real degree of petrochemical contamination.
The politician problem is the fact that the oil lobby fears the local white reaction to paying Black homeowners billions of dollars to create private toxic waste dumps in the inner city ghettos. In addition, the oil lobby does not want the general public to know for legal reasons, the degree of actual petrochemical –based contamination still in the region. The depth of petrochemical contamination would be revealed when the thousands of special toxic waste trucks came to transport the toxic waste out New Orleans to private waste dumps.
The nation and the mostly displaced New Orleans African American community returns home to vote, it is trumaizated and transfixed once again by the New York Times and other media reporting of the new discovery of Black Americans bodies and bodies part in the debris in the lower Ninth. This latest chapter of the ongoing FEMA horror story is a critical part of a carefully designed oil lobby media deception to keep the national focus away from the political fight raging in East New Orleans over the new landfill.
A political fight is raging in Vietnamese Catholic East New Orleans community over the oil industry fast tracking Chef Menteur landfills an 88-acre site that has been twice rejected as a landfill. This critcal fight with the oil lobby has been almost completely black out of the mainstream by the oil centric reporting.
The new group of landfills is the next mission critical step in the oil lobby master plan for a network of toxic waste dumps within New Orleans that will be anchored by a even larger back drainage toxic waste water park in the Ninth Ward.
According to the BCC’s Horizon programme the future of the Lower Ninth ward is becoming imprisoned in a large issue of Louisiana’s precious wetlands. That is reportedly three-quarters of New Orleans annual wetland loss happened with Katrina. If the city is to fight “extinction”, according to the wetland argument logic, low lying areas like the Lower Ninth Ward built below sea level should be turned into green space, serving as buffers against floodwater. Embedded in the wetland designed is the potential for a dual use landfill and back drainage lake for periodic city flood. With a weaken 17th Street levee, leaking into the city, the Lower Ninth would as it catch basin. The landfill model for the Ninth Ward is being developed in the designed of the East New Orleans landfill borrows pits.
This future function of saving the city from flood, as a dual use parkland/landfill would set the political stage seizer of the remaining Black homes in the Lower Ninth Ward under an application of the new city power of ‘eminent domain’. This method of taking the land from the black homeowners avoids the political charged issue of the white reaction to Blacks being paid billions of dollar by a private Landfill company. Saving the city of New Orleans by taking the Lower NInth Ward would be the oil lobby battle cry, following the first flooding this year.
The East New Orleans landfill creates all the necessary laws to later do the politically sensitive Lower Ninth Ward.
The two East New Olreans landfills would take up a area larger than lower Manhattan or Old City, Philadelphia. According to the Times-Picayune, the proposed plan call for 110-foot-tall piles of debris, 30 feet of which would be below ground level in borrow pits, according to the permit. Thousands of these de facto open air chemical waste silos would dot East New Orleans near Lake Pontchartrian is immediate reach of Katrina storm surges. The first of the two new landfill would second in size to the Agricultural Street Landfill, 95 acres of municipal and industrial waste. That is nicknamed “Dante’s Inferno”.
The state of Louisiana has expanded the definition of construction and demolition debris includes petrochemical –based waste and “asbestos-containing materials”, among other things. The communities fear that this will open the door to illegal oil and chemical toxic dumping at the site. Waste Management of Louisiana secretly offered the cash –starved city of New Orleans, seven times the revenue (22 perecent of the gross revenue) it is current receiving from the city owned landfill to open the Chef new landfill, a stone’s throw from Bayou Sauvage, the largest urban national wildlife refuge in the Untied States.
The oil lobby needs a political cover too fast-track the new dump. The cove be push right now is the very real coming bankruptcy of the city of New Orleans and other toxic dump target cities in New Orleans like St.Bernard and Cameron metropolitan region.
According to the Time-Picayune, two government watchdog groups, the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) and the Public Affairs Research Council (PAR) are suggesting New Orleans considered as an option declaring bankruptcy, in order to reorganize it financial house. According to the Time-Picayune, the city of New Orleans projected revenue will drop from $260 million to only $110 million in 2006. The city debt load is projected to increase. The total outstanding debt stand at $964 million, with debt service estimated at $96 million this year.
The Bush administration and the media very carefully left out New Orleans short-term financial needs out of the $62 billion federal gave away grants in the winter. The President could pay the $ 964 million or the debt service of $96 million out of the $ 5 billion the oil companies pay to drill in federal oil fields off the coast of New Orleans. The oil companies could pick up the 96 million-debt service until the city and region is back on its feet’s. Exxon Mobile has 50 billion is near cash assets alone. The New Orleans financial crisis is political created by the oil lobby to force the creation of toxic waste dumps within the city to avoid paying hundred of billion of dollar in clean up and public infrastructure replacement costs.
What the Time-Picayune or the two government watchdog groups, the Bureau of Governmental Research and the Public Affairs Research Council fail to point is that for the period of recovery, during the bankruptcy the city would be run by a financial board of mainly out of town regional and national banks who primary function is to service the debt. In such a situation, toxic waste dumps would be viewed by the financial board as a means of generating revenues. The city would face to approve any request revenue generating waste dumps.
No one in his right mind would create another toxic waste dump in the city of New Orleans. Much less near communities with large numbers of yuong children.With the largest“Cancer Alley”, the stretch of the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, has more than 140 polluting chemical plants, oil refineries and industries routinely sending their waste discharge downwind or downstream, most into redlined neighborhood that are both black and poor. New Orleans has the nation’s most hazardous Superfund sites and Hurricane Katrina flooded them. According to the E Magazine these five sites include the Thompson-Hayward chemical plant and the Agricultural Street Land. U.S. PIRG reports that Thompson-Hayward prod produced pesticides and herbicides, including DDT and Agent Orange. Closed in 1986, the site was heavily contaminated with dioxin and other toxins and may have been reached by flood waters during Katrina.
The chemical contaminated sediment in the city, partuclarlty in the Lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans, has made the Black community primary target by the oil companies to archor the new series of toxic waste dumps within the city and region to save the oil companies and insurance industry from paying hundred of billion of dollars in oil and spills clean up costs.
The lower Ninth Ward is two square-mile neighborhood of small house, that was virtually obliterated by Hurricane Katria in 2005. If it were not for a very strong community and national Black support, the area should have a easy target for the oil lobby.
The neighborhood is idea backdrainage area for oil and chemical spills from upstream oil and chemical plant on the Mississippi River and norhtern New Orleans oil and chemical plants operating within the city. Half of the Lower Ninth Ward sits as much as 8 feet below sea level, but much of it is not on the flood plan. Most of the oil and chemical spills from Katrina settled in the neighborhood. This created a legal gold mine.
Rather than pay the peopele the billions of dollars the land is worth as a private toxic waster dump, the oil industry is trying to take the land out right and shift the cost of manitance to the federal Super fund or a priavte company. The oil and chemical companies fear that if they pay the Black peoeple in the Ninth Ward, the industrial fair market valuve of the Ninth Ward, other communities, partuclarly white communites will demand equal payment for the toxic dumps already in their communities.
The oil and chemical companies have been pushing for the creation of a series reopened and new toxic waste sites within the city of New Orleans to dump tons of illegal oil and chemical toxic waste.
Federal and state government of Louisana was been quietly buying properties in highly contamination New Orleans ghettos in order to create a toxic waste site to avoid having the oil companies pay billion of dollars to clean-up the ghetto .
Creation of a large toxic waste dump in the lower Ninth Ward would destroy the industrial core of the New Orleans region while killing the foreign manufacturing investments in New Orleans recovery.
According to Mr. Canizaro, a prominent real estate developer in New Orleans, “ It doesn’t take a genius to figure if you’re only going to have 40 or 50 percent of your original population(New Orleans), then there’s going to be shrinking in the amount of land that’s going to be needed.” Some experts have said that the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and other low-lying neighborhood should be returned to marshland.
What not being said is these same neighborhoods are worth 300 billion dollars in hidden contamination clean up costs that legally shuold be paid by the oil and chemical companies and not the US tax payers to the New Orleans region. The lower Ninth Ward at 60 percent Black home ownership has the highest African American ownership rate in the state of Louisiana. Black citizens in the lower Ninth Ward are legally entitled to billions of dollars for personal , property damages and the cost of clearing up the petrochemical contanments from the oil companies. Each thousand homeowner paid at one million each would one billion dollars. That not counting the replacement cost of chemically contanmentated water drains, schools, community centers, hospitals and other social infastrucutre.
Why do the oil companies have pay so much money? Because most of the oil and chemical companies spills were located or travaled to the low lying sections of the Black communities like the lower Ninth Ward via the toxic flood water. Even months after the hurricane the contanmentation is still in the water, soil and air.
To protect the oil companies from legal calims the federal has allowed the peoeple of New Orleans to return to their toxic communities. The US Department of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns New Orleans residents to avoid contact with arsenic sediments , but refuses to say that its not safe to move back to the ghetto. In many areas of the city and region all the top soil will have to be removed and put in special toxic waste dumps.
To do the clean up right in New Orleans, much of the top soil should be removed, particalrly for the safety of young children. According to E Magazine, a recent Columbia University/Mailman School of Public health found that children exposed to arenic-tainted water from wells in Bangladesh faced reduced intellectual function.
Doing it right means forcing the oil companies to payout billions of dollars to rebuild social infrastructure in the New Orleans industrial region.
This point is missing in most media reporting.
Oil industry master plan for a group of toxic waste dumps in New Orleans move closer reality.
East New Orleans today, Lower Ninth Ward after the first major flood
By Isiah Scott
On Fed 14, Mayor Ray Nagin used his emergency powers to suspend the city’s zoning ordinance and grant a condition use permit to Waste Management for the Chef Menteur landfill in exchange for a donation of 22 perecent of the gross revenue of the new landfill to the city of New Orleans. This "thing for a thing "political arrangement was a national embarrassment for the mayor. Even lewis Libby could have doe a better job of coving up his mistake
Having been publicly discredited in the national media, the mayor, so-called diamond in the rough Margie Eugene-Richard and the rest of New Orleans city government is now forced to process a second multinational waste management group, Newport Environmental Services (NES) LLC, which owns a 700-area parcel along Paris Road. The NES landfill project is 9 times the size of the Chef Menteur and would be the largest in the country. The NES Group has also applied for a state permit and two federal permits needed to open the landfill and apears to have connection all the way to the Oval Office.
The new landfills in East New Orleans are the latest in a series of pre-Katrina carefully designed backroom political moves by the oil lobby to fast track removal of toxic petrochemical debris removal from the New Orleans in order to save paying out billions while limiting their legal exposure.
Over five million cubic yards of debris has been force into the city dump at Gentilly and other dumps located in the city.
The New Orleans region has reportedly over 55 million cubic yards of waste that must be removed and nowhere to legally dump in the city of New Orleans.
The existing and plans dumps cannot legal handle all the additional waste. Abandoned industrials parks and flooded ghettos in the inner city flooded by Katrina and Rita offer the oil companies the cheapest solution to their need for landfills for their oil and chemical toxic waste.
An unknown but very toxic amount of petrochemical waste must be disposed secretly to limit legal claims to oil and chemical companies.
The cost of making the contaminated inner city communities livable by humans and replacement of the schools, colleges, hospitals and other public infrastructure would cost the oil and chemical companies hundreds of billion of dollars. The oil lobby to date has refused to even acknowledge, much less pay this multi billion-dollar social infrastructure cost. The oil lobby has quietly build support within the business community, Black city leadership and the state leader for local creation of toxic waste dumps within the city of New Orleans in order to saving money in clean up costs while hidding the real degree of petrochemical contamination.
The politician problem is the fact that the oil lobby fears the local white reaction to paying Black homeowners billions of dollars to create private toxic waste dumps in the inner city ghettos. In addition, the oil lobby does not want the general public to know for legal reasons, the degree of actual petrochemical –based contamination still in the region. The depth of petrochemical contamination would be revealed when the thousands of special toxic waste trucks came to transport the toxic waste out New Orleans to private waste dumps.
The nation and the mostly displaced New Orleans African American community returns home to vote, it is trumaizated and transfixed once again by the New York Times and other media reporting of the new discovery of Black Americans bodies and bodies part in the debris in the lower Ninth. This latest chapter of the ongoing FEMA horror story is a critical part of a carefully designed oil lobby media deception to keep the national focus away from the political fight raging in East New Orleans over the new landfill.
A political fight is raging in Vietnamese Catholic East New Orleans community over the oil industry fast tracking Chef Menteur landfills an 88-acre site that has been twice rejected as a landfill. This critcal fight with the oil lobby has been almost completely black out of the mainstream by the oil centric reporting.
The new group of landfills is the next mission critical step in the oil lobby master plan for a network of toxic waste dumps within New Orleans that will be anchored by a even larger back drainage toxic waste water park in the Ninth Ward.
According to the BCC’s Horizon programme the future of the Lower Ninth ward is becoming imprisoned in a large issue of Louisiana’s precious wetlands. That is reportedly three-quarters of New Orleans annual wetland loss happened with Katrina. If the city is to fight “extinction”, according to the wetland argument logic, low lying areas like the Lower Ninth Ward built below sea level should be turned into green space, serving as buffers against floodwater. Embedded in the wetland designed is the potential for a dual use landfill and back drainage lake for periodic city flood. With a weaken 17th Street levee, leaking into the city, the Lower Ninth would as it catch basin. The landfill model for the Ninth Ward is being developed in the designed of the East New Orleans landfill borrows pits.
This future function of saving the city from flood, as a dual use parkland/landfill would set the political stage seizer of the remaining Black homes in the Lower Ninth Ward under an application of the new city power of ‘eminent domain’. This method of taking the land from the black homeowners avoids the political charged issue of the white reaction to Blacks being paid billions of dollar by a private Landfill company. Saving the city of New Orleans by taking the Lower NInth Ward would be the oil lobby battle cry, following the first flooding this year.
The East New Orleans landfill creates all the necessary laws to later do the politically sensitive Lower Ninth Ward.
The two East New Olreans landfills would take up a area larger than lower Manhattan or Old City, Philadelphia. According to the Times-Picayune, the proposed plan call for 110-foot-tall piles of debris, 30 feet of which would be below ground level in borrow pits, according to the permit. Thousands of these de facto open air chemical waste silos would dot East New Orleans near Lake Pontchartrian is immediate reach of Katrina storm surges. The first of the two new landfill would second in size to the Agricultural Street Landfill, 95 acres of municipal and industrial waste. That is nicknamed “Dante’s Inferno”.
The state of Louisiana has expanded the definition of construction and demolition debris includes petrochemical –based waste and “asbestos-containing materials”, among other things. The communities fear that this will open the door to illegal oil and chemical toxic dumping at the site. Waste Management of Louisiana secretly offered the cash –starved city of New Orleans, seven times the revenue (22 perecent of the gross revenue) it is current receiving from the city owned landfill to open the Chef new landfill, a stone’s throw from Bayou Sauvage, the largest urban national wildlife refuge in the Untied States.
The oil lobby needs a political cover too fast-track the new dump. The cove be push right now is the very real coming bankruptcy of the city of New Orleans and other toxic dump target cities in New Orleans like St.Bernard and Cameron metropolitan region.
According to the Time-Picayune, two government watchdog groups, the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) and the Public Affairs Research Council (PAR) are suggesting New Orleans considered as an option declaring bankruptcy, in order to reorganize it financial house. According to the Time-Picayune, the city of New Orleans projected revenue will drop from $260 million to only $110 million in 2006. The city debt load is projected to increase. The total outstanding debt stand at $964 million, with debt service estimated at $96 million this year.
The Bush administration and the media very carefully left out New Orleans short-term financial needs out of the $62 billion federal gave away grants in the winter. The President could pay the $ 964 million or the debt service of $96 million out of the $ 5 billion the oil companies pay to drill in federal oil fields off the coast of New Orleans. The oil companies could pick up the 96 million-debt service until the city and region is back on its feet’s. Exxon Mobile has 50 billion is near cash assets alone. The New Orleans financial crisis is political created by the oil lobby to force the creation of toxic waste dumps within the city to avoid paying hundred of billion of dollar in clean up and public infrastructure replacement costs.
What the Time-Picayune or the two government watchdog groups, the Bureau of Governmental Research and the Public Affairs Research Council fail to point is that for the period of recovery, during the bankruptcy the city would be run by a financial board of mainly out of town regional and national banks who primary function is to service the debt. In such a situation, toxic waste dumps would be viewed by the financial board as a means of generating revenues. The city would face to approve any request revenue generating waste dumps.
No one in his right mind would create another toxic waste dump in the city of New Orleans. Much less near communities with large numbers of yuong children.With the largest“Cancer Alley”, the stretch of the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, has more than 140 polluting chemical plants, oil refineries and industries routinely sending their waste discharge downwind or downstream, most into redlined neighborhood that are both black and poor. New Orleans has the nation’s most hazardous Superfund sites and Hurricane Katrina flooded them. According to the E Magazine these five sites include the Thompson-Hayward chemical plant and the Agricultural Street Land. U.S. PIRG reports that Thompson-Hayward prod produced pesticides and herbicides, including DDT and Agent Orange. Closed in 1986, the site was heavily contaminated with dioxin and other toxins and may have been reached by flood waters during Katrina.
The chemical contaminated sediment in the city, partuclarlty in the Lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans, has made the Black community primary target by the oil companies to archor the new series of toxic waste dumps within the city and region to save the oil companies and insurance industry from paying hundred of billion of dollars in oil and spills clean up costs.
The lower Ninth Ward is two square-mile neighborhood of small house, that was virtually obliterated by Hurricane Katria in 2005. If it were not for a very strong community and national Black support, the area should have a easy target for the oil lobby.
The neighborhood is idea backdrainage area for oil and chemical spills from upstream oil and chemical plant on the Mississippi River and norhtern New Orleans oil and chemical plants operating within the city. Half of the Lower Ninth Ward sits as much as 8 feet below sea level, but much of it is not on the flood plan. Most of the oil and chemical spills from Katrina settled in the neighborhood. This created a legal gold mine.
Rather than pay the peopele the billions of dollars the land is worth as a private toxic waster dump, the oil industry is trying to take the land out right and shift the cost of manitance to the federal Super fund or a priavte company. The oil and chemical companies fear that if they pay the Black peoeple in the Ninth Ward, the industrial fair market valuve of the Ninth Ward, other communities, partuclarly white communites will demand equal payment for the toxic dumps already in their communities.
The oil and chemical companies have been pushing for the creation of a series reopened and new toxic waste sites within the city of New Orleans to dump tons of illegal oil and chemical toxic waste.
Federal and state government of Louisana was been quietly buying properties in highly contamination New Orleans ghettos in order to create a toxic waste site to avoid having the oil companies pay billion of dollars to clean-up the ghetto .
Creation of a large toxic waste dump in the lower Ninth Ward would destroy the industrial core of the New Orleans region while killing the foreign manufacturing investments in New Orleans recovery.
According to Mr. Canizaro, a prominent real estate developer in New Orleans, “ It doesn’t take a genius to figure if you’re only going to have 40 or 50 percent of your original population(New Orleans), then there’s going to be shrinking in the amount of land that’s going to be needed.” Some experts have said that the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and other low-lying neighborhood should be returned to marshland.
What not being said is these same neighborhoods are worth 300 billion dollars in hidden contamination clean up costs that legally shuold be paid by the oil and chemical companies and not the US tax payers to the New Orleans region. The lower Ninth Ward at 60 percent Black home ownership has the highest African American ownership rate in the state of Louisiana. Black citizens in the lower Ninth Ward are legally entitled to billions of dollars for personal , property damages and the cost of clearing up the petrochemical contanments from the oil companies. Each thousand homeowner paid at one million each would one billion dollars. That not counting the replacement cost of chemically contanmentated water drains, schools, community centers, hospitals and other social infastrucutre.
Why do the oil companies have pay so much money? Because most of the oil and chemical companies spills were located or travaled to the low lying sections of the Black communities like the lower Ninth Ward via the toxic flood water. Even months after the hurricane the contanmentation is still in the water, soil and air.
To protect the oil companies from legal calims the federal has allowed the peoeple of New Orleans to return to their toxic communities. The US Department of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns New Orleans residents to avoid contact with arsenic sediments , but refuses to say that its not safe to move back to the ghetto. In many areas of the city and region all the top soil will have to be removed and put in special toxic waste dumps.
To do the clean up right in New Orleans, much of the top soil should be removed, particalrly for the safety of young children. According to E Magazine, a recent Columbia University/Mailman School of Public health found that children exposed to arenic-tainted water from wells in Bangladesh faced reduced intellectual function.
Doing it right means forcing the oil companies to payout billions of dollars to rebuild social infrastructure in the New Orleans industrial region.
This point is missing in most media reporting.
posted by Nubianobserver at 8:05 AM
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