Art Imitates Remediation As First Step in City Cleanup
A proposal by a North Carolina artist is laying the foundation for what may become the largest in-situ residential soil-lead remediation project in the country. Artist Mel Chin’s work often brings site-specific art to unlikely places, including destroyed homes and landfills. He has worked with scientists in the past to create gardens of hyperaccumulators—plants that draw heavy metals from soil. Now he is attracting academic, engineering and social resources to ask Congress for $300 million to address soil-lead contamination in New Orleans.
Although the contamination is not attributed to Hurricane Katrina’s floods in 2005, the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s intensive post-disaster analysis of soil conditions there has created an unusually detailed picture of the city’s lead-contamination problem. An estimated 86,000 city lots have soil-lead concentrations of more than 400 parts per million—six times EPA’s maximum for lead in play-area soil.