Photo by Terri Fensel

"If you ask people in [St. Bernard] Parish, 'Do you know anything about [environmental] sampling?' they're going to say no."   – Anne Rolfes

ground. A bent sign along the St. Bernard Highway announces this as a site of the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. The major conflict here is nearly two centuries old. Somehow, that fact makes De la Ronde seem like an oasis.

St. Bernard Parish is now a different type of battlefield: This is the site of one of Katrina's greatest environmental calamities: at Murphy Oil, the storm reportedly pushed an oil tank off its base and moved it about 15 feet. According to official estimates, 800,000 gallons of oil poured out. In the days following Katrina, parish president Henry "Junior" Rodriguez compared St. Bernard to Love Canal, referring to the infamous New York state landfill.

Environmental catastrophe is not new to St. Bernard. For years, residents have fought to raise awareness of what they call industry-related health problems. Earlier this year, a group called St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality won two court battles against ExxonMobil, which operates the Chalmette Refinery, for violating the Clean Air Act.

Given past events, St. Bernard Parish wonders if it can trust Murphy Oil, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality.

In 2002, EPA investigator Hugh Kaufman accused the federal agency of deliberately under-testing in New York City after 9/11. "I believe EPA did not do that because they knew it would come up not safe and so they are involved in providing knowingly false information to the public about safety," Kaufman said in a hearing. "Not just EPA, the state and the city, too. We had testimonies that all the agencies -- local, state and federal -- have been consorting together every week to discuss these issues."

Anne Rolfes, founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, thinks that conditions are right for the EPA to similarly neglect its duties in Chalmette and across New Orleans. Industry wants to protect itself from lawsuits. So with city governments and its citizens desperate to rebuild neighborhoods and schools, the question becomes: What can the people do to protect themselves and their families?

Through her work with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Rolfes teaches people living in the "fenceline" communities that border petrochemical facilities how to monitor their own soil and air quality. The Bucket Brigade helped citizens in the Diamond community of Norco successfully fight Shell Oil.

In recent years, the group turned its attention to St. Bernard Parish and the Chalmette Refinery, which occupies the old Kaiser Aluminum plant on St. Bernard Highway. Rolfes and the Bucket Brigade now face one of their biggest challenges to date: assisting residents whose homes were among the hardest hit by the floodwaters and the Murphy Oil spill.

Rolfes is driving to St. Bernard one October day; in her back seat is a large bazooka that could have been used in the movie Ghostbusters. Called the UV Hound Multi Gas Analyzer, it costs $16,000, and it's on loan. The simple explanation of how it works: it shoots a beam of ultra-violet light, which is absorbed in different ways by certain chemicals. You can measure the air quality immediately.

"It won't get the mold but it will catch what's coming out of the refineries," she says.

Rolfes is here to hand off the UV Hound to local environmentalists. She's also planning to attend what she hears will be a parish-wide town hall meeting that has been called for 10 a.m. this morning in Chalmette. No environmentalists have been invited to speak, so Rolfes wants to pass out a stack of Bucket Brigade flyers. She starts the tour in the neighborhood that runs alongside the Chalmette Refinery.

There are 14 sites where the Bucket Brigade is taking soil samples, starting at the home of Ken Ford, the president of St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality. Around the corner is Rowley Elementary School.

Dotting intersections all over the parish are signs that list phone numbers: Call to sue Murphy. Rolfes is still checking them out. She wonders aloud if some of these numbers might lead to the oil company itself. The conditions are right for a cheap land grab, she says. She's seen this sort of thing before.

The Louisiana Bucket Brigade isn't suggesting that people stay or move, she says. As always, the goal is to arm residents with information. So far, she says, the EPA has failed its primary mission: to get the word out about any hazards. "If you ask people in this parish, 'Do you know anything about sampling?' they're going to say no."

She pulls up along a canal, where the only signs of life in the neighborhood surrounding Jacob Drive are workers in red jumpsuits. Rows of vacuum hoses snake across the waterway. Trucks display the logo of Garner Environmental Services, Inc. Rolfes speculates on the motive for the cleanup. Are they improving the neighborhood, or are they destroying evidence? She gets out and starts taking pictures. She's shooed back to her car.

"Who knows what those guys are doing?" Rolfes says as she starts driving away. "Actually, I'm going to ask them." She turns around. Back at the canal, she rolls down the window. "Who contracted you?" she asks.

A man in a jumpsuit answers. "Murphy," he says, then turns back to his work.

When Rolfes pulls up to the council chambers, the St. Bernard meeting is already underway. A crowd of about a thousand people is pushing into the chambers, now a dusty concrete auditorium. The doors and windows are all removed. Some residents stand on the empty window frames, cupping their ears to hear.

There are a few figures on a stage, mostly men in shirt-sleeves and ties. Sheriff's deputies line the walls. On the floor below is a folding chair and a microphone. The man at the table is state Sen. Walter Boasso, a Republican from the nearby town of Arabi. When the pledge of allegiance is finished, he begins the work of the day: querying various officials about the emergency response after Katrina and the current state of the parish.

"We lost our tax base here in St Bernard Parish," one man in a suit tells the senator. Shouts come from the audience. The state senator announces that this meeting is scheduled to go on for eight hours. People start to shout louder. "We want answers!" says someone.

A bulky man with thick, white hair stands up at the front. He's the parish president, Junior Rodriguez. He's been called to testify. But before speaking, he lifts up a gold-capped cane and slams it down on the table in front of him. "Goddamn it, shut up!" he bellows at the crowd.

The shouts subside, but only for a few minutes. A few phrases are audible over the loudspeakers:

"All of our lives are at stake ... ."

"You can never talk to the same person twice ... ."

"Loan us money? It's a damn slap in the face to loan us money ... ."

When Council Chairman Joey DiFatta gives his testimony, he's the first speaker who can be heard over the din. Sweat pouring down his face, he demands answers about Murphy, the oil spill, the hot zones and levee repairs. "To rebuild our houses and not protect them is stupid," he says. "And we don't want to be stupid." The crowd cheers.

The councilman goes on. He's heard from EPA about the short term. He wants to know about the long term. "That's living in the home, that's staying in the community, working in the community, for the next 10 to 20 years. I need to know: What is that going to do to our people? ... I need you guys, and I think you can do it, to get DEQ to shake that tree and get some answers." With no opportunity for public comment, people start to drift away from the chambers. Outside, on a strip of dusty, burnt grass, parish officials are holding forth with their constituents. One of them, St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stephens, is being grilled by two women. A cluster of deputies is positioned behind him.

"All these companies are promising to employ all these sorts of people, and so far, I don't see all those people working," he says. "This thing has been a failure from the first day of the hurricane. They left us to drown like rats."

Council Chairman DiFatta comes outside. I ask him about the belief held by St. Bernard residents that they were ignored during the hurricane, and are still being ignored in the rebuilding process.

"If you say Chalmette's in peril, or you say Toca or Shell Beach is in peril, nobody knows where the hell that's at," he says. "But you say New Orleans is in peril, everybody around the world knows where New Orleans is. So that's what happened, we fell in the shadow of New Orleans, but let me tell these people, we're more important because we produce the seafood and we produce the oil and we produce the natural gas. Let them get that from 'the city that care forgot.'"

Parish President Rodriguez walks through the crowd, on his way to the parking lot. He holds his cane in front of him, not really using it to walk. He says the latest information is suggesting it won't be another Love Canal.

But is he getting the information he needs, particularly from Murphy Oil, from the EPA, the DEQ, that he needs?

"No, I don't think they're giving us information. I got to be a little leery of it -- suspicious, you might say. Not that I want to be, but it's in the best interest of the parish residents that I make sure that they give us the correct information."

Does he trust the EPA to give him the right data?

"Well, let's put it this way," he replies. "That's their job. If they don't do it, then there's nothing that I can do about it."

The St. Bernard meeting has recessed for lunch. Ken Ford is talking with a group that includes Kim Manning, a St. Bernard native who's on Sen. Walter Boasso's staff. She describes a map on the wall of the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness. The map stopped at Chalmette, she says. "No, people! -- there's homes, there's families down below," she told them in the days following the storm. "There's Violet, there's Meraux. It keeps going on. They're like, 'What do you mean, that's just the Gulf.' I said, 'You better get a bigger map because there's lot of people under that.'"

We join the line at a Red Cross trailer to receive a plate of barbecued beef, green beans and canned peaches. Ken Ford is joined by his wife, Genevieve, and Joy Lewis. All are members of St. Bernard Citizens for Environmental Quality. They're in their mid-60s and they're old friends. They admit that their children are mad at all of them -- mad that they're coming in, mad that they're risking their health by going onto their property.

Joy Lewis' husband, Johnny Lewis, is back at their house now, trying to salvage anything he can find from their 50 years of marriage. Their anniversary was Sept. 2, and their daughter was planning a party for them in her 2-month-old, three-story St. Bernard house.

Instead, that Friday, like every day since, Joy Lewis was trying to find the body of her mother, who perished in St. Rita Nursing Home. She says she had left her mother behind because she knew the nursing home had an evacuation plan. Her mom had a blood clot; she didn't want to jeopardize her health by taking her out of the home.

"When I found out a Category 5 hit us, I got really upset," Joy says, echoing many who thought the Category 4 hurricane was stronger than it was. "My mother was 92 and she had all her faculties, and I can just imagine her being so afraid, hearing the wind and feeling the water. It upsets me. So I gave them all the information they needed, and I'm still looking for her. For almost seven weeks."

Ken Ford hasn't touched his lunch. I ask him if he's going to take the UV Hound out in the parish this afternoon.

"I'm going to do what I can do," he says. "I got health problems, I got one lung."

I ask him how he lost a lung.

"Cancer," he says. "Took my left lung out."

"Do you wonder if it's related to living in this area?"

"I hate to say that."

"But you wonder about it?"

"I wonder because there are 17 people on my street either died from cancer, died with cancer, or have cancer right now."

There's also not much talk yet of their flooded homes, of selling, of bulldozing. First, they need information. The kind of information they say they now have to provide for themselves.

On Murphy Oil's Web site, company president W. Michael Hulse has posted an open letter to St. Bernard Parish residents. It states that all its employees are safe. "On a less positive note, as many of you know, the storm damaged one of our storage tanks which leaked oil into some of the areas surrounding the refinery," the letter says. "At the moment it is our understanding that all final determinations about the safety and habitability and future of property in St. Bernard Parish have to be made by local, state and federal governmental agencies." In the letter, Hulse also announces a $5 million gift to the parish.

When asked why she's suspicious of those agencies, Rolfes pulls out a Sept. 17 joint press release from the EPA and DEQ titled "Air Sampling Data Collected by EPA Mobile Labs Released." A line in the release states, "Monitoring data directly around the Murphy Oil Spill revealed some slightly elevated levels of benzene ... ."

Rolfes pulls out another sheet of paper. This one charts the raw data. The benzene level is 170 parts per billion. That's more than 40 times the state limits. Studies have shown that long-term effects of exposure to benzene include leukemia and anemia.

Outside Wal-Mart, Ken and Genevieve Ford and Joy Lewis discuss their plans for the afternoon -- whether to go back to the meeting, take the UV Hound out for sampling or salvage their homes. They'll leave the parish tonight and go to Mississippi, where they're staying. Then they'll come back soon to do it all over again.

Despite all the talk from the day's proceedings, they still don't have the information they need. No one does. In St. Bernard, they learned that hard lesson by living on the fenceline.

"People haven't heard a squeak from the very institutions that are designed to protect us," says Rolfes. "As usual, the entity being left out of it is the people."

(Additional reporting by Scott Jordan.)

Michael Tisserand is the former editor of Gambit Weekly. This article is adapted from "Submerged: An Evacuee's Journal," which can be read at www.altweeklies.com. He can be contacted at michaeltisserand@yahoo.com.