Après le déluge: Microbial landscape of New Orleans after the hurricanes
- Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, Old Dominion University, 4600 Elkhorn Avenue, Norfolk, VA 23529
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
When storms of hurricane force unleash their power on natural systems, they can reset successional sequences and even change the structure of biological communities (e.g., refs. 1–3). Should that same power descend on a center of human population, the results can be deadly catastrophic. A recent and unforgettable example is the one-two punch delivered to New Orleans in August and September 2005 by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Failure of levees within the city and the resultant flooding by waters from Lake Pontchartrain set the stage for a collapse of social norms and governmental order. Images of New Orleans' human misery after the storms have become iconic. After landfall of Hurricane Katrina, much was conjectured about potential public health repercussions of the storm (4). The arrival of Hurricane Rita 26 days afterward served only to compound the situation and increase such speculation. Fortunately, there were no large-scale outbreaks of serious communicable disease. There has been, however, increasing documentation of the storms' effects on the city's environment, especially in those low-lying areas that were under as much as 3 m of water. What are the concerns associated with the sediment, toxic chemicals, metals, and microbes mobilized by the hurricanes? In a recent issue of PNAS, Sinigalliano et al. (5) consider the poststorm “microbial landscape” of New Orleans and environs. They show that Lake Pontchartrain's microbial environment returned to prestorm (but not pristine) conditions 2 months after the hurricanes. Furthermore, they argue persuasively that the lake was not the source of fecal contamination in floodwater sediments; instead, the city's deficient sanitary infrastructure was responsible.
The study represents the efforts …
*E-mail: fdobbs{at}odu.edu
