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10/09/2005:

"Katrina Workers in Peril: Will We Repeat Mistakes of 9/11 Cleanup?"

Federal agencies and the media have begun to pay attention to the safety and health of workers involved in the Hurricane Katrina rescue, response and cleanup. The main reason is clearly the toxic soup that has consumed the New Orleans area, but hovering in the background are the lessons learned from the cleanup operation following the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, which left thousands of workers with serious long-term health problems.

The potential hazards in New Orleans, and to a lesser extent throughout the Gulf Coast, range from the more common hurricane-related hazards – such as electrical hazards, falling tree limbs, and dust containing lead, silica and asbestos – to the unique hazards caused by the New Orleans flood: raw sewage, rotting human and animal bodies, medical waste, and chemicals such as gasoline, oil, corrosives, lead and other heavy metals. Many of these materials will persist in the soil for years to come as the city is rebuilt.

All of this brings back bad memories from the aftermath of 9/11 when police, fire, rescue, construction, utility and volunteer workers in New York were exposed to a similar array of hazards. Asbestos, glass, concrete and hazardous chemicals were pulverized when the buildings fell and then cooked for weeks while the fires sent out plumes of toxic smoke.

Dr. Stephen Levin of the Selikoff Center for Occupational & Environmental Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York estimates that of the 12,000 workers and volunteers screened by the hospital, half have persistent respiratory problems, such as asthma, inflammation and sinusitis. One emergency medical technician died recently of respiratory illness related to his exposure. Many others are so severely ill they can’t work. About 300 firefighters have retired with disabilities from injuries and illnesses they believe are related to World Trade Center work.
americanprogress.org

La Nueva Orleans
NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they're done, they're going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It's the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.

President Bush has promised that Washington will pick up the greater part of the cost for "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen." To that end, he suspended provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act that would have required government contractors to pay prevailing wages in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. And the Department of Homeland Security has temporarily suspended sanctioning employers who hire workers who cannot document their citizenship. The idea is to benefit Americans who may have lost everything in the hurricane, but the main effect will be to let contractors hire illegal immigrants.

Mexican and Central American laborers are already arriving in southeastern Louisiana. One construction firm based in Metairie, La., sent a foreman to Houston to round up 150 workers willing to do cleanup work for $15 an hour, more than twice their wages in Texas. The men — most of whom are undocumented, according to news accounts — live outside New Orleans in mobile homes without running water and electricity. The foreman expects them to stay "until there's no more work" but "there's going to be a lot of construction jobs for a really long time."