[CPEO-MEF] NASA: "New Orleans plant built rockets to send Americans to space - and spilled chemicals into soil, water"

[Lenny Siegel <LSiegel@cpeo.org>]

NASA spent millions over decades trying to remove Michoud's toxic waste. It's still there.
New Orleans plant built rockets to send Americans to space - and spilled chemicals into soil, water

BY MARK SCHLEIFSTEIN
NOLA.com
April 9, 2021


In 1966, as NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility was building rockets to send the first American to the moon, a tank containing 16,000 gallons of a cancer-causing solvent failed. The contents seeped into the dirt and groundwater at the site, and the federal agency has been trying ever since to clean it up.

While the tank failure, reported here for the first time, was the most spectacular leak at the New Orleans East complex, a review of dozens of state and federal government records on Michoud show the same chemical had been leaking into soils and groundwater for years from dozens of drain pipes beneath the immense plant's Building 103, which encloses 43 acres, and from nearby chemical storage ponds.

The cleanup problems, which have now lingered more than a half century, stem from the 832-acre Michoud property's place as a key manufacturing site in the U.S. aerospace program. But they also reflect how unsafe manufacturing practices were until Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s adopted a suite of laws restricting the use and disposal of toxic chemicals.

…

For the entire article, see
https://www.nola.com/news/environment/article_6cfeef1a-90bc-11eb-a158-4fdb371e078a.html

—

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org
Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)

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