In the 1980s, black New Orleanians were encouraged to buy houses built by the city on top of a toxic landfill. Three decades later it is one of Louisiana’s worst cancer hotspots, but residents of Gordon Plaza are still fighting to be relocated. For 50 years, from 1909 to 1958, the city’s medical, municipal and industrial waste was sent here to be incinerated and sprayed with now banned pesticides. In the late 90s city officials started planning low-income housing developments here. Last year, a local developer converted an abandoned building on the original Press Park site into new apartments.
The EPA began testing the soil in the 1980s. The land was rich in arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and had extremely high levels of lead, among other powerful toxins left behind by the Agriculture Street landfill. All told, about 150 contaminants have been found in the soil, 49 of which are known carcinogens. In 1994 the area – including Gordon Plaza, an elementary school, a public housing development called Press Park apartments and a senior housing complex – was declared a Superfund site (a US federal government program designed to fund the clean-up of toxic wastes). Earlier this year, a report by the Louisiana Tumor Registry found the census tract in which Gordon Plaza is located had the second highest cancer rate in Louisiana, at 745 cases per million people, compared to a state average of 489. Besides cancer, many residents report chronic respiratory, gastrointestinal and skin ailments.
The EPA began testing the soil in the 1980s. The land was rich in arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and had extremely high levels of lead, among other powerful toxins left behind by the Agriculture Street landfill. All told, about 150 contaminants have been found in the soil, 49 of which are known carcinogens. In 1994 the area – including Gordon Plaza, an elementary school, a public housing development called Press Park apartments and a senior housing complex – was declared a Superfund site (a US federal government program designed to fund the clean-up of toxic wastes). Earlier this year, a report by the Louisiana Tumor Registry found the census tract in which Gordon Plaza is located had the second highest cancer rate in Louisiana, at 745 cases per million people, compared to a state average of 489. Besides cancer, many residents report chronic respiratory, gastrointestinal and skin ailments.
After the area was declared a Superfund site, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the city of New Orleans and Gordon Plaza residents engaged in relocation talks, but couldn’t strike a deal after the city refused to contribute “in-kind services” that could help fund the move. Instead, in 1997 the EPA pursued a controversial clean-up plan: dig up 2ft of the contaminated topsoil, place a permeable liner, known as a geotextile mat, and re-cover it with clean dirt. The geotextile mat – which looks like the thin black fabric often used to line backyard garden beds – was never meant to stop contaminants or fumes from migrating upwards. Only exposed soil was excavated, leaving landfill contamination under homes, sidewalks, roads and any other developed surface. While EPA contractors swarmed the area in hazmat suits, disturbing and piling contaminated soil, residents were not relocated, but instead told it was safe to stay on site. By EPA’s own calculations, if soil below the mat were to rise to the surface, cancer risks would increase by nearly fivefold.
“The toxins are still there! They did a cover-up, not a clean-up.”
Wilma Subra, a renowned environmental scientist and Superfund expert who helped shape that program’s laws, says that to this day, residents are being directly exposed to carcinogenic landfill toxins through several pathways.
“We clearly identified that people were in direct contact with contamination,” said Subra, who estimates that the EPA clean-up only touched about 10% of the site’s total area. Subra contends that after Katrina, leachate – groundwater that has flowed through the contaminated soil, carrying chemicals with it – flowed across the area. Her tests showed carcinogens such as dioxins, furans and several PAHs were all present in the soil in levels that exceeded regulatory standard.
Over the past three decades, residents here have won two class action lawsuits against city agencies and insurance companies totaling more than $26m. A 2015 settlement with insurance companies garnered small payments – about $3,000 to $10,000 – for all but nine plaintiffs on the case. But the city has yet to pay out anything because there is no legal mechanism to force them.
“They all hid behind the law,” explained Jesse Perkins, a member of Residents of Gordon Plaza Inc, a community not-for-profit. “That allows them to drag this thing out so long and they will never pay a penny...We’re in the fight for our lives,” said Perkins. “Y’all put us in this situation … We thought we bought our houses on clean, safe land!”
Shannon Rainey, the persistent force behind this decades-long struggle and the president of Residents of Gordon Plaza, put it bluntly: “They used us as guinea pigs,” she said. “You knew this was a toxic landfill, so y’all used us as guinea pigs to see how long black folks can live on top of a toxic landfill.”
“It’s not just that we’re living on top of cancer-causing chemicals. It’s like a living cemetery. We’re just waiting to die.” said Sheena Dedmond.
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