New Orleans East Landfill Update: "Landfill Testing Called a Farce"

In New Orleans, the Chef Menteur landfill fight is on with the newly elected same-old mayor.

Before his narrow re-election, whose validity has been questioned all along by many established civil rights groups for not providing equal access to representative elections for the still displaced hundreds of thousands of former residents, Mayor Nagin bypassed laws that call for community hearings before creating a landfill and opened a 100 acre dump site for millions of tons of hurricane debris. This immense and hastily created "landfill" sits in and on the wetlands in the East of New Orleans, jeopardizing the lives of a community of primarily Vietnamese and African-American families as well as the U.S.'s largest urban wildlife refuge.

24 hours before the election last Saturday, Mayor Nagin re-opened to dumping the enormous landfill site after Youth and Elder community members, joined by civil rights, religious and environmental groups, had successfully waged a campaign that halted the landfill-in-progress. Mayor Nagin put a 3-day moratorium on dumping ...."Until I prove to you it is safe."

Now these united commuity and activist groups say that Nagin's methods of testing the safety of the landfill "are a Farce" in this article in the local New Orleans Times Picayune: