last updated 29th September 05
By 4ecotips

Pumping floodwater adds to disaster

Believe it or not, more rain would benefit New Orleans, ecologist says Dr. Seth R. Reice, associate professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences..

"People might think I'm kidding, but I'm not. The floodwater still covering much of New Orleans and elsewhere is full of everything people store under their sinks in their kitchens and bathrooms. It's also full of coliform bacteria from backed-up human waste, plus gasoline, oil and countless other pollutants. It is a really toxic stew."

Reice suggests intense rain would dilute the water and could make it possible to varying degrees for organisms - both large and small - to cope with it better.

Dilution is much needed, he said. Standing water in New Orleans streets was found late last week to carry ten times the maximum safe level of fecal coliform bacteria to say nothing about the non-organic pollutants. He likened the streets to open sewers.

Reice is the author of The Silver Lining, subtitled "The Benefits of Natural Disasters." Published in 2001 by Princeton University Press, the book received much attention when it first appeared and later following the tsunamis in 2004 in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean.

It details how, usually, hurricanes and lesser storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods and other apparently catastrophic events renew life and boost diversity in ecosystems throughout the world.

But authorities in New Orleans are making a large mistake by pumping the floodwater into Lake Ponchartrain, Reice said.

"They have no business doing this," says the biologist. "It is going to cause tremendous pollution and probably big fish kills. Instead, they should have pumped it as far out to sea as they could or at least into the Mississippi where the current would dilute it. Or they could have treated it in wastewater treatment plants. They over-reacted to the need to drain the streets and gave no thought to the severe environmental damage to the lake and its fishes."

The second largest problem - one that most Americans didn't realize until the hurricane - is that New Orleans has been sinking for decades. Reice says: "That's because it was built on Mississippi Delta silt, which built up over millions of years by the sediments carried by the Mississippi River and deposited during floods. By isolating New Orleans from flooding, engineers robbed the delta of its sedimentary deposits.