Where is All the Water Going?

The breach in the 17th Street levee has now been repaired, and the pumps have been “turned back on”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aAXWfdM2pOEc&refer=top_world_news. However, it will take at least 75 days to pump all the water out of New Orleans, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. Where is the water going? Apparently the water is being pumped right back into the Pontchartrain. Given the amount of contaminants that may now be in that water—a “toxic soup” as the Mayor has called it—we may have an environmental disaster on our hands, spreading slowly into the Gulf of Mexico. For example, the Agriculture Street Landfill, a federal Superfund site on the National Priorities List of highly contaminated sites requiring cleanup and containment, takes up 95 acres in New Orleans, and is now under three feet or more of water. The flood waters, the same flood waters now being pumped back into the lake, could potentially cause the landfill’s toxic contents, the result of decades of municipal and industrial waste dumping, to leach out. Read more at “Solid Waste & Recycling Magazine”:http://www.solidwastemag.com/article.asp?id=47051&issue=09012005.

*Update:* Unbelievably, the EPA has been “*excluded*”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2005/09/06/white-house-excludes-epa-from-hurricane-response-task-force/ from the the federal Hurricane Response Task Force.

*Update 2:* More from “The Indepedant”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article310814.ece.

bq. Toxicologists and public health experts warned yesterday that pumping billions of gallons of contaminated water from the streets of New Orleans back into the Gulf of Mexico - the only viable option if the city is ever to return to even a semblance of its former self -would have a crippling effect on marine and animal life, compromise the wetlands that form the first line of resistance to future hurricanes, and carry deleterious consequences for human health throughout the region.