Storm debris landfill is OK'd

The state Department of Environmental Quality will allow the opening of a new construction landfill in eastern New Orleans despite the vehement opposition of a coalition of neighborhood residents and environmentalists, department officials announced Thursday.

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The Chef Menteur disposal facility, at 16600 Chef Menteur Highway adjacent to the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, will also receive emergency authorization under the Clean Water Act today from the Army Corps of Engineers to begin accepting waste, corps officials said Thursday. The facility could take as much as 6.5 million cubic yards of debris, officials said.

The corps and DEQ approvals were the last remaining regulatory hurdles keeping the landfill from accepting waste, meaning the facility could open immediately. However, officials from Waste Management of Louisiana, which will operate the landfill, could not say Thursday when the facility will be ready to accept waste.

Lawyer Robert Wiygul, who represented the Louisiana Environmental Action Network in a recent lawsuit against DEQ that forced the agency to reduce the amount of waste dumped at the nearby, city-owned Old Gentilly Landfill, said a suit over the new landfill appears "unavoidable."

"We know it's against the wishes of the community and the City Council," he said. "It's hard to find anyone who's for it except DEQ and Waste Management. "We're talking about exactly the same kinds of problems as with the Gentilly landfill: a vulnerable location where the whole area flooded. It's right next door to Bayou Sauvage in a wetland area with a high water table. The only thing different is this one isn't built on top of an old dump.

 

Fast-track permit

The new landfill grew out of the Gentilly settlement. As operations were scaled back there, Waste Management sought and received the conditional-use permit it needed for the new landfill from City Hall, courtesy of Mayor Ray Nagin, who in February invoked emergency powers after Katrina to waive the city's comprehensive zoning ordinance. The same day, Waste Management pledged to give 22 percent of the revenue it receives from the new facility to the cash-strapped city.

Environmentalists and leaders of the nearby, mostly Vietnamese community of Village de l'Est, were enraged at news of the fast-track approval granted to the landfill. The state's authorization came exactly a week after leaders of the Vietnamese community held a demonstration at City Hall and the City Council asked Nagin to rescind his zoning waiver.

Nagin declined, saying that the landfill is "three miles from the nearest home," and adding: "If we don't do this, it will take three years to dispose of all the debris. If they (the council) have a better alternative, I'm all ears."

The Rev. Vien Nguyen, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church and a leader of the Village de l'Est area, hotly contested both Nagin's numbers and his rationale.

For starters, Nguyen said, the landfill is just 0.8 miles from the nearest apartments, not three miles.

 

Hindering recovery?

Moreover, Nguyen said, Nagin's decision to place a disposal facility there flies in the face of the mayor's public statements encouraging communities to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The neighborhood has been actively planning its future, Nguyen said, and many residents have begun rebuilding. He and others fear a new landfill nearby will hurt those efforts.

"This will have a chilling effect on our recovery," he said. "It's certainly a black eye to us as the people trying to recover. We thought we could reason with them to show them all the compelling reasons not to put a landfill in a wetland area. There seems to be a disregard for human safety as well as recovery."

Nagin's estimates of time and distance were apparently derived from statements made by Chuck Brown, assistant secretary of the DEQ, who on Thursday offered a similar rationale for allowing the landfill to open.

Brown said Thursday that it would take 30 months to clean up storm debris with one landfill in the area; about 15 months with two landfills; and about 10 ½ months with three landfills.

Currently, Brown said, there are two construction landfills open in the area: the city-owned Old Gentilly Landfill, also in eastern New Orleans, and the Highway 90 landfill on the west bank of Jefferson Parish in Waggaman. The new landfill would be the third facility, meaning that, by Brown's figuring, the debris should be picked up in less than a year, provided all three landfills stay open.

Brown acknowledged, however, that his figures were not based on a scientific analysis of where debris is located and how long it will take to pick up. Rather, he used estimates of how much debris remains and figured that each landfill could accept approximately 20,000 cubic yards per day.

 

More haulers likely

While the math may not be precise, Brown said more landfills will definitely speed the cleanup because once debris haulers figure out they can make more trips to the landfill each day, more haulers will arrive to aid in the effort.

"Once they know we have other facilities, we'll probably have more folks coming to offer trucks and labor," Brown said.

The corps, which is in charge of debris-removal, has also said that another landfill would make its mission cheaper and faster. However, corps officials likewise don't have a scientific estimate of how much difference another landfill will make.

Sid Falk, debris mission manager for the corps, said the agency believes the debris removal would be "probably 20 percent more efficient" with another landfill. Falk said the corps does not have "a good handle" on how much money would be saved because prices for each debris-removal task are negotiated based on current conditions.

Asked whether the corps had requested that DEQ approve a new facility, Falk said, "Absolutely."

Pete Serio, chief of the Eastern evaluation section for the corps, regulatory branch, said the corps does "not commonly" waive a needed Clean Water Act permit for a landfill.

"This is kind of a unique situation because of the storm debris resulting from Hurricane Katrina," he said, adding that the corps will conduct a more thorough review over the next few months.

The Chef Menteur site is owned by Expedition Enterprises, according to city records. That company's principals are listed in state records as Ross Reynolds of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Gerald Vaccaro and Charles Canale Jr. of Tickfaw.

But the operations and permitting have been handled by Waste Management. Brown stressed that the approval granted Thursday to that company was technically "not a permit" but rather "approval of an emergency operational plan."

 

Short life span

A typical landfill might be open for a decade, Brown said, but the Chef site might be closed in a year because it's likely to be full by then.

"What we're going to do is utilize the facility until we're comfortable that the debris is picked up," Brown said. "A permit is a permit to operate for 10 years. That's not what we're doing here. We're just using this facility to handle debris from the hurricane. And if the normal rates apply, it will be filled to capacity in 12 months."

But Nguyen countered that even if the landfill isn't open for long, it will still be there and, in his view, putting the nearby community at risk from runoff or the possibility of another catastrophic flood. The area around the landfill flooded badly after Katrina.

"They talk about a temporary landfill, but that landfill will be there permanently," he said.

Nguyen, Wiygul of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network and City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis all griped that the community's strong objection to the facility didn't seem to matter.

"Whatever DEQ thinks, this is still a democracy, and people still get to decide what their government does," Wiygul said.

"It seems as if there has been a total disregard of the voice of the people and the City Council, and that's not acceptable," said Willard-Lewis, who hopes to convene a meeting with Brown and Nguyen next week.

Brown said that DEQ will soon issue a "decisional document" laying out its reasons for approving the landfill, and that the public will have an opportunity to comment on that.

"If there are some other concerns that will be voiced, we look forward to hearing them," he said.

Brown added that regulators must take into account a broad range of factors when making such decisions, and the region's need to dispose of debris quickly is one of them.

"We keep talking about rebuilding, but we can't rebuild until we clean it up," Brown said. "When folks say the emergency is nonexistent, well, they haven't been traveling to parts of the Lower 9th Ward and eastern New Orleans that I've been in."

Wiygul countered that debris removal, at this point, "is not what's holding up the recovery of New Orleans."

The approval of the Chef site came just two days after the owners of another large tract in eastern New Orleans said they intend to seek permission to open a landfill.

Newport Environmental Services LLC said it has applied for two federal permits needed to open a landfill for a 700-acre parcel along Paris Road, about four miles south of the junction of Interstates 10 and 510. The firm has not filed for a state permit, but one of its owners said the firm will do so by the end of April.

However, with the Chef site set to open, Brown said he sees far less urgency to approve another site.

"At this point, from an emergency standpoint, I'm very comfortable with where we are," Brown said. "I think this will address our needs."

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Gordon Russell can be reached at grussell@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3347.