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 Rose Johnson with Lark Mason at her home in Gulfport
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My co-chair of the Mississippi Chapter of Sierra Club, Rose Johnson of north Gulfport, also considers herself lucky. Katrina stripped off most of the shingles on Rose's home, and the 24 inches of rainfall from the storm soaked her carpet and furnishings. For the first couple of weeks after the storm while without electricity, she had 14 members of her family staying with her while she volunteered at a nearby community center handing out food and other relief supplies.
A month after Hurricane Katrina sent a 25- to 30-foot tidal wave of destruction across the Gulf Coast, Rose and I ventured past a police roadblock into a neighborhood south of the railroad tracks in Gulfport where huge shipping containers from the Port of Gulfport had turned into torpedoes ramming into houses and spreading their contents over a wide surrounding area.
Despite what she had seen in the low-income, minority neighborhoods of North Gulfport where many homes were damaged, Rose was shocked by what she saw south of the tracks. The neighborhood was surrounded by concertina wire to keep people-except residents and cleanup workers-out because of health threats and looting.
There were mounds of debris ten feet tall and higher, including large numbers of the multi-modal shipping containers that are transferred from the ships to railcars or 18-wheel tractor trailer rigs. Some rail cars had contained pork and chicken products, fouling the air with an unbearable stench while creating a public health risk from illnesses such as salmonella poisoning.
Rose and I were checking up on a friend and fellow Sierra Club volunteer, Lark Mason, whose home was inundated with seven feet of water from Katrina. That day Lark had just finished completely gutting her cherished home two blocks from the beach: all the interior sheetrock, carpets, insulation and ruined furniture had been removed and stacked next to the curb. Some of Mason's clothing, including her mother's wedding dress, was hanging from the rafters drying until she could get them to a laundry.
Rose was overcome with emotion as she stood on Lark's front porch.
"I just can't believe this," Johnson said, tears in her eyes. "I thought I had it bad. But what we suffered is nothing compared to this. Lark, I feel so bad for you. We have all lost so much."
Lark then took us on a tour of the scene of devastation between her home and the beach with the Port of Gulfport in the background. Large shipping containers and cars were stacked topsy-turvy over huge mounds of debris that had washed up from the destroyed buildings from the first couple of blocks off the beach. Water flowed from broken water and sewer mains, biting flies were having a field day, and the odors were so bad you didn't want to take a deep breath.
Years before the Sierra Club had opposed filling in 40-acres of the Mississippi Sound for an expansion of the Port of Gulfport to build a large parking lot for the shipping containers. The club had warned about the dangers of putting the containers in the way of harm from a hurricane, and recommended the parking lot be built five miles away north of Interstate 10.
Sierra Club also opposed an expansion of waste pits at DuPont DeLisle in Pass Christian into 24 acres of wetlands located close to the Bay of St. Louis. We were concerned about toxic releases from a hurricane surge. Although we had been successful blocking the wetland waste pit expansion, after the hurricane there were major concerns about the release of toxics such as dioxin, PCBs and heavy metals from DuPont.
Sierra Club activist Paul Stewart lived across the Bay of St. Louis from the DuPont DeLisle facility, which produces a whiten agent called titanium dioxide-along with 14.9 million pounds of toxic waste per year. His home was destroyed by the hurricane, and in the aftermath Paul was extremely frustrated in trying to get regulatory agencies to access whether it was safe for people like him to return to their homes. He and his wife Melody, who evacuated to stay with relatives in Maryland, went to Capitol Hill to meet with congressional leaders in late September pleading for testing to be done of homes and schools located near DuPont.
DuPont claimed it had no environmental releases from the storm. But Paul, who had toured the plant, finds it impossible to believe that the worst hurricane in the history of the U.S. hit this facility-one of the top sources of dioxin releases in the U.S.-with no environmental impact to the surrounding area.
"I have toured the plant and seen the waste pits," Paul says. "DuPont admitted the plant was flooded, but said they didn't release any toxics into the environment. How can they possibly know that without testing nearby schools and homes?"
Paul believes that DuPont DeLisle, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) and EPA erred in allowing the plant to be located directly on the bay in a hurricane prone area.
"They played Russian roulette and lost, our land is now toxic and all DuPont can talk about is getting operations back up and running," Paul said. "The waste pits at the DeLisle facility are supposed to be impermeable because the toxins they contain are deadly and should never find their way into the environment. That all changed with Katrina and no one including MDEQ, EPA, DuPont, FEMA, or our elected officials, seem at all concerned about the health risks to our citizens."
Paul says it isn't right to blame the pollution problems on Katrina.
"Katrina did not pollute our land, DuPont did," he said. "Katrina just did what hurricanes have done for thousands of years. It was DuPont, MDEQ, and EPA that allowed that plant to be located directly on the bay in hurricane prone area."
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Photo: Becky Gillette/Sierra Club collection; all rights reserved.
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