The magnitude of the ecological disaster in New Orleans is gradually dawning on people. Present and former EPA workers are starting to talk about it as a “Love Canal times a hundred” or “the biggest super fund project in history.”
The city of New Orleans sits near a vast marshy area that’s a large petrochemical complex. The longer the floodwater remains trapped in the city, the more it will be contaminated with petrochemical products, sewage and other refuse.
One of the compromised levees sits along the Industrial Canal, a 5.5-mile waterway that connects the Mississippi River to the Intracoastal Waterway. Louisiana’s petrochemical industry manufactures one-quarter of America’s petrochemicals, including basic chemicals, plastics and fertilizers, and more than a third of all industrial chemicals transported on the nation’s inland waterway system wend their way through this canal.
Hurricane Katrina has created a toxic soup that stretches across southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi. Before any rebuilding can occur, this toxic sludge will have to be cleaned up, a process that will cost billions and last for years, if not decades. New Orleans faces the real prospect that it will never return in anything close to it’s previous form.
If that happens, it will have been killed by the oil industry.
The ramifications of U.S. oil consumption have already trapped us in an unwinnable war in Iraq, now they have destroyed one of the most scenic and historic of U.S. cities.
It’s time to get off of oil.
It’s time to go Green.