But as Blink and others pointed out, some residents live with disaster better than others, and indeed, the oil disaster affected residents differently.

Blink, a small-business owner, was among those attending the release of a report that examines the effects of the spill on small businesses in the tightly knit parish, where a flood of recovery money divided neighbors and friends into “spillionaires” and those who continue to struggle.

The report compiles and analyzes interviews with more than 50 small-business owners, many of whom were passed by in the financial windfall of the oil cleanup. The report is the product of The Urban Conservancy and is called “My Heart Is Tied Up in This Place: Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Plaquemines Parish’s Local Businesses.”

“The difficult part is showing how the population is indirectly affected, how a brief and scant influx of money alienates neighbors and friends,” said Dana Eness, the executive director of The Urban Conservancy.

Urban Conservancy Executive Director Dana Eness discusses her agency report in Belle Chasse Friday. Photo by Conor Monahan

She was joined by parish officials, citizens and researchers at the Southeast Louisiana Fisheries Assistance Center Regions Bank building in Belle Chasse.

The report stems from an effort begun in 2007, before “Deepwater Horizon” or “Macondo” were household names in Southeast Louisiana.

Eness initially sought to establish community ties within the parish to help fortify local business and attract investment following the destruction caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The effort took on new urgency in the wake of the nation’s worst oil spill and subsequent clean-up effort in 2010.

She said the report shows that many independent businesses – hardware stores, retailers, restaurants and groceries – continue to show signs of an incomplete recovery.

Among residents, the cleanup and restoration effort has been met with mixed results. Many, such as Blink, say irreparable harm was done by not exhausting local knowledge of waterways, as well as trained, effective manpower.

“Our police and fire departments are arguably the best hurricane recovery agencies along the coast – their response has become surgical,” he said.

But as oil saturated the coast and its precious bayous, BP enlisted only select boat owners while dismissing others local citizens eager to protect their livelihoods, he said.

But some business owners met the relief effort warmly.

“There were a thousand different companies down here,” the report quotes one convenience store owner as saying.

And they came with money to spend, particularly on alcohol, soft drinks and tobacco, the owner pointed out: “I went from selling one carton of Newport cigarettes per month to 12 per week.”

This influx was short-lived and failed to reach all sectors of the market, but it did bring in significant money.

Those business owners whose services were not in such demand had two options: file a claim, or don’t.

Though it might seem obvious that suffering businesses should apply for relief, many didn’t out of fear of being blackballed by the oil industry, the report said.

“Either you get the business and you don’t make the claim or vice versa,” one person interviewed for the report said.

“The industry is powerful and well-connected,” added another. “They reward businesses that treat them favorably and punish those who do not.”

The report does not focus solely on businesses, but rather works to illustrate ways in which the community is still grappling with recovery.

The report describes its findings as “largely consistent with previous research of local businesses in a post-disaster context.”

However, given Plaquemines unique geography, traditional solutions cannot be applied, it said.

Rather, customized solutions, unique and accommodating of local residents and businesses, are required for the prolonged recovery of the parish, it contends.

Eness said she hopes that this is only the beginning of a discussion between businesses, big and small, in an attempt to bolster the coastline and coastal communities.

It’s 11 a.m. on a Monday and Bernice Horne is sweeping the front porch. Inside, her son fixes himself a quick lunch—he’s on the clock—while her granddaughter gets ready for a class at the local community college. “Erica,” she calls. “Grab me a dust pan. We don’t need any more mess around here.”

The view from Horne’s front porch is bleak: a weedy lot, the dark, gutted house of a dead neighbor, and beyond that, a derelict affordable-housing development  stretching as far as the eye can see. Occasionally, a bird swoops in or out of a broken window. A ripped chain-link fence borders the  development, which never reopened after Hurricane Katrina.

“One day my baby granddaughter was sitting out on the porch swing and she said, ‘Why that building have eyes? It look like it looking at us’,” Horne, a retired school custodian, says.  “I said, ‘Baby they supposed to be windows and doors to keep little girls like you safe.’”

A New Orleans entrepreneur has received $46,000 in Road Home grant money to rehab a single unit in the otherwise uninhabitable Press Park complex, across from Horne's ranch house. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

After Katrina, Horne used a state grant to rebuild her tidy ranch-style house from the ground up. For reasons both emotional and financial, she never seriously considered not doing so. “We don’t have any other place,” she says quietly. “This is where I raised my children. We can’t afford to go anywhere else.” But others with more options also continue to attract government grants to properties that are almost certain to be bulldozed eventually.

Upon her return, she installed a jungle gym in the backyard and inside, a plush sofa with plenty of room for chatting with the neighbors she expected would return.  They haven’t. The population of the Upper 9^th Ward’s Desire neighborhood has dropped 68 percent since 2000, falling from 3,791 to 1,213 in 2010, U.S. census data analyzed by GCR & Associates shows. Where there were once occupied homes, weeds grow. The only commercial establishment within miles is the Money and Honey One Stop, a concrete-fronted corner store with unpredictable hours and an inventory heavy on 99-cent soda and potato chips.

Though New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s recovery plan includes putting an $11 million community center and health clinic in the neighborhood, the only city project to be completed so far is a modestly outfitted park with a small swimming pool, a few sports fields and a donated Kaboom playground. On warm evenings, the sound of children playing football reverberates through otherwise quiet streets.

“No traffic. Nothing. It’s a ghost town other than the park,” a neighbor, Hardy Price, says. Price is one of four residents on his block.  One of the others is his adult son, who lives across the street in a vinyl-sided shotgun-style house sandwiched between two overgrown lots owned by families who never returned after Katrina. The remaining two are renters who moved in next door after the property’s prior owner moved to Texas after Katrina and converted his home into a Section 8 rental. Another half-dozen empty houses and lots line the block. “The neighbors,” Price says, “they moved on.”

The view from Price’s front stoop pretty well matches the bleak scenarios laid out shortly after Katrina by urban planners. In the months after the storm, experts from the Urban Land Institute — a Washington DC-based urban-planning think tank invited by then-mayor Ray Nagin to advise his Bring New Orleans Back Commission — warned that without a coordinated strategy for rebuilding neighborhoods in sync with repopulation trends, those areas that lost large numbers of households would fall victim to “the jack o’ lantern effect”: gap-toothed redevelopment in which occupied homes would be surrounded by swaths of blight and abandonment. Instead, the planners recommended transforming hard-hit areas into green space while concentrating rebuilding efforts in the city’s less-damaged core, but residents recoiled.

On a now infamous map rolled out at a commission hearing, Horne’s neighborhood, along with other parts of the Lower 9^th Ward and Eastern New Orleans showed up as a green dot.

The dots reflected depth of flooding, some of it in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods like Lakefront and Broadmoor, but with so much of it concentrated in largely black neighborhoods, cries arose that the redevelopment proposal was a plot to keep black homeowners from returning to New Orleans. Overnight, the notion that some neighborhoods wouldn’t be rebuilt became racially charged. Nagin, then facing a re-election fight, abandoned his pledge to respect the blue-ribbon commission’s recommendations and began encouraging everyone to rebuild, even in neighborhoods like Horne’s.

An arrow marks the Horne family residence. Their neighborhood, Desire, was one of several that post-Katrina planners recommended be turned into green space. (The Lens/Google) 

A year after the storm, Reed Kroloff, then the dean of Tulane University’s architecture school and one of two people who were to have overseen a recovery planning process for the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, told The Times-Picayune that rejecting the Urban Land Institute’s advice amounted to “a complete failure of leadership at almost every level.”

In fact, weeds had been growing high in Horne’s neighborhood long before the hurricane hit. For more than a decade prior to Katrina, a quieter disaster had been unfolding. In another, spectacularly bad policy decision, low-income housing, both public and private,  a community center and an Orleans Parish School Board elementary school had been built atop a 95-acre municipal dump so toxic that it was eventually declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Shrinking cities, big worries

Welcome to the new normal–where swaths of once bustling city neighborhoods deteriorate behind fences. The circumstances that brought New Orleans’ neighborhoods into their current limbo are a combination of singular events and larger national trends. Many communities around the country currently confront similar fates. For evidence, look to the urban prairies of Detroit; Youngstown, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. In New Orleans, abandonment was brought on by Katrina. In the other cities, it was the slower winds of economic and political change, deindustrialization, the overseas emigration of American manufacturing, the foreclosure crisis, decades of population loss, spending cuts and federal policy changes.  Now cities must decide how to proceed: continue to maintain city infrastructure and services in communities too hollowed out to qualify as urban, or simply disinvest and mothball these neighborhoods.

Press Park was built on top of a landfill. Since Katrina, it has been empty, awaiting demolition. (photo by Ariella Cohen)

“We are paying a big price for decades of bad decisions at local, state and federal levels,” says Dan Kildee, president and co-founder of the Center for American Progress, a national nonprofit that focuses on urban revitalization. “We are paying the price of decades without a vision.”

President Obama is the first president to bluntly assert that new strategies must be found for communities like Desire where abandoned housing is rife and no one seems interested in repairing or occupying it. Unlike prior administrations that have changed individual programs and hinted at a broader need to reshape the way the federal government supports urban development, Obama’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has said from day one that the agency’s entire approach must be transformed to take into account changing economic and environmental considerations as well as a new geography of poverty that has low-income populations,  once concentrated in cities, now dispersed across sprawling suburbs.

“For generations in America, we have measured success by the number of housing units we are able to construct,” says Kildee, in arguing for a different approach.

Kildee has a point. When politicians want to claim an economy is robust they cite the number of housing starts. To demonstrate a community is financially healthy, they cite rising home values. The implicit assumption is that populations will keep pace with the market and that the new housing will be absorbed. It is that assumption that Desire and hundreds of other similarly abandoned communities are now proving catastrophically wrong.

In response, HUD has come up with a  Sustainable Communities initiative and the Choice Neighborhoods program. Sustainable Communities takes a cross-agency approach to build more cohesive, connected regions in which funding for transit is better coordinated with housing development and job growth. Choice Neighborhoods seeks to transform isolated public housing developments into integrated, mixed-income neighborhoods.

But those changes are taking place in a context of drastically reduced federal support for cities and housing. Despite Obama’s commitment to rethinking cities, HUD’s budget was slashed 9 percent to $37 billion, the largest reduction in funding of any major federal agency. Adjusted for inflation, the total is  lower than any HUD budget since 2003, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The spending package includes an 8 percent cut to the capital fund for public housing—a reduction that could have grave implications for already overburdened housing agencies. In the Upper 9^th Ward alone, the Housing Authority of New Orleans manages at least a half-dozen abandoned or partially abandoned complexes, including the Press Park subdivision visible from Bernice Horne’s porch.

Adding to the challenge: a nearly 40 percent cut to HUD’s  largest affordable-housing block grant program, the HOME program, which provides municipalities with grants for affordable housing or direct rental assistance. A smaller but still sizable 6 percent reduction hit the agency’s most flexible community redevelopment tool, the Community Development Block Grant program. CDBG grants provide funding for the sort of neighborhood-level intervention needed to clean up the messy blocks surrounding Horne’s home.

“Every local housing authority is going to be picking up the pieces and absolutely funding only its highest priority communities,” says Linda Couch, a senior policy analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

But as budget cuts and political pressures force triage,  what happens to those neighborhoods that wind up on the wrong side of the red line?

Home ownership in harm’s way

If New Orleans is “the city care forgot,” Desire is the neighborhood care ignored.  Built on drained swampland west of the Industrial Canal, the neighborhood grew up alongside a dump where refuse was burned in open pits from 1909 until 1948, when neighbors’ complaints about thick, putrid smoke forced legislation barring dumps inside the city. Instead of abandoning the dump altogether, city officials circumvented the legislation by converting it into a landfill. Burying the refuse underground was seen as more sanitary, an argument that ignored leaching and other forms of chemical pollution.  The Agriculture Street Landfill persisted until 1965 when it was last used an emergency dump for debris from Hurricane Betsy.

Soon after the landfill closed, the local housing authority began eyeing the unused city  land for affordable housing. In 1969, the first of two federally financed developments,  Press Park and Gordon Plaza, rose on above the landfill. Though project engineers    worried about subsidence, politics quickly trumped environmental concerns.

Throughout the 20th century, new neighborhoods were built over the Agriculture Street landfill with no thought to the toxins under the ground.

In a  desegregating city where much of the housing available to black families was  substandard, the idea of building a modern housing development from the ground up—  even if that ground were  contaminated—appealed to the city’s leadership. No   remediation of the contaminated soils was attempted.

HANO began to aggressively market Press Park’s new,  affordable townhouses to striving black families, instituting programs that allowed low-income public housing residents to become homeowners. Gordon Plaza sprang up on the former landfill’s eastern edge in the late 1970s. Containing homes for senior citizens, rentals and affordable single-family homes, the development was, like Press Park, paid for with federal grants and loans.

The strategy reflected the modus operandi of the city at the time: build more and build cheap. Over several decades, the strategy transformed previously undeveloped, drained swampland in the 9^th Ward and farther east — areas now synonymous with Katrina’s devastation —into an area dense with federally subsidized affordable housing, populated overwhelmingly by black families.

New Orleans officials built the Shirley Jefferson Community Center within the Agriculture Street landfill, on the edge of a housing development, near a public school. Neighbors want the abandoned center to be demolished. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

Following the families into new neighborhoods, the Orleans Parish School Board went on a construction spree.  Even before Moton Elementary opened in 1985 on the edge of the landfill, elevated lead levels in playground soils led school officials to contemplate abandoning it.  Again, pressure for a ribbon cutting won out. The school opened. By the time of the 1990 census, about 1,000 people lived on the landfill or along its immediate periphery.

“We moved there because the schools were down the street,” said Horne, who bought her privately developed home on the eastern flank of the landfill in 1983. “The children didn’t have to cross a lot of traffic. They could walk to school.”

But while the population continued to grow so did concerns about the area’s environmental safety. People were finding stray landfill debris in their yards.  The Environmental Protection Agency, which according to legal documents had found evidence of contamination as early as 1986, came down again in 1993 to do testing that found higher-than-allowed levels of lead, arsenic and polychlorinated aromatic hydrocarbons. In 1994, Moton, located across the street from Press Park was closed, and Horne’s granddaughter Erica, then a Moton first- grader, tested positive for lead poisoning.

“Around that time, we stopped growing vegetables in our garden because we were worried about what was in the soil,” Gordon Plaza homeowner Ruth Parker says.

Legal limbo

That same year, the EPA recognized the 95-acre Agriculture Street Landfill site as a Superfund hazardous waste site. Though many homeowners urged EPA officials to buy their homes and clear the land, the EPA decided on a cheaper fix: removing contaminated soil and replacing it with clean clay atop a fabric liner. The soil remediation cost $42.8 million and took nine years, wrapping in 2003, but the site remains on the Superfund list.

Still bouncing through the federal appeals system is a class-action lawsuit filed in 1993 on behalf of residents, homeowners and students who unknowingly bought homes, rented apartments or attended school on top of the landfill. After more than a decade in the courts, only a portion of residents included in the class of certified plaintiffs have received settlements, despite a 2006 ruling by Civil District Court Judge Nadine Ramsey who declared the neighborhood “uninhabitable” and “dangerous.”

“If this was another kind of neighborhood we wouldn’t have to fight so hard,” Horne, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said. “It’s like we don’t exist, like we keep having to tell the courts and the city and everyone that we are still here. That’s what it feels like.”

Bernice Horne says her neighborhood has been left behind in the city's post-Katrina rebuilding. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

In November, an inspection of the landfill site done by EPA officials mentioned a  resurgence in illegal dumping at the site. Plaintiffs in the class-action suit say they hope for an eventual settlement that will allow them to move elsewhere. Parker bought her Gordon Plaza home in 1981 for $40,000. Thirty years later, its assessed value is $45,000. She and her husband are retired. Both have cancer.  “The settlement was our only hope,” Parker says. “No one is going to buy these houses, knowing what is back here.”

Last year, a non-practicing attorney in Houston named Robert Spencer bought the largest vacant Gordon Plaza tract for $1 from HUD. The property’s previous owner, Desire Community Housing, had defaulted on a HUD loan, leaving the federal agency to foreclose on the 2.6-acre property and auction it off. Spencer, who has said that redeveloping the complex would be his largest project to date, was the only bidder.  He has made little progress on the site since buying it in May, neighbors say. Despite loud complaints from these nearby residents, Spencer has filed no permits for the demolition of the blighted housing, a fire hazard.

Meanwhile, HANO maintains that it can’t demolish Press Park until it buys out 67 private townhouse owners within its 237-unit development. It can’t do that until the courts resolve the class-action suit, officials say.

Neighbors impatiently wait for the wrecking ball. It’s not hard to see why. Walk in through breaches in Press Park’s chain-link border and you will find apartments with moldy, water-damaged pictures on the wall and toys on the floor, crusted in six years worth of dirt.  Water from leaking sewerage and water pipes pools in the overgrowth, leaving a faint aroma. At community meetings, residents blame HANO for failing to take cleanup action that could inspire private owners like Spencer to get moving.

Still investing in disaster

Further complicating matters, the federal government continues to invest in Press Park and the struggling blocks that surround it. Since Katrina, HUD has sent about $9.3 million in Road Home hurricane recovery grants to remaining owners of the 1,137 housing units included in the census tract that includes Press Park’s 237 apartments, Louisiana Office of Community Development records show.

On a warm Tuesday in October, one of those grant recipients, John Spears, climbed through an opening he cut in the development’s fence and showed a reporter the townhouse-style condo he restored using a $70,000 Road Home Small Rental Program grant from the state community development office. Buckets of white paint and Spackle litter the otherwise empty, three-bedroom unit. In an upstairs room, a brand-new plastic-framed window looks out over the development’s deserted, trash-strewn inner-courtyard. If you forget about Katrina, it looks like the set for a dystopian horror movie about a low-end suburb depopulated by a deadly pathogen.

John Spears received $46,000 from the state Road Home small rental recovery program to renovate a unit within Press Park. Now he can't find a tenant willing to live in the bombed-out complex. (Photo by Ariella Cohen)

In order to receive the $46,000 in grant money the state awarded Spears for completing the affordable housing rehab, he had to show the unit to an inspector, he said.  “The inspector said, ‘I don’t see anything else around here. Why would you redo it,’” Spears recalled, tapping his foot on a glossy, adobe-colored floor tile.  The question, however on-point, didn’t stop the landlord from receiving his grant money or a certificate of occupancy from the city.  Now he is waiting for a tenant to agree to move in so he can receive the final $24,000 installment of the grant allocation. He’s shown the place to a few Section 8 voucher holders but no one has taken up the lease, he said.

“I’m hoping HANO will fix the rest of this mess up so someone will actually want to live here,” he said. “Otherwise, they can buy me out and tear it down. I’ll give them this and they can give me a new unit, somewhere else.”

In a recent interview, the HUD-appointed administrative receiver who runs HANO, David Gilmore, acknowledged that he has met with Spears but declined to talk about his specific situation.  “We’re trying to buy everyone out,” Gilmore said.

While Spears is the only recipient of Road Home money that has actually completed a renovation within Press Park, there could be dozens more who received grant money to fix storm-damaged units that are now slated to be demolished.  This means that taxpayer money will be spent twice on the same housing units, first to repair it, then to tear it down.

Gilmore said that while FEMA will eventually pay for the demolition of the Katrina-battered complex, redevelopment is years off.

“I don’t have any plans at the moment. That doesn’t mean there won’t be,” said Gilmore, who was sent from HUD’s Washington office to clean up and modernize the long-troubled housing authority put under federal receivership in 2002.

A new model for housing

Developing Press Park into anything other than an open field will be tricky. Federal regulations prohibit using HUD housing grants on Superfund sites, meaning that HANO would have to transfer the property to a private owner if it wanted to see housing developed there. Beyond that, the notion of rebuilding a neighborhood on a landfill in a far-off section of the city with few public services contradicts the essence of Obama’s holistic, cross-agency Sustainable Communities agenda.

“That was developed in a different time,” Gilmore said of Press Park. “I am not sure if I would’ve ever built there in the first place.”

For HANO, the rethinking of federal housing policy coincided with its own controversial transformation. After Katrina, the agency never reopened its four largest, traditional public housing complexes, instead implementing HOPE VI programs that turn traditional public housing into smaller, mixed-income communities operated by private developers. The projects, which housing officials expect to complete in the next two years, reflect HUD’s reorientation towards mixed-income, mixed-use communities located in urban cores and connected to public services. One of them, Harmony Oaks in Central City (formerly C.J. Peete), features wrap-around tenant services in a new community center. A cross-city greenway has been incorporated into the design of another development, the old Lafitte complex, now called Faubourg Lafitte.  The master plan for a third, Columbia Parc (formerly the St.Bernard complex), includes a revenue-generating golf course.

But while residents are publicly enthusiastic about amenities in the new developments, their shrunken size and mixed-income portfolio means that many of the neediest pre-Katrina tenants remain locked out of the modern offerings.

Before Hurricane Katrina, HANO had 5,100 occupied housing-development units and 8,500 vouchers, for a total of 13,600 units. HANO now plans to provide 22,500 households with assistance, but nearly 80 percent of families will receive the housing subsidy in the form of a Section 8 voucher, according to the agency’s 2012 budget. The number living in traditional public housing will have fallen by 20 percent.

Again following federal policy trends, HANO has traded thousands of public housing units for a market-based voucher system that the agency hopes will encourage people to move into privately owned units, thus de-concentrating poverty. The agency does not specifically track whether such a de-concentration is occurring, making it tough to evaluate the policy’s success. Available data  suggests the policy implementation has a ways to go: A 2010 analysis of census-tract level data shows that most of the houses that are approved for voucher usage are located in low-income neighborhoods, within close proximity to the former housing projects.

In addition to the tens of millions of dollars going to complete developments shuttered after Katrina, HANO last year took on another high-profile project — the redevelopment of Iberville, the city’s last major traditional public housing development, and the only one located in touristy downtown New Orleans.

HUD selected Iberville as one of five developments to receive federal support through Choice Neighborhoods.  Its reinvention as a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood will cost upwards of $600 million over the next decade of planning and construction, $30 million of which will come from the Choice grant.

A successful transformation of Iberville carries huge political potential for the city’s leadership as well as for Obama, who has highlighted the community in speeches about the power of Choice Neighborhoods to reinvent American cities. Unlike the Press Park section of Desire, which is separated from New Orleans’ downtown core by railroad tracks, a smoggy stretch of industrial businesses and the Interstate, Iberville can’t be ignored.

“The Treme community plays a vital role in the city’s heritage and cultural identity,” Landrieu said in a press release put out when the HUD announced New Orleans would receive the Choice award. “This grant provides us with an essential tool to transform lives and revitalize one of the greatest neighborhoods in the country.”

Gilmore admits that even if Press Park were his top priority, it would not qualify for the federal support Iberville is getting. “It just would not satisfy the vast array of issues Choice Neighborhoods takes into account,” he says.

HANO is slowly rebuilding the Desire public housing complex, despite its remote, industrial location. HANO chief David Gilmore says that the authority decided to rebuild because residents felt strongly about returning, not because its location makes sense as a place for housing. (Photo by Marc Fader/City Limits)

Winners and losers

Ninth Ward Councilman Jon Johnson was mad.  It was day 10 of the City Council’s hearings on the city’s 2012 budget and the only clear message he was hearing seemed to be that his district, which encompasses a large swath of the city’s northeastern neighborhoods, including the city’s most storm-devastated areas, was not going to get much help in the coming year. As the director of the city’s Regional Transit Authority explained that population losses in the 9^th Ward would mean fewer buses, Johnson turned to an aide and spoke quietly for a moment. As soon the authority’s presentation ended, Johnson turned back to his microphone. “We have to stop dumping all of our resources in the core of the city,” he told the crowded Council chambers. “We have communities out here that are struggling to hold on while downtown, things are getting built, things are improving. It is simply not right.”

Kildee, a Democrat who has announced he will run this year for a U.S. House seat from Flint, Mich., his hometown, has made a name for himself as a leader in the burgeoning “Shrinking Cities” movement. Kildee’s mission is to align the size of cities with their population, creating smaller cities wherein resources and services can be better targeted.  A consultant to municipalities around the country, Kildee has advised the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority and stationed an outpost for his organization’s Vacant Properties Campaign in the city. In June, the organization will hold a conference here.

Kildee acknowledges that Johnson is right. There will be losers.

“I would love to live in a world where the federal government could provide enough resources to do it all at once but until that day comes someone has to make hard choices,” he says.  “We know for certain that the old way of spreading money around is not working. But it does keep me up at night, worrying about those communities who may not benefit.”

This report is published in partnership with City Limits, a national urban affairs journal. 

States seek to wring opportunity from BP disaster.

By Benjamin Leger, The Lens contributing writer

The $1 billion fund set up by BP is supposed to pay for restoration of natural resources damaged by last year’s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill, the worst environmental disaster in the nation’s history. But a coalition has come forward with a report concerned that without greater transparency and public input, the money will be misused.

Alabama’s wish list includes a beachside parking lot and a new police station. Mississippi wants a tourist-friendly aquarium and a storage facility for boats. Texas officials would use old oil platforms to build artificial reefs with its share of the $1 billion restitution fund BP has set up.

Announced in April on the anniversary of the spill, the BP money will be divided between two federal agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department, and the five states that border the Gulf of Mexico: Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and Louisiana.

A committee of representatives of the coastal states and the federal agencies will select projects from the state wish lists, but BP must approve all projects and costs. Of the five Gulf Coast states included in the settlement, Louisiana is the only one so far to publicly release its list of priorities.

“The magnitude of the BP oil disaster demands robust public participation on all levels,” said Jill Mastrototaro, Sierra Club Gulf Coast regional campaign director, speaking for the Gulf Future Coalition.

The group, which includes about three dozen community and environmental groups, has raised questions about the environmental value of some projects proposed. The plan for oil platform reefs proposed in Texas, for instance, “raises public health concerns,” says the report released by the coalition on Tuesday.

The police station earmarked for funds in Alabama does not “meet any criteria” for funding. A parking structure put on the state’s restoration priority list similarly misses the fund’s basic criteria of addressing specific injuries of the oil spill.

Another project on Mississippi’s list would improve “the appearance of storm water outfalls near Highway 90” while directing “storm water directly into the Mississippi Sound without filtering pollutants,” the report states.

The aquarium proposal, near Biloxi, Ms., consistently showed up in state pamphlets and documents despite the state’s acknowledgement that it is of dubious environmental value, Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of Gulf Restoration Network, said. The aquarium would house dolphins that washed up on oily beaches after the spill, she said, but that amounts to nothing more than “a very expensive ‘Sea World’ at the public’s expense.”

The report goes on to challenge the broad criteria for project selection and the lack of avenues for public input.

Louisiana received a rare favorable mark from environmentalists. The state earned plaudits for publicly vetting its 13 priority projects. Most of the projects have undergone environmental review as well, the report said. Unlike other states, Louisiana’s priorities appear to meet restoration criteria.

The Louisiana projects include restoration of the Caminada Headland, a section of the Barataria Basin Barrier Shoreline that is eroding into the Gulf. Also prioritized were several projects that would build barrier islands and restore oil-damaged oyster reefs.

The report identifies several key criteria that the coalition says should be considered before a project makes the committee’s short list. Though that short list will be submitted to the public for comment, environmentalists worry that without a more robust and open process prior to the comment period, public participation will be largely illusory.

“It is that small window of opportunity that we feel the public should be involved in,” said Sarthou.

If the proposals are whittled down, based solely on judgments of the trustee council, “they are just taking into account the personal preference of the trustees doing the review,” she said. “It’s essentially just an arbitrary process, which is what the members of our coalition are very upset about.”

The Gulf Future report contends that the current process allows the public  “no way of knowing” how projects are prioritized, or why. That should be changed immediately, the environmentalists say. Their report provides a suggested blueprint for evaluation that includes public input and clearly defined criteria.

Federal officials rebuffed the recommendation. The committee of state and federal agency trustees could do the job just fine without more public participation, said Tim Zink, a spokesman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“These people know what they are doing,” Zink said. “They are dedicated to representing the public and holding BP accountable to the fullest extent of the law for the damages they have caused.”

Zink said the trustee council in coming months expects to disclose projects recommended for a first round of funding, but the list won’t be “written in cement.”

“If we hear that any one of those projects is overwhelmingly unacceptable to the public, the trustees will pull back on those projects,” he said. “One of the fears that’s out there is that the trustees will come out with a plan that spends the money really fast. That’s not what’s going to happen – there will likely be several rounds, several waves of projects, and multiple times for the public to weigh in.”

Zink said those opportunities to weigh in would happen in the “coming months.”

“When they see the great lengths we are going to solicit public comments, a lot of their concerns will be answered,” he said.

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

Barbara Syrie has lived in a FEMA trailer since losing her Mississippi home to Hurricane Katrina. In the past six years, her health has deteriorated dramatically, and she blames high levels of formaldehyde that remain in the trailer, despite promises from FEMA that over time the chemical would dissipate. Photo by Nick Shapiro/ http://boratory.org/

By Ariella Cohen, The Lens staff writer |

More than six years after FEMA provided displaced Hurricane Katrina victims with trailers that were later revealed to be toxic, early tests suggest that dangerously high levels of formaldehyde linger in the more than 130,000 units still in use.

An air quality test done last month in a FEMA trailer housing Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi showed levels of the carcinogen that exceeded levels deemed safe by the federal government. The test, done by University of Oxford researcher Nick Shapiro, indicated a level of exposure of 105.6 parts per billion within the trailer, which was sold by FEMA in 2008 to a retired Mississippi couple who had lost their home to Katrina and could not afford to rebuild.

Like thousands of trailer residents who have come forward over the past six years, Charles and Barbara Syrie say the formaldeyde-laced trailers have made them ill.

“We have symptoms of exposure,” Charles Syrie said.  “Headaches. My wife Barbara has a raspy, raspy voice most of the time. We have muscle aches. Two years ago, Barbara had perfect teeth. Now she can pretty much break them off with her fingers.”

Though FEMA does not have an official limit for safe exposure to formaldehyde, the level registered in the Syrie’s trailer is high by all measures and far in excess of the 16 parts per billion, the level that was declared acceptable under agency standards established in 2008 in response to lawsuits filed in the wake of Katrina. For context, the average formaldehyde level in manufactured homes ranges from 15.5 ppb to 36.3 ppb, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which, along with the U.S. Department of Health, believes formaldehyde causes cancer in instances of chronic exposure. Studies have shown that chronic exposure at the same 100 ppb level seen in the Mississippi trailer can cause health effects in sensitive individuals, the CDC states in its own research materials. Likewise, the World Health Organization has set its guideline for formaldehyde in non-occupational settings at 100 ppb for 30 minutes.

“I wish we could leave, but we live on Social Security, on a fixed income,” Syrie said. “We can’t afford to go anywhere else.”

The Lens has teamed up with University of Oxford researcher Shapiro to track down more of FEMA trailers being used as permanent homes, test their air quality and learn more about how Americans are faring as they make lives in Katrina’s government-issued, chemical-laced overstock.

As The Lens reported in May, more than 130,000 FEMA trailers put back on the open market by the federal government are popping up in disaster zones and other places where people are desperate for low-cost housing.

In towns hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Katrina’s leftovers can be seen in trailer parks and discount dealerships.

A slew of trailers are readied for resale. Credit: Nick Shapiro

In Louisiana and Mississippi, a sluggish economy has kept Katrina victims like the Syries from rebuilding homes and moving out of the cramped, contaminated quarters they once thought temporary.

Over the next few months, The Lens and Shapiro will test more of these trailers using equipment donated by Prism Analytical Technologies, a Michigan-based manufacturer of home air testing equipment. The Syrie trailer in Picayune, Mississippi was the first tested by Shapiro. You can read a first-hand account of Shapiro’s experience tracking and testing FEMA trailers at his blog, http://boratory.org/.

The Syries bought their trailer from FEMA because they could not afford to move following Katrina. The sales price was $5. The federal agency tested it for formaldehyde and found it safe for habitation, they say. Yet after years of experiencing mysterious health problems and watching three pet dogs die of cancer, the trailer inhabitants decided it was time for another test. “Everyone – the vet, our doctors—was saying it’s the formaldehyde making us sick,” Syrie said.

The potential toxicity of FEMA trailers quickly became a hot topic nationally when the government rushed the low-cost temporary housing units to Gulf Coast residents displaced by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Soon after the trailers appeared in the disaster-stricken region, inhabitants began to complain of persistent sickness – headaches, nausea, burning, watery eyes and bloody noses, chronic respiratory problems. Soon enough, the complaints were tied to the formaldehyde present in the manufactured particleboard and plywood used to quickly and cheaply manufacture the small, unventilated temporary housing units procured by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the storm. After months of debate about the units’ safety, residents banded together to test the air quality of their trailers. Eventually, lawyers began to file class-action lawsuits against trailer manufacturers and FEMA, which procured and paid for the contaminated units.

While the litigation continues to wind through the courts, the fracas has resulted in policy changes forbidding the sale or use of the trailers as permanent housing. Thousands of trailers went into storage. FEMA encouraged people to give up those still on the market, even creating a program so that people could sell units back to the federal government. Officials vowed never again to use the contaminated model. And, as it goes in the seven-minute news cycle, the issue all but faded from national attention.

Unfortunately, the saga of these so-called toxic tin cans wasn’t over.  The trailers had been built at a cost of $1.7 billion, plus $75 million a year to store and maintain. To partially recoup the investment, the U.S. General Services Administration sold more than 130,000 trailers on the open market, with a red-lettered bumper sticker warning that they could not be used as permanent housing and a threat of legal retaliation against resellers.

“We thought we were getting a deal,” Syrie said. “It turns out we’re just stuck.”

Have you seen, lived in, bought or sold a FEMA trailer? Know someone who has? The Lens and American Public Media want to hear your story. Share your insights here.

With less than a month to go before the deadline for a final round of federal stimulus transit funding, city officials are pushing to extend the proposed Rampart Street/St. Claude Avenue streetcar line all the way to Poland Avenue, on Bywater’s downriver edge.

On a visit to New Orleans on Friday, U.S. Department of Transportation Deputy Secretary John Porcari visited what would be a 2.4-mile addition to the French Quarter streetcar loop, currently slated to end at Press Street.

Porcari encouraged New Orleans officials to apply for the so-called TIGER grant, a spokesman said, but cautioned that no other city has won more than one of the competitive grants. In 2010, DOT awarded the city $45 million in TIGER funding to build a Loyola Avenue streetcar line. That 1.5-mile line is now under construction and projected to begin service between Union Passenger Terminal and Canal Street in mid-2012.

Despite the odds against the city getting a second helping of TIGER funds, the trip ended with Porcari excited over the project’s potential, New Orleans Regional Transit Authority CEO Justin Augustine said.

“(Porcari) is interested in working with us to help make it a reality,” Augustine said.  The RTA is now working with city officials to craft a TIGER III application, Landrieu spokesman Ryan Berni said. The application is due on Oct. 31.

Porcari’s caution is warranted. The project remains a long shot. The city has no money for construction and it’s unclear whether the $90 million the RTA has in hand will be enough to complete construction of the first phase, between Canal and Press streets, given cost overruns on the Loyola Avenue line. A further complication: The extension requires a private rail operator, Norfolk Southern, to share a now-active rail crossing at Press Street. The company has long resisted that idea, citing an average of 36 freight trains traveling over the tracks daily.

“For safety reasons, Norfolk Southern has no streetcar crossings with its mainline tracks anywhere within its 22-state system,” spokeswoman Susan Terpay said in an email Tuesday.

Despite the challenges, Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer, a longtime streetcar champion who was at meetings with Porcari on Friday, remains hopeful. The vote of support from U.S. DOT signals not only growing momentum for the project, but also the possibility that the federal government will use its clout to get Norfolk Southern to negotiate, she said.

“(Porcari) committed his help to reaching an agreement with Norfolk Southern,” Palmer said.  “Norfolk Southern asks many things of the United States government and the Department of Transportation and it is my hope that we can use that leverage to achieve a transformative project for the citizens of New Orleans.”

In January 2002, a mound of powdery chemical catalyst used to make gasoline collapsed on a worker doing routine cleanup at the Marathon Ashland Petroleum  refinery in Garyville, La.

Within minutes, the contract employee, from Colfax, was completely engulfed in the toxic chemical and struggling to get free. Before help arrived, the face seal on the man’s helmet broke, allowing fresh air to hit the catalyst and ignite. “Employee #1 was killed as a result of chemical burns,” reads the Occupational Safety and Health Administration report on the death, which was tagged a “housekeeping” issue. The incident report ends with no violations listed and no penalties imposed.

Marathon, which would experience another fatal accident in 2007 and again in 2009, has been considered by the federal government to be one of the country’s safest places to work for nearly two decades, one of 2,434 across the country certified by OSHA as a Voluntary Protection Program site.

This report was prepare in collaboration with iWatch News and other colleagues in the national Invesgtigative News Network.

That status makes the refinery part of an elite group of businesses that serve as ambassadors between industry and the agency’s safety inspectors. In exchange for professing a commitment to safety and carrying that message to private-sector peers, program members get a three-to-five-year exemption from routine OSHA inspections and a friendlier relationship with the feds, not to mention bragging rights useful to the public relations department. Created in 1982 as part of the Reagan Administration’s effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy, the program was an experiment in industry self-policing.

After two decades of slow growth under Reagan and his White House successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the self-enforcement program took off during George W. Bush’s eight years in Washington.

One of the few OSHA initiatives spared cuts during the Bush administration, the program was promoted as a way to encourage employers to voluntarily comply with safety standards at a time when regulations and enforcement efforts were being steadily rolled back. Under Bush, the number of workplaces blessed with the OSHA model-workplace certification tripled nationally, despite warnings from government auditors that such ambitious expansion could threaten the program’s integrity.

Today, the program continues to grow and Congress is considering legislation, co-sponsored by U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., that aims to expand it even further. In addition to codifying the program and expanding access to it, the legislation would prevent OSHA from imposing the user fee it proposed last year to cover increased inspections of participating workplaces. Current rules call for inspections only in the event of a fatality or if a complaint is filed.

If the proposed legislation becomes law, Louisiana – which already has more self-regulated sites than any state other than Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio — is expected to see a jump in participation.

“Louisiana has one of the largest number of VPP sites in the U.S., and from my experience working with companies in the state, those companies that are in have a true commitment to workplace safety and health,” said Davis Layne, executive director of the Voluntary Protection Program Association, a nonprofit trade organization. “Many other companies are now seeing that value and trying to get involved.”

The commitment to safety may be sincere, but evidence that the program is actually achieving its goals is hard to come by. The deaths at Marathon are not the only fatalities at these so-called model workplaces. Since 2000, at least 74 workers have died at certified sites and agency investigators found serious safety violations in at least 47 cases, according to records examined by The Lens in collaboration with Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News. In Louisiana, there have been six deaths since 2000, including the three at Marathon in Garyville and two at other facilities that were linked to serious violations of their safety code. None of the Louisiana deaths resulted in companies losing model workplace status.

Critics of the federal government's Voluntary Protection Program say that fatal accidents should not be tolerated at these so-called models for workplace safety.

Indeed, the disconnect between the Voluntary Protection Program’s goals and its results is especially stark in Louisiana, where a large petrochemical industry puts workers in daily contact with life-threatening risks that are not measured by the program. The big problem, program critics contend, is that the potentially catastrophic risks inherent in refinery operations aren’t meaningfully reflected in the personal-injury data that is the program’s primary metric.

“In a refinery, not fixing a pipe or repairing a machine can lead to a major explosion and a slip-and-fall rate is not going to help you know if that repair or maintenance was done,” said Celeste Monforton, a former OSHA policy analyst who now is a lecturer in environmental and occupational health at George Washington University.

The agency’s records lend validity to Monforton’s concern. Petroleum refining facilities account for only about 7 percent of OSHA’s model workplaces in Louisiana – six out of 107 sites. Yet four of the last decade’s six fatalities – 67 percent— occurred in those petrochemical facilities. Nationally, at least 11 of the 74 site- recorded fatalities between 2000 and 2010 — 15 percent — happened at refineries, all of them in Louisiana or Texas, OSHA records show. Additionally, these facilities increasingly depend on contract workers – like the man who died of chemical burns at Marathon’s Garyville plant — whose injuries or days lost are simply omitted from the personal injury rate average that serves as the program’s primary metric for measuring workplace safety. This means that refineries could have a higher rate of on-site injury than allowed by program standards, yet still be certified because a sector of its workforce isn’t factored into the equation.

In March, a contract worker at Valero Energy’s facility in Norco, a certified program participant, fell from a ladder to his death.  A malfunction in the plant had exposed the worker, Victor Rodriguez, 30, to dangerous levels of the toxic gas hydrogen sulfide in the minutes before his fall.

His family is now suing Valero and the contracting company that employed him for wrongful death.

“What happened was a breakdown in the process safety management,” Byron Buchanan, a lawyer for the deceased contractor’s family, said.

But while the Houston lawyer contends that the fatal accident was preventable, and possibly indicative of a larger weakness in the refinery’s process management system, it’s unlikely to affect Valero’s status as a model for workplace safety or cost it money in fines, analysis of OSHA inspection data shows. Among the fatalities that previously occurred at federally certified sites in Louisiana, three of the five complete accident investigations — 60 percent of the total and all of them at Marathon — resulted in no penalties.

While refineries avoided fines, wood and paper companies weren’t so lucky. After a worker was killed at the International Paper mill in Mansfield, OSHA fined the company $10,000 for two separate violations.  No summary of the accident was included in OSHA’s investigation but records show the violations were for failing to maintain proper guard rails and other safety mechanisms. The 2009 fines remain outstanding, though the company told OSHA it had fixed the problems in 2010.

In Oakdale, a Boise Cascade sawmill was assessed $4,410 after an employee was fatally struck by a tractor-trailer while walking to his workstation. “The intersection of the drive aisle was not marked or controlled by signals or stop signs,” an OSHA inspector noted in the accident investigation summary. The lack of traffic signage led to an initial fine of $6,300.The agency later settled with the company for $4,410 in penalties.

OSHA did not respond to a request for information about the mill deaths. It was not, however, the agency’s first time fielding questions about a worker death at a safety-certified International Paper mill.

In 2008, a catastrophic boiler explosion at a mill in Vicksburg, Miss., killed one worker and injured another 22, leaving at least three in medically-induced comas for months while doctors treated serious burns. In a subsequent investigation OSHA discovered that the Tennessee-based company had ignored an internal memo outlining recommendations that, if followed, would have prevented the explosion or minimized risk to workers, according to records examined by the Center for Public Integrity’s iWatch News. OSHA, in its investigation, alleged violations of safety standards that program members are expected to exceed, yet the company did not lose certification.

Texas refineries have been less successful than their Louisiana counterparts in avoiding fines following fatalities, OSHA records show, perhaps in part because the deaths at program-certified refineries in Texas have been associated with more catastrophic failures of systems and machinery. In total, 54 percent of fatality investigations at Texas refineries — four out of seven — resulted in fines compared to zero in Louisiana.

What the two states have in common, however, is that none of the fatalities resulted in an establishment losing OSHA certification as a model for safety. After a worker was killed and another seriously injured by a preventable boiler explosion at a Valero refinery in Texas City, for instance, OSHA issued the Voluntary Protection Program participant a citation. The 2009 blast had thrown one of the workers under a stainless steel tank, causing “fatal blunt force trauma,” the accident report reads. Valero hasn’t paid its $4,500 penalty, or suffered a fall from grace as part of the model-workplace program.

At Marathon in Garyville, another worker died after mistakenly driving his pickup into a wastewater retention pond on the refinery’s grounds.  By the time co-workers answered his radio call for help, the technician’s Ford F-150 was completely submerged.  “Employee #1 was found at approximately 3:00 a.m. on September 1, 2007, drowned in the pond,” reads the OSHA report. Again, no violations were found and no fines imposed on the refinery, which was certified as a model workplace in 1994. In the report’s concluding lines, an inspector notes that there are no lights in the area. No penalties were paid and the site remains part of OSHA’s model program.

Ignoring a slap on the wrist, losing a life

Nationally, about 70 percent of sites where a worker has died since 2000 remain in the program today. Typically, a site is removed from the program only after repeated incidents demonstrate chronic mismanagement. At a certified Weyerhaeuser Co. paper plant in Oklahoma, for instance, a worker was crushed to death in a paper machine two years before the site was reapproved for model workplace status. Less than two months after the site was recertified, another worker was crushed to death in a paper machine and OSHA found the same violations that had been cited in the first death, documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show.  Only then did OSHA remove the site from the program.

That reluctance to decertify doesn’t surprise personal injury lawyer Buchanan. After years of representing Texas oil industry workers, he says he has seen no significant difference between certified and uncertified workplaces.

“My experience in Texas is that when a site is (allowed into the program), safety conditions are not vastly improved,” he said. “The certification could be tied to under-reporting more than anything else.”

OSHA did not answer questions from The Lens about the model-workplace program’s implementation in Louisiana, or respond to repeated requests for an interview with the program’s regional supervisor. The agency also failed to turn over personal injury data that must be made public upon request under the Freedom of Information Act.  “People are stretched thin,” spokesman Jesse Lawder said when a reporter asked why questions still had not been answered a month after they were submitted. A spokeswoman for the agency’s regional office, Elizabeth Todd, referred all inquiries to Washington.

Landrieu, who counts Marathon Oil and other Voluntary Protection Program participants among her biggest financial backers, declined multiple requests for an interview to discuss the program or the pending legislation codifying the program that she helped write.

In an interview with iWatch News, OSHA Deputy Assistant Secretary Jordan Barab defended the program. A death leading to the discovery of serious violations is “certainly a strong indication that you’ve got a serious problem,” he said. But overall the program is “very useful as a model to all employers of what can be achieved,” he added.

A partnership between industry and its regulator

OSHA and program advocates like Landrieu sell self-regulation of workplace safety as a way for government and industry to work together and ultimately, save both sides money. In 2007, a typical year, the agency estimated that the program had saved taxpayers more than $59 million and participating companies more than $300 million.

That corporations would wind up assuming more of the regulatory burden and yet actually save money might seem counter-intuitive. Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero Energy Corporation explains it this way: “The benefits are priceless. Not only do you know that your employees are safer, but from a more dollars-and-cents perspective, safer also means more efficient, fewer breakdowns, less worker turnover and a better relationship with OSHA.” Valero, which operates 11 refineries with model-workplace status, including one at Norco, is pursuing certification of its remaining seven in North America. Day declined to comment on Victor Rodriguez or the incident at Norco that took his life.

To join the model-workplace program, companies must submit to an on-site evaluation. Unlike the usual OSHA visit where inspectors can issue citations, however, evaluators — often including employees of companies in the program — issue “90-day items,” a list of hazards to correct within 90 days. Once a site receives certification, OSHA allows it to police itself. Inspections happen once every three to five years unless triggered by a serious accident, formal complaint or a referral of a potential hazard. Moreover, the status exempts sites, from any industry-specific safety programs that OSHA uses to crack down on workplace hazards — regardless of perceived risk.

Whether or not fatal accidents should be tolerated at workplaces held up as models for safety is a question some in Washington are asking. A Government Accountability Office audit of the Voluntary Protection Program in 2009 found that “sites that no longer met the definition of exemplary workplace” remained in the program, and that “OSHA’s lack of internal controls are not sufficient” to stop that kind of adulteration of the program from happening on a routine basis.

More broadly, auditors determined that OSHA had never developed goals or measures to assess the program’s performance, making any effort to evaluate it “inadequate.” In final recommendations that have not been implemented, the accountability office suggested OSHA tighten internal controls and collect more data so that potential catastrophes can be predicted and prevented. Like Monforton, the former OSHA employee now teaching at George Washington University, auditors say that personal injury data isn’t a sufficient barometer of safety at a high-stakes workplace like a refinery, where a simple procedural mistake has the potential to end lives.

“They don’t track what almost happened, just what does,” GAO investigator Revae Moran told The Lens. The lack of documentation can make it “difficult to take preventative action,” and hard to prove when an incident is symptomatic of a larger pattern of sustained or willful negligence, she said.

That lesson had been taught before, but evidently not learned. On March 23, 2005, a jet fuel manufacturing unit at a BP refinery in Texas City went up in flames, killing 15 people and injuring more than 170. A subsequent investigation found that as part of a cost-cutting drive in the years before the deadly explosion, BP management had placed temporary trailers next to the volatile fuel-making unit and made personnel changes that workers felt compromised their job safety.

For lack of stringent reporting requirements on the refinery’s safety processes, the compound effect of these changes was not realized until it was too late, industry post-mortems revealed. An investigation of the explosion by an independent blue-ribbon panel headed by Texas lawyer James Baker, a former cabinet member in the administrations of Reagan and both Bushes, found that better reporting on refinery conditions would have reduced risk.

Most relevant to the Voluntary Protection Program was the finding that relying on the personal injury rates that qualify companies for the OSHA program contributed to the cascading failures that ignited the Texas City refinery. “BP mistakenly interpreted improving personal injury rates as an indication of acceptable process safety performance,” the Baker panel report stated, adding that “reliance on this data combined with an inadequate process safety understanding created a false sense of confidence that BP was properly addressing safety risks.”

OSHA responded to the Baker panel’s findings with a new program of inspections targeting refineries — the National Emphasis Program. A program fact sheet distributed in 2007 drove home the need to target refineries. The total number of potentially hazardous chemical releases between 1992 and 2007 at petroleum refining facilities surpassed the combined totals of the next three highest industries: chemical manufacturing, organic chemical manufacturing and explosives manufacturing.

Yet even with this stark evidence of heightened risk, OSHA exempted Voluntary Protection Program sites from the National Emphasis Program. Moreover, for lack of sufficient staff and budgeting, OSHA’s regional offices have failed to inspect eligible sites. In Louisiana, for instance, where hundreds of petroleum manufacturing businesses are subject to inspection through the program, OSHA has done only 10 planned inspections since the its launch four years ago. The inspections, though rare, were fruitful, resulting in 173 citations, many of them for violations classified as serious by OSHA, agency records show.

The exemption of model-workplace sites from subsequent inspections makes it impossible to fully compare their safety records with the performance of inspected sites. But the probe that followed the 2002 death from chemical burns at Marathon’s Garyville site revealed a procedural safety failure of precisely the kind targeted by the National Emphasis Program, from which the facility was exempt.

Inspections of Marathon refineries that aren’t part of the exempting program have turned up repeated allegations from OSHA that the company is violating safety regulations and in some cases, demonstrating “plain indifference” to them. A 2007 inspection of an Ohio refinery ended with citations for 45 violations, 42 of them serious and 2 classified as “willful” totaling $321,500 in fines, OSHA records show.

Marathon declined to answer inquiries for this article. Company spokesman Robert Calmus told iWatch News that he would not discuss specific incidents, but said the company is “a strong supporter of the VPP program and is proud to have many of its facilities VPP certified.”

A precise speed limit hasn't prevented fatal accidents at Marathon Refinery in Garyville.

Barab, the OSHA assistant director, has said that fatalities at exempt sites have caused the agency to consider reinstating industry-specific inspections for refineries that enjoy model-workplace status. “We have had some fatalities in VPP refineries, so that’s something we are still trying to figure out,” Barab said in an interview with iWatch News. “Our general plan is to inspect at least a few VPP refineries and decide for ourselves whether we really need to continue the exemption.”  He said that the agency hasn’t begun those inspections because it is already stretched thin doing inspections of sites already on its priority list. “We haven’t really been able to pull out of that yet,” he said.

Though the legislation to codify the program that is now moving through Congress mandates more internal controls and documentation at participating workplaces, it reinstates the exemption and doesn’t offer any specific requirements for new controls or reporting.

And if the bill passes, said Layne, of the trade association for self-regulated workplaces, the exemption will be only harder to lift. “If you are a refinery and you are in the VPP you already get more rigorous scrutiny than if you are not in the program,” he said. “The advantage of having it placed into law will then make it funded through normal appropriations.”

Asking the driver to police his ride home

Norco refinery electrician Wilton Ledet has seen co-workers burned by boiling chemical catalysts, frostbitten by propane and cut by tools that don’t have required guards. He has helped co-workers off the shop floor after falls from 20-foot ladders. “I’m lucky none of my guys have died,” said the 20-year veteran of the Shell-Motiva plant, and president of the United Steel Workers Local 750. After years of advocating for better worker conditions, Ledet is an ardent opponent of the Voluntary Protection Program.

A central tenet of the self-regulatory program is cooperation between management and the rank-and-file workforce – all applications require sign-off by an employee representative, or a union official if a site is organized. In recent years, the refinery’s management has approached Local 750 about pursuing certification in the OSHA program, but union membership has voted against it, Ledet said. He likens the program to asking drivers to police their commutes home. “My thing is, am I going to speed home from work, get home and then call the police and say, ‘Oh, I sped home?’ ” Ledet said.

“If a company wants to be in a program that bad, there is a reason why they want it. That reason is not my safety,” he said.

Shell’s Norco refinery did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but Layne, the trade group rep, says that Ledet is underestimating the program’s value. “It forces management and workforce to come together, reduces employee turnover, reduces management friction, and reduces injuries,” he said.

Layne also disputes the notion that participating refineries receive less scrutiny than non-certified peers because they are not subject to regular OSHA inspections. To make this point, he recalls an explosion at a Tesoro refinery in Washington State that killed four people just one year after OSHA inspectors were there. The inspection had cited Tesoro for 17 health and safety violations that, at the time of the explosion, were being challenged rather than repaired. “Just because they go in and make an inspection, there is no guarantee that anything is resolved,” Layne said.

With an annual budget that is a fraction of other federal agencies and constantly under attack by anti-regulatory interests, OSHA has long struggled to carry out its broad mandate. But while self-regulation has been held up as a solution, Monforton says that well-intentioned initiatives like the Voluntary Protection Program could in fact be costing the public more than they save.

“The principles espoused by VPP are good and the goals are laudable, but I have not been convinced by any data that the government investment is worth it,” she said. “If you get to wave the flag of government-certified safety, you should not have situations where workers are drowning in ponds because there are no lights. We are rewarding companies for non-exemplary behavior and then paying to oversee that reward.”

In Louisiana’s ConocoPhillips Refinery in Belle Chasse, workers recently teamed up with management to get OSHA certification as a model workplace. Anthony Corso, chairman of the refinery’s USW local, supported the move because he saw it as the only way to upgrade the long-neglected facility. “They were dragging their feet on a lot of repairs we’d been asking for but once they wanted their VPP status they picked up,” Corso said. “They wanted to get the site back up to speed.”

Corso estimates that ConocoPhillips, which earned $3 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2011, spent about $1 million to bring the Belle Chasse plant, its second largest in the U.S., up to code. The improvements ranged from basic repairs of guardrails on equipment and cages on ladders to larger pipe fixes, Corso said. The veteran refinery worker worries whether the investment will continue now that the certification is complete.

“We heard from other folks at other refineries that after they get the certification, they stop listening, but right now, we are pleased,” Corso said. “A year and half from now, we may be saying something else.”

City Council members appear to be falling in line in a move toward more transparent and timely budgeting – but not all of them.

Last week’s joint meeting of the Criminal Justice and Budget committees was a first of its kind. For as long as anyone can remember, the various courts and related sinecures that answer to Criminal Justice have allocated and spent their millions of dollars without allowing for much in the way of public review.

An expose by The Lens, revealed that many Criminal Justice functionaries had no idea their budgets were even subject to public oversight.

Councilwoman Susan Guidry, the member in charge of the committee, cited The Lens article in demanding  greater transparency from the courts.

When Traffic Court kicked up a little resistance, Guidry stood her ground and threatened to pull its funding.

The review of criminal justice agencies continues tomorrow with a review of budgets submitted by the sheriff’s department, the public defender’s office, the Criminal District Court, and the Criminal District Court clerk’s office. The District Attorney’s office and Municipal Court will be reviewed on July 6.

Councilman-at-Large Arnie Fielkow is urging Council committee heads to meet jointly with the his Budget Committee and to do so this summer, rather than waiting for the annual train wreck that occurs as the year-end budget deadline draws nigh.

In August, he’ll schedule “a couple of days of budget-grading sessions … to compare the 2011 budget goals with what has been delivered,” he said.

Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer is on board. Her Sanitation Committee is scheduled to meet jointly with the Budget Committee in August. So is Councilwoman Stacy Head, who presides over Public Works.

Head sees a joint meeting with Fielkow’s Budget Committee as a way to hold the administration accountable for its failures and illuminate successes. She said she’ll be looking for specifics: potholes filled, number of cars towed, street lights changed,  revenues from street rentals – that kind of thing.

But not everyone is stepping forward to embrace the new approach.

Asked if she intended to comply with Fielkow’s request to meet jointly with budgeters, Cynthia Hedge Morrell, who presides over the huge revenues that flow through the Airport and the Utility committees, had a succinct, one-word answer: “No.”

City Council members appear to be falling in line in a move toward more transparent and timely budgeting – but not all of them.

Last week’s joint meeting of the Criminal Justice and Budget committees was a first of its kind. For as long as anyone can remember, the various courts and related sinecures that answer to Criminal Justice have allocated and spent their millions of dollars without allowing for much in the way of public review.

An expose by The Lens, revealed that many Criminal Justice functionaries had no idea their budgets were even subject to public oversight.

Councilwoman Susan Guidry, the member in charge of the committee, cited The Lens article in demanding  greater transparency from the courts.

When Traffic Court kicked up a little resistance, Guidry stood her ground and threatened to pull its funding.

The review of criminal justice agencies continues tomorrow with a review of budgets submitted by the sheriff’s department, the public defender’s office, the Criminal District Court, and the Criminal District Court clerk’s office. The District Attorney’s office and Municipal Court will be reviewed on July 6.

Councilman-at-Large Arnie Fielkow is urging Council committee heads to meet jointly with the his Budget Committee and to do so this summer, rather than waiting for the annual train wreck that occurs as the year-end budget deadline draws nigh.

In August, he’ll schedule “a couple of days of budget-grading sessions … to compare the 2011 budget goals with what has been delivered,” he said.

Councilwoman Kristin Gisleson Palmer is on board. Her Sanitation Committee is scheduled to meet jointly with the Budget Committee in August. So is Councilwoman Stacy Head, who presides over Public Works.

Head sees a joint meeting with Fielkow’s Budget Committee as a way to hold the administration accountable for its failures and illuminate successes. She said she’ll be looking for specifics: potholes filled, number of cars towed, street lights changed,  revenues from street rentals – that kind of thing.

But not everyone is stepping forward to embrace the new approach.

Asked if she intended to comply with Fielkow’s request to meet jointly with budgeters, Cynthia Hedge Morrell, who presides over the huge revenues that flow through the Airport and the Utility committees, had a succinct, one-word answer: “No.”