The Advocate. December 28, 2022.
Editorial: An iconic mix of Spanish moss and pollution for Louisiana
Sometimes it seems as if we in Louisiana cherish our pollution.
In one of Baton Rouge’s iconic locations, with the State Capitol’s image reflecting on the surface daily, the Capitol Lakes have been polluted time out of mind — confirmed harmful in the administration of Gov. David C. Treen in the early 1980s.
It’s almost like the PCBs and other dangerous chemicals in the lakes were awaiting their own historical marker. All they got in those days were “no fishing” signs in Vietnamese, as a colony of refugees from the war in southeast Asia lived nearby.
Now, maybe, the lakes are getting a chance at not just clean-up but revival, the way the scenic location was intended when it was created by damming a little bayou in the early days of the 1900s.
After much work behind the scenes, Gov. John Bel Edwards has asked the Environmental Protection Agency to add the lakes to the federal agency’s Superfund list.
If that makes the site eligible for federal funding, the lakes could finally be remediated in a way that would make them safe for people to enjoy.
EPA funding was not a given, especially as the agency had determined long ago that the PCBs and heavy metals in the bed of the lakes were not a threat to health unless they were disturbed.
Let sleeping poisons lie? That’s material for a Louisiana historical marker right there.
But the state Department of Environmental Quality has persisted and EPA reversed its 2002 decision that the lakes’ pollution levels were too low to cause health hazards.
What the form of remediation may take depends. It can be a long road for repairing environmental damage, even with federal funding from the Superfund designation.
But we hope that Edwards is right that one day the lakes will be “a healthier environment for wildlife that inhabit them and the many people who would use them recreationally.”
Safe as well as pretty? That’s almost worth a celebratory marker in Louisiana any day.
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