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Landfill standards strengthened

Bea raised concerns about levee stability

Friday, November 17, 2006

By Mark Schleifstein

The stacking of millions of pounds of debris from Hurricane Katrina in the city-owned Old Gentilly Landfill in eastern New Orleans will have to meet more stringent safety requirements to protect a neighboring hurricane levee, officials with the Army Corps of Engineers and state Department of Environmental Quality confirmed Thursday.

The agreement could result in increasing FEMA’s daily limit for dumping construction debris in the landfill, from the current 19,000 cubic yards to 50,000 cubic yards.

The decision to increase safety requirements followed concerns raised several weeks ago by Robert Bea, an engineering professor at University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the waste’s additional weight could weaken the levee and cause it to fail during another hurricane.

The landfill has also been the subject of a debate pitting the need for debris removal against contamination concerns. State officials have argued for months that the Old Gentilly Landfill, along with another landfill proposed for eastern New Orleans, should be approved to speed up the disposal of debris collected in New Orleans. They’ve argued that the increased time and cost of transporting the waste to other landfills has slowed debris collection.

That view has been countered by environmental groups led by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, who argue that the reopening of the Gentilly landfill has increased the risk of exposing neighbors to improperly disposed materials and could cause wastewater leakage from the older and new parts of the landfill.

Telephone conference

In a 2 1/2-hour telephone conference Wednesday, ending with an agreement to increase the landfill’s safety requirements, federal and state officials and a geotechnical engineer hired by the state met with Bea and representatives of the environmental group and its attorneys.

State DEQ officials barred media representatives from hearing the conference call.

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