US MainStream Media ignores "Love canal" Superfund site under water in NO

[papau]

The Agriculture Street Landfill (ASL), located halfway between the old French Quarter and the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, is still under 3 feet of water due to the collapse of a section of the Industrial Canal Levee, causing the toxic waste from the landfill to mix with floodwaters and spread far beyond the old landfill site.

http://www.solidwastemag.com/article.asp?id=47051&issue=09012005

Love Canal-type landfill submerged in New Orleans floodwaters

<snip>The Agriculture Street Landfill (ASL) is situated on a 95-acre site in New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana. The ASL is a federally registered Superfund site, and is on the National Priorities List of highly contaminated sites requiring cleanup and containment. A few years ago the site, which sits underneath and beside houses and a school, was fenced and covered with clean soil. However, three feet or more of flood waters could potentially cause the landfill's toxic contents – the result of decades of municipal and industrial waste dumping – to leach out.

Houses and buildings that were constructed in later years directly atop parts of the landfill. Residents report unusual cancers and health problems and have lobbied for years to be relocated away from the old contaminated site, which contains not only municipal garbage, but buried industrial wastes such as what would be produced by service stations and dry cleaners, manufacturers or burning. The site was routinely sprayed with DDT in the 1940s and 50s and, in 1962, 300,000 cubic yards of excess fill were removed from ASL because of ongoing subsurface fires. (The site was nicknamed "Dante's Inferno" because of the fires.)<snip>