Wrapup from Boulder

Hi friends, I'm back in Boulder. I had a peaceful weekend reconnecting with people I care about, and am ready to share a final wrapup with you all.

I had a fantastic experience in New Orleans. The people, food, architecture, culture, and history are still there and still utterly unique.

I got some insight into how a lot of people really live in New Orleans - in residential neighborhoods of small and beautiful homes, many of which have been destroyed. Now lots of people live in FEMA trailers, pictured right. The FEMA trailers had not even been delivered to some places when I left.

I also learned about setting up a lab from scratch and doing science without boundaries, as human needs require it. The various projects that our lab will handle are soil analysis and remediation through sunflowers, mustard greens, oyster mushrooms, compost tea, and new soil creation using sheet composting. Although my knowledge is a centimeter deep and a mile wide, I realized that it was all driven by the immediate needs of the people of New Orleans.

Lots still needs to be done in New Orleans. Under the elevated interstate highway are hundreds if not thousands of wrecked cars that need to be towed away. Apparently it was easier to claim that one's car had been totaled and get the insurance money to buy a new car than it was to be compensated for damages to a house. And I heard that a lot of insurance companies were covering "hurricane" damage but not "flood" damage - how can those be separated given the root cause of the levee breaks?

Some of you may be interested in what you might do to help, or continue your interests in what you've read about here. Here are a few ideas.
1. Find out how your own interests can be pursued in New Orleans. Whether you like fine food, history, golf, hiking, or environmental analysis, google it and find out what you might enjoy here. The more people who are invested in some aspect of New Orleans, the more support it has for its rebuilding. If that's all you do, that's worth it.
2. Learn about your own state's soil testing lab. Every state should have a university extension service to which you can send a sample from your yard and get it inexpensively tested, just for fun. And find out what your state or city's standards are, like the Louisiana RECAP standard.
3. Consider taking your next vacation in New Orleans, or the Gulf South. They are rolling out the welcome mat for tourists. My hotel, International House Hotel, was delightful.
4. Of course, consider making a gift! Lots of wonderful groups are working down there, from Common Ground and the Red Cross to local churches and nonprofits in your own area.

Finally, New Orleanians still have their sense of humor. As you can see from the car on the right, "Everything is going swimmingly."

Thank you all so much for reading my blog these many days. Knowing you were there made this trip so much more fun. And laissez les bons temps rouler!

Last morning

Hi y'all, this was my last morning. I breakfasted at Cafe du Monde (on beignets and iced coffee) and have packed a Central Grocery muffuletta for lunch. I'm going to take one last drive around town and then head to the airport. I'll try to blog from there!

A Day of Good Stuff

Today was absolutely intense. The last time I blogged, I had just finished printing the field protocols and having lunch. I went from there to picking up Lovell Agwaramgbo at Dillard University, taking him to St. Mary's, and meeting Russ Schmehl of Tulane and Kurt Birdwhistell of Loyola. It was a regular pow-wow of professors, all chemists. Alec and Clark were waiting for us, and we gave the professors a tour of the lab. Of course the "tour" part took all of two minutes, but we all had lots to share about the purposes of the lab and the project.

Then we toured four different remediation sites. First we went to Deslonde Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward, where we saw sunflower gardens at a home and at the Common Ground center there. Lovell, Russ, Kurt, Clark, and Alec are pictured right. Then we went to the sunflower garden at the Martin Luther King Jr. School in the Lower Ninth. Then we went to the community garden in Gentilly, which has been an organic garden for at least the last 30 years. Finally we drove to a neighborhood further west called Gert Town, in which the Haywood-Thompson pesticide processing plant has been closed for at least twenty years, but in which cancer rates are higher than the norm. We looked at one more sunflower garden there.

From there I returned to St. Mary's with Alec and Clark, and I watched them transfer mycelia from a well-grown culture to fresh millet. I will describe this in detail tomorrow - it's totally fascinating. They have built a glove box/cell culture hood out of a Rubbermaid tub, a piece of plexiglas, rubber gloves, and duct tape. They are the true MacGyvers of this project! Clark is pictured right putting his hands into the gloves. On the left you can see Alec's hands spooning mycelia-millet from a jar on the right into a new jar of millet on the left. The Lysol spray disinfects the inside of the sterile box.

After the mycelia transfer, Alec, Clark and I headed to UNO to return some library books, and we drove through the Lakeview neighborhood, which was also hard hit by the storm. I could see floodwater marks on the houses that looked at least 8 feet high, and that's where the water settled - it probably rose 2-4 feet higher.

Our final journey was for Vietnamese food. Alec knew of a Vietnamese neighborhood on the far eastern end of New Orleans, off Chef Menteur Highway, just before the Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge. When he spotted Saigon Drive on the map, we figured we were headed in the right direction. We found a small neighborhood of Vietnamese shops and had dinner at a restaurant there. I had a very tasty charbroiled beef over steamed rice, with delicately chopped and sauteed scallions on top. We wanted to order durian fruit for dessert but they were out of all their fruit. Here we are in the restaurant, me, Clark and Alec (right to left).

This neighborhood was an enclave of sorts. All the restaurant clientele seemed to be Vietnamese, and they were singing karaoke to Vietnamese songs. There was a long table of men, enjoying hot pots over gas burners and drinking icy beers, and one of them had a birthday, so we all sang Happy Birthday (in English). The whole experience was an amazing cultural departure from the rest of my time here; I had to remind myself that I was actually in New Orleans.

I have a lot more I want to share about today, but it's getting late and I should get some rest. Tomorrow I'll post pictures and update more. Today was just fascinating - I could think about what I learned for hours ...

Writing protocols

I've had a busy morning and will have a busy rest of the day! This morning I wrote up nine protocols, methods of doing various procedures that the bioremediation team is doing. Here's a list.

Sunflower Remediation of Lead
Arsenic Remediation using Mustard Greens
Soil Sampling
Organochlorine Pesticide Remediation
Oyster Mushroom Cultivation
Organic Waste Disposal
EM (Efficient Microorganisms)
Making Compost Tea
Sheet Composting

Alec and Clark dictated these to me yesterday at the community garden, and I typed them up and will place them in our field manual.

I had a very quick and delicious lunch at Herbsaint, one of Susan Spicer's restaurants. I ate a wonderful lamb sausage sandwich with mint salsa verde - I considered the catfish as a more "local" specialty, but I just had to have the lamb. Last night I had a light dinner at Susan Spicer's other restaurant, Bayona, in the French Quarter. The cream of garlic soup was tasty, really smooth and rich with the sweetness of roasted garlic, not pungent at all. The goat cheese crouton with mushrooms in madeira sauce was out of this world. Definitely something I'd order again. It had a deep mushroom flavor and a creaminess that I just loved. Tasted very French.

This afternoon I will give a tour of our lab to some local chemistry professors, and then Alec is going to show us some soil sites. I'm really excited about this whole thing and hopefully will have some good pictures to post tonight!

Taking dictation and Vietnamese food

Today was busier than I expected! I connected an extension cord for the bathroom lab, and now our fridge is working. I then went to the Sun Done Community Garden, where the bioremediation team was working, and I took dictation from Clark and Alec on all their different procedures. I'll report on that later today.

Lots of rain today - I wish it would rain this hard in Colorado. I want to go out to eat, but am hesitant to get soaked... But I'm running out of evenings, and still so many things to try: Bayona, the Indian place a few blocks up, the best Vietnamese place. There has been a lot of Vietnamese immigration to New Orleans. I read a really good book of short stories by Robert Olen Butler last year, mostly tales of Vietnamese in this city making their lives here. It's called A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. I highly recommend it. It used to be that when I thought of New Orleans, I thought of cultures like French, African American, Spanish, Indian (because there are Indians like me almost everywhere!), Cuban, Haitian, Caribbean in general. But this book opened my eyes to another group that has made a mark here.

And I bet I can find some great crispy duck! David and I are always looking for a good dish of that.

Ventilation, pipettors, and St. Bernard housing

Let me start with the loveliest piece of wrought iron in the French Quarter, pictured right.

Well, I've learned more about laboratory ventilation today. Basically a lab needs to have 6-12 air exchanges per hour. The ACS Handbook of Chemical Health and Safety suggests using six exchanges as a good guideline. This is separate from airflow provided to a fume hood; this is just air flow throughout the lab. I calculated that the bathroom lab has about 5,100 cubic feet of air, so if I want 6 exchanges per hour at 60 min/hr, that means I need a blower or fan that moves 510 cubic feet per minute.

I'm going to share these estimates with Lauren, but since the trailer is coming, I don't want to set up too much infrastructure in the bathroom lab. I'm also going to direct her toward some simple hoods, in case we need them.

I learned another interesting thing yesterday that might be old news to some of you. A positive displacement pipettor is specially used for volatile or viscous liquids, as opposed to the air displacement pipette, which we use all the time for aqueous solutions. The positive displacement pipettor's disposable tips are actually these mini-pistons, where the tip holds the liquid and a piston actually contacts the liquid and pulls it upward. These pistons are more expensive than the usual pipet tips.
Today I did the ventilation research, and I also went to the St. Bernard housing development, which has not been reopened since Katrina. Here are some pictures of the rally there today. There was food, and music, and people were dancing. There was also a lot of political expression.

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Today I'm going to continue my research on ventilation. Then I'm going to spend my afternoon and evening out. I definitely want to see fireworks over the Mississippi River tonight!

Big shopping and my kit choices

Today was a big shopping day, both in person and online. I bought a 1.6 cuft fridge for the lab, along with extension cords, fire extinguisher, surge protector, and a lock. I also sent Lauren a much longer list of items to buy for the lab.

I selected two kits: the Ensys PAH kit and the Envirogard Chlordane kit. Both are immunoassays made by Strategic Diagnostics. They use a differential photometer to quantify a color change - I'll find a Spec 20. I'll either buy one online or from the state of Louisiana surplus warehouse (that sounds like a barrel of laughs, doesn't it?). Actually, glancing at their website tells me that it's probably a waste of time.

The kits measure several different PAHs and chlorinated pesticides respectively, and I can't distinguish between, say, fluorene and pyrene. The detection limits (or Method Detection Limit, MDL as they call it) vary for the analyte. Fluorene's MDL is 1.5 ppm, lower than the Louisiana RECAP standard of280 ppm. So we can measure below that standard.

What is the RECAP standard, you ask? The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) runs the Risk Evaluation/Corrective Action Program (RECAP) , which sets standards for pollutant concentrations that require some kind of corrective action. These numbers provide the benchmarks above which the LDEQ initiates some sort of management option. One purpose of our screening is to note whether our sites exceed these benchmarks.

Otherwise, things are peaceful here. I spent most of the day doing internet research, although in the morning I set up the new equipment I bought in the lab over at St. Mary's. Things are shaping up over there. At the end of the week, before I leave on Friday afternoon, I'm going to give a short orientation on the lab to the bioremediation team.

Some of you are dying to know what awesome New Orleans food I ate today! Aa, my friend and blogger, suggested Mother's in one of his comments, so I walked over today - it's only three blocks from my hotel. I ordered a Ralph sandwich (baked ham, roast beef, cheese, beef debris and au jus, and mayonnaise) and pecan pie. Wonderful! I ate half of it for lunch and will finish the rest off for dinner tonight.

New digs and shopping

I have moved to new digs! Pictured on the left is my new home, the International House Hotel, where I am cooler, less mosquito-bitten, and more easily able to work on the internet without traveling from cafe to library to university to restaurant to cafe.

Tomorrow I will do some shopping for essentials: extension cords, power strips, a digital timer, and a few other lab items that I can find in a hardware store. I'm getting close to the final decisions on the other kits.

I learned today that the mobile lab is arriving soon! Apparently Lauren found someone to drive it from Austin to New Orleans sometime after July 4th. This is good news, because it means less infrastructure I have to build at St. Mary's (the school where the girls-bathroom lab is located). I hope it arrives before I leave, but I'm not counting on it.

I've also learned that the Dexsil PetroFLAG kit is on its way! I hope it gets here before Thursday, so I can open it up and try it out.