City Business consults with Sarah Elise Lewis on the Moton Elementary School site atop the former Agriculture Street Landfill.

Sarah fills us in much, much more on what it's all about and then some.

The part that makes me cry:

I went back to Moton yesterday to take a few pictures. Soon after getting out of the car I met the woman who lives across the street in modest home with the FEMA Trailer aesthetic that’s become so familiar in working class neighborhoods since the flood. Seeing us peeking into the auditorium door, she shouted to me, “Hey. They gonna open the school back up?” Her children now attend elementary school Uptown, and she drives them there every day. From across the street to a world away.

She was hoping her children could attend Elementary School in a place that very well may cause cancer. Because it is better than the situation they’re in now.

And so I am angry. Not that the school is ungutted, unsecured, and still full of its contents nearly three years after Katrina, but because a neighborhood was ever built there in the first place. Who would benefit from placing homes on an incinerator site?

The following diagram from Citizens' City Hall gives us some clues:

And, for anyone who pooh-poohs the idea of having to shuttle children nearly a world away from the neighborhood in which they live to attend school, I refer you back to a map in this post detailing how far out of their way parents must take their children to be educated. In uncertain times, in this uncertain place, and in our shaky economic climate, those costs of transportation for these children and their families can have an impact on incomes. Parents have more than enough to worry about without having to think about how the ground beneath their feet is capable of killing them and their children slowly and horribly.

I want the government to do the right thing and buy these people out, get them moved out of Cancer Alley and onto healthier ground.

Anyone want to take bets on whether or not that will happen?