SILENT BATTLEFIELDS IN A FRAGILE LANDSCAPE

Driving along Interstate 10 from east New Orleans to Baton Rouge, the traveler first climbs steeply over the Industrial Canal between the Mississippi River and the Intracoastal Waterway and then drops just as precipitously, rumbling past dingy railroads and industrial land before passing signs for the French Quarter. The Industrial Canal has barges backed up waiting their turn to go through a century-old shipping lock. Today it is the site of a bitter struggle between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who want to spend twelve years expanding the lock and residents of the neighborhood who fear it would release toxics from contaminated soils, block traffic, and rattle their homes for over a decade. The predominantly African-American neighborhood claims that choosing to expand the lock rather than siting it in wetlands to the south constitutes environmental racism and has sued the Corps and placed a restraining order to prevent the beginning of the project.

Just past the Canal, off to the left of the highway, is the Agriculture Street Landfill neighborhood, where a middle-class black subdivision was built directly on top of the old city dump in the late 1970s with Federal Housing Authority money. Noxious odors, illnesses, and sinking houses alerted neighbors to the risk, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put the site on the Superfund “National Priority List” for cleanup in 1994 after conducting soil tests that uncovered 150 toxins in the dirt.