casinos in louisiana built on a landfill

They are now ramping up pressure on the current mayor, LaToya Cantrell, to take action. Despite multiple legal victories, the group has been fighting for relocation since the 1990s, unsuccessfully lobbying six different mayors.

Photograph: William Widmer/The GuardianĪ buoyant and friendly man with a quick smile, Perkins is a member of Residents of Gordon Plaza Inc, a community not-for-profit. Jesse Perkins stands in the front yard of the Gordon Plaza home he moved into in 1988. Last year, a local developer converted an abandoned building on the original Press Park site into new apartments. In the late 90s city officials started planning low-income housing developments here.

“How can you treat human beings like this?” ‘The fight for our lives’įor 50 years, from 1909 to 1958, the city’s medical, municipal and industrial waste was sent here to be incinerated and sprayed with now banned pesticides. “Sometimes I think it’s criminal,” said Perkins. In 1994 the area – including Gordon Plaza, an elementary school, a public housing development called Press Park apartments and a senior housing complex – was declared a Superfund site (a US federal government program designed to fund the clean-up of toxic wastes). All told, about 150 contaminants have been found in the soil, 49 of which are known carcinogens. The land was rich in arsenic, dioxins, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and had extremely high levels of lead, among other powerful toxins left behind by the Agriculture Street landfill. Photograph: William Widmer/The GuardianĪfter chemical drums and other detritus started literally popping out of front yards, the EPA began testing the soil in the 1980s.

Gordon Plaza is a subdivision developed by the city of New Orleans in 1981 atop the Agriculture Street landfill, which was closed in 1965.

Casinos in louisiana built on a landfill