Ben Lemoine / WWL-TV News Reporter

For a community striving to come back to their homes and reopen their businesses in New Orleans East after Hurricane Katrina, they say opening a debris landfill on Chef Menteur Highway is like throwing salt on an open wound.

It took three months and a lot of work for Thu Nguyen to get her restaurant back up and running.

“We would have to go to the West Bank to get clean water for our customers and for cooking,” Nguyen said.

On a struggling stretch of Chef Highway, being open has paid off; business is back. However, word of a new landfill a few miles away has soured the celebration.

“So we try very hard and we're doing everything we can, and with this news, it's just...a lot of people are just giving up. We tried our best. And it looks like nobody's helping us,” Nguyen said.

Under an executive order signed by Mayor Nagin, the Department of Environmental Quality has allowed Waste Management to open the 88-acre facility in an attempt to speed up the clean-up process.

Though the landfill will only accept construction and demolition debris, it's the proximity to area homes that has left many local residents concerned and angered that they were not consulted.

“…And basically saying, ‘the public, this is it; you have no choice. It's going to be here and that's not the way the law is supposed to work.’ Just with this state of emergency, they're running roughshod over the public,” said Darrly Malek-Wiley, Sierra Club spokesman.

DEQ officials said they simply have to open another landfill because only about half of the debris from Katrina has been removed – they still have another 18 million cubic yards to go. Without another place to put it, they said it could take another two and a half years to get rid of it all.

“The presence of asbestos is potentially problematic when we're talking about removing houses with roofs and with slate tiles,” said City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard Lewis. “We have to look at long and short term impacts on families.”

Lewis said she was turning to Governor Blanco to intervene and will meet with DEQ representatives next week to voice her concerns about the landfill.

However, DEQ scientists said debris would be segregated and no household hazardous wastes would be dumped there. According to Dr. Chuck Brown, the environmental impact would be almost zero.

“We're not looking at a ten-year permit. We're looking at something that, if everything works like we think it will…we'll have that particular facility closed out within 12 months,” said Brown. “We'll have two feet of clay on it and we'll be growing grass…You know, we looked at it from an environmental standpoint and technically and the risk is minimal.”

There is only one step left before the landfill is opened for use: the Army Corps of Engineers has to issue a wetlands permit to the facility, which could happen next week.