Local Photographer Anthony Turducken
The Sierra Club and the Louisiana School Boards Association supported a bill to stop building schools on toxic sites in Louisiana. The Club and the Walter L. Cohen Alumni Association brought a Notice of Intent to File Suit, Pursuant to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, for hazardous waste violations at the Booker T. Washington High School, against the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD). This is the first such step in filing a citizen's lawsuit in the federal court system.
RSD and the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) initiated reconstruction proceedings at the site, and on August 27 of this year, the Orleans Parish school monitor was sued for an alleged open meetings violation. Those responsible for Robert R. Moton Elementary School, also OPSB owned, faced a similar suit in recent memory.
New Orleans Jazz legend Louis Armstrong “would follow the garbage trucks all the way to the Silver City dump, where many of the city’s poor waited to see what prizes they might reclaim from the refuse” (Laurence Bergreen).
![Armstrong, Louis - Sculpture - Carved plaster bust](/sites/default/files/uploads-wysiwig/2864-thumb-lg-388x468.jpg "Richmond Barthe carved this bust of Louis \\"Satchmo\\" Armstrong out of plaster ca. 1952.")
“This is one of the ways I helped the family raise the newborn baby Clarence,” he once noted.
Read more in the musician's account: Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans
Booker Taliaferro Washington (1856–1915), born into slavery in Virginia, became one of the foremost African-American educational leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Washington went on to found an Institute which is today the private and historically black Tuskegee University.
Today Booker T. Washington's name has graced over fifteen post-secondary educational institutions in the U.S., only one of which was built on the site of a toxic waste dump. The school was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, looted for copper and other building materials, and now stands in ruins at 1201 S. Roman Street in Louisiana.
State recovery officials planned to spend $55 million on efforts to build a New Orleans College Prepatory (NOCP) charter school on the same portion of the Silver City Dump along Earhart Boulevard in Central City. The Booker T. Washington High site where the original campus opened in 1942 is owned by the OPSB.
Retired Lieutenant General Russel L. Honoré, pictured below, championed the cause with his Green Army. Lt. Gen Honoré coordinated military relief efforts as the designated commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, across the Gulf Coast, after gross mismanagement of the crisis response by state and local agencies.
Speaking to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality risk assessment process, retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré reportedly said: "They'll approve a ham sandwich".
Several stages were required to address the extensive contamination at Love Canal, including the 93rd Street School soils.
RSD plans to remove three feet of dirt and add six feet of clean soil. 86 percent of the toxic dump would be covered, 29 percent by concrete or asphalt pavement and 57 percent by structures, with the remaining 24 percent as green space. Use of the green space would be governed by a soil management plan to reduce potential future exposure to toxic metals. The soils in question contain known carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) with significant levels of arsenic, barium, lead, mercury, and zinc.
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Though the proposed geotextile mesh barrier could help to prevent upward movement of toxic materials, the report fails to address threats to Bayou St. John wildlife (just less than two miles away), such as the contaminants moving underground and into groundwater. Also approximately two miles away, named after New Orleans' Walter L. Cohen, Sr., Walter L. Cohen High or "one of the most dangerous high schools in the country" according to National Geographic. Though reognized to be in fine condition, the Walter L. Cohen School sits on valuable real estate with no record of contamination. With less than half of its pre-storm enrollment, the New Orleans’ public school system is struggling to support the facilities it owns that no longer serve active educational purposes. The predominately African American students from this school would be moved into the new mega-school facility, Booker T. Washington High, once the city's second largest landfill. A municipal government report describes the dump, operating from the late 1890s until the thirties, as having “mounds as high as 20 feet above surrounding grades".
It is estimated that Louisiana has a cancer rate of thirty the percent higher than the national average and that African Americans have a thirty percent higher rate than this state average. Every thirty years a school is built on a landfill in the state.
“This highlights the lack of respect the RSD has for the people of New Orleans and signals that not all is not well ten years after Hurricane Katrina,” said Darryl Malek-Wiley, Senior Organizing Representative of the Sierra Club.
For Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage please visit Democracy Now! at DemocracyNow.org
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