Keeping Lower Ninth Ward residents from becoming double asbestos victims As the excavator demolishes the house at 1333 Reynes Street in the Lower 9th Ward, a worker keeps any potential asbestos dust inundated with water by spraying debris. U. S. Army Photo by Lt. Col. Jack Hourguettes Jr.  Back to Features Page

In Lower 9th Ward, actions speak louder than rumors
By Dave Harris, Public Affairs, Louisiana Recovery Field Office

Lt. Col. Jack Hourguettes (pronounced Ho-Gets) drives his own black jeep to the Lower Ninth Ward. The Corps liaison officer for Orleans Parish imagines himself in the shoes of a resident of the Lower Ninth Ward and asks himself, “How would you deal with the personal battle Katrina served up?”

You’ve struggled all your life—with violence in your neighborhood, with a choice between eating and buying medicine for your kids. Then, you hear the biggest hurricane in the history of New Orleans is knocking at the door. You want to evacuate, like the middle-class folks. But you have $13 in your pocket. You could borrow a car and make it as far as Baton Rouge. Or you could feed your kids.

If you choose to evacuate (your relatives throw in some peanut butter and crackers), OK, you stop-and-go through the clogged Interstate-10 and, driving on fumes, you arrive in Baton Rouge. Where do you stay? What do you eat?

You find a Salvation Army soup kitchen and bed down in a shelter. You ask around regarding what’s happening back home in your neighborhood. Someone says, “The feds deliberately blew up the levees to flood the Lower Ninth. It saved the rich white community.”

Then the truth dawns on you as cooler heads prevail. If someone blew up levees protecting the Ninth Ward, they only shot themselves in the foot. Flooding the Ninth Ward also flooded out the "rich kids" in their nearby neighborhoods too.

And yet, the bird on the other shoulder says, “But if explosions are lies, where is the Army Corps of Engineers? Why do they focus on every neighborhood but mine?"

Then, cruising down Claiborne one day, you see Plastic Man and a monster with huge jaws and teeth to the right. You make a right turn and see a bunch of people dressed in plastic and wearing some kind of breathing mask in front of the jaw-gouged house at 1333 Reynes. The Corps of Engineers is in the neighborhood after all. Now you see it with your own eyes.

A huge excavator is knocking down this house that needed to be leveled. A flat-bed trailer with two huge water tanks stands ready. A hose from the tanks sprays the cross-hair target of the excavator to overwhelm and render harmless any dust that might contain menacing asbestos.

This house has no confirmed asbestos. Time to follow the rules. Without a guarantee of no asbestos, contracted air monitor Philip Chime said, the crew must “assume” the presence of the dreaded fiber.

“I’m not the one to analyze the data; I’m just sucking air,” he said with a smile. So far, air quality hasn’t posed a problem. EPA’s standard is .01 fibers per cubic centimeter.

“Our findings so far have had a point-zero-zero,” he said as he pointed out the process to saturate with water all of the demolition sites, especially suspected asbestos. “Either way, they are treated the same.” The debris is then wrapped in polyurethane on the bed of the truck.

It’s harder this way—assuming the asbestos. If known asbestos is present, it simplifies the testing. “If we can’t go in and do ACM testing, it makes it a much more time-consuming project.”

FEMA’s Cesar Rodriques monitored the demolition project for historical significance. He explained that houses scheduled for demolition were determined to be as having a high, moderate or low probability of the need for historical preservation. The Reynes house had a low probability, but historical preservation people still monitor 25 percent of all demolitions.

What historical artifacts was he checking for?  Rodrigues said he looks for “bottles, ceramics, old foundations and wells” and so crews working on monitored houses aren’t allowed to dig below eight inches.  

It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon and the excavator had only completed a portion of the Reynes house.

“This is a new crew—their first house,” Hourguettes said. “They are ramping up the number of crews to complete as many demolitions as possible by Dec. 31.” That’s the target date after which federal funding reduces from 100 to 90 percent.

The colonel talked about the importance of the Corps’ presence in the Lower Ninth Ward. “People initially thought we didn’t care about them,” he said.  “Our work here shows that we do.”