All those who spend time in the Ninth Ward know both sides of the Industrial Canal levee to be precious public space. Groups of every stripe use the levee as a gathering place—musicians, flamboyantly dressed parade goers, and bereaved communities holding memorials for the recently departed all assemble there. That section of the river has a wildness to it; on the Upper Ninth Ward side it is affectionately known as The End Of the World. On both, dogs roam freely off leash, children can explore with fewer restrictions, and on the weekends the river is dotted with fishing poles, just like the country. This juncture where the canal meets the river may have once been a bustling center of the city’s shipping industry, but productivity has been thoroughly supplanted by congeniality and repose.
Until recently, that is. The city’s forces of industry have long rallied to reclaim the zone in the name of commercial enterprise, and thanks to their efforts, the tranquility of the Lower Ninth Ward side of the levee is currently facing its most immediate and tangible threat to date. This fall, the Port of New Orleans (Port NOLA)—an entity run by the state, not the City—struck a deal with the Canadian food production company Sunrise Foods International to rehabilitate the Alabo Street Wharf and reactivate nearly two miles of inactive rail lines that run from the wharf down Alabo Street in Holy Cross, from which it would then turn onto the neutral ground of St. Claude into Arabi.
Work is already fully underway on the project: Clouds of dust can be seen lingering between homes on Alabo Street as crews from out of state lay the gravel and rail that will soon be used by 10 to 20 rail cars per day. Where the tracks meet the river, a large riverfront warehouse spanning the block between Flood and Lamanche is to be restored by Sunrise, while Norfolk Southern Railway—the same company responsible for the East Palestine, Ohio derailment disaster—is handling the resuscitation of the rail lines.
As far as the state is concerned, the deal makes sense: Port NOLA will initially use $10 million in federal bonds to pay Sunrise for the rehabilitation of the wharf, with the expectation that the Port will recoup these costs with over $50 million in revenue over the 15-year term of the lease. But the residents of Holy Cross fear that this will irreparably damage their neighborhood. The initial phase of construction is expected to be done by this summer, kicking off Phase 1 of the project. From there, cargo ships full of imported grain will start regularly docking at the Alabo Wharf. The grain will be loosely stored in the warehouse and then transferred to trains that will carry the grain down the rail lines to various importers. Phase 2 of the project, which includes the construction of a vegetable oil refinery plant, will start shortly thereafter.
Aaron Mercadell’s driveway intersects with train tracks on Alabo St. Having witnessed firsthand the devastation that grain transportation can cause as a longshoreman, Mercadell is hoping City officials and the public can stop the Port of New Orleans from reindustrializing the neighborhood.
All of this poses numerous potential hazards to Holy Cross residents, almost none of which have been publicly addressed by Port NOLA or Sunrise Foods, since the deal was pushed forward before the surrounding community could provide any meaningful input. In the absence of any readily available environmental or community impact assessment, those who could be impacted by the Alabo Street development are left with scant details, hollow promises, and outright denials. Their concerns, as communicated in various public meetings, are legion.
Environmental consequences are at the top of most residents’ lists. The threat of a grain dust explosion, which is far from exceptional at grain storage facilities, could release toxic gases into the air, and it could even compromise the structural integrity of a levee made notorious by its past failings. Other environmental hazards aren’t so theoretical. An influx of hundreds of tons of loose grain is a powerful beacon for rats and other pest populations, a daunting prospect despite Sunrise’s assurances that they have a pest-control plan in the works. At other grain terminals throughout the state, insects have a tendency to feast off of loose grain that’s deposited into the river, which then attracts fish populations. Those fish populations, in turn, offer food for alligators, which can end up congregating en masse in the vicinity of the grain terminals, as residents of South Louisiana’s industrial corridor have warned their New Orleans neighbors.
Another concern most frequently raised by residents over the past months has been the potential health impact of fine grain dust particulates that are 2.5 microns or smaller (approximately 4% of a single hair’s diameter). Though Port officials say they have plans to manage the dust, residents worry that at every stage of the process, including the grain’s off-loading from the ships into the terminal and then from the terminal to the train cars, these microscopic particulates will be a threat to the air supply. Particulate matter’s well-documented ability to stick to airborne pollutants like exhaust fumes allows them to permeate the lungs, where they can accumulate over time and cause respiratory diseases. Some of the other consequences brought up by community members in public fora include the dangers posed to children who play on Alabo Street, the negative impact to property values, and the potential to obstruct emergency vehicles.
Whether the fears of the community are substantiated or not is still unknown, but at the Community Open House held on December 4, representatives of Port NOLA, Sunrise Foods, and Norfolk Southern were evasive, according to Jeffrey Wittenbrink Jr., an attendee of the open house, and would not address residents’ concerns on the record.
According to the terms of the lease, the development could bring up to 20 railcars in and out of the wharf every day. Alabo Street is nothing like Press/Homer Plessy Street, where residents of the Upper Ninth must wait patiently as Norfolk Southern trains add or remove cars, but the nearest residential structure is at least 100 feet away from the rail line. On Alabo Street, family homes are as close as 15 feet from the rail line, which runs down the middle of the road. An absence of crossing arms or lights mean that the trains will be legally required to blow their horns at least four times at each of the 22 residential intersections they’ll cross. This was a concern for one resident who spoke at Port NOLA’s December 30 public hearing on the issuance of the bonds that will fund the project. “I work from home in a therapeutic capacity. I am online with my clients, trying to have actual business meetings—a whistle constantly blowing in the background is obviously not going to help me,” they said. “And I’m not the only person in this neighborhood who works from home.”
Originally founded in the Canadian city Saskatoon, Sunrise Foods International was purchased in 2018 by Tiryaki Agro, a giant Turkish conglomerate whose production operations stretch as far as Russia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates.
Norfolk Southern, their transportation partner in all of this, requires no introduction for anyone who has ever gotten stuck at the tracks while the company’s train blockade takes its sweet time. But the company’s issues go beyond daily inconvenience. Worryingly for Holy Cross residents, the company is responsible for several environmental calamities, from a sulphuric acid incident in Tennessee to a deadly crash in South Carolina which, according to The Intercept, “resembled a chemical weapons attack.”
So how did an agreement with such dubious corporate entities manage to pass right under our noses, and where do things stand now? As these plans were progressing in the spring and summer, Port NOLA did its best to minimize community involvement or input—it satisfied its legal obligations by publishing two “public notices” that were mired in legalise and buried deep in The Advocate’s Classified section, while simultaneously pushing the initiative through in its board meetings, which are rarely attended by New Orleans residents. The only public input offered before the lease was all-but-signed took place at a June board meeting. By the time the lease was signed sometime in October (the exact date is unknown), the Holy Cross community was only starting to catch wind of the plans, and a small collective of residents mobilized to get the word out.
Among those residents was Wittenbrink, a board member of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association whose house on Tricou Street is less than 1,000 feet away from the soon-to-be-reactivated rail lines. As far as he knows, Wittenbrink was the first community member to hear about the development plans and fully register what was going on. He was attending State Representative Candace Newell’s town hall on behalf of the Neighborhood Association, with no expectation that he’d learn anything earth-shattering. But then, a representative for Port NOLA took a moment at the podium to casually announce their intentions. The announcement took no more than two sentences, he remembers. “They said, ‘Oh, we’re gonna bring the Alabo Wharf back into commerce with an organic grain terminal. It’s gonna be really good for the Port.’” Wittenbrink pressed the Port for more answers, and with a heavy heart brought the news back to his neighborhood association, which leapt into action.
Since the fall, Wittenbrink has been part of a small but tireless group of community members who have tried to bring attention to the matter in the hopes that the project can be stopped. Though the lease has already been signed and work has already begun, there are still a few potential routes through which the agreement could be nullified. For one, the lease forbids Sunrise from “any activities which could result in adverse impacts to the environment and/or human health on the Premises… or any adjacent property.”
In just three months of organizing, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association and the issue-specific organization Stop the Grain Train have amplified public attention and pressure. Though it’s not in their jurisdiction, the City Council recently passed a resolution urging the state and Sunrise to conduct the necessary environmental and community impact assessments. These are only some of the indicators that the signs and posters saying “Stop the Grain Train,” now ubiquitous in the Ninth Ward, are working. Though the state and their corporate partners appear hell-bent on pushing this project down the throats of Holy Cross residents, they are being met by a unified and growing community of concerned New Orleans citizens who have too much to lose—and nothing to gain—to let this come through without putting up a fight.
For more info, check out stopthegraintrain.com or @stopthegraintrain on Instagram.
Top photo: Train tracks run the length of Alabo St. from St. Claude to the levee amongst residential homes and pedestrian walkways. In some cases the tracks lay less than 20 feet from homes.
photos by Stephen Lomonaco
