There's just a whole smorgasbord of chemicals that are getting in the water.
Clearly, there's going to have to be an environmental assessment of a lot of different areas of the city before people can go back in and live.
You really can't talk about cleaning up the city until they get all those vehicles hauled out.
We realize as people clean their homes out, they're moving all this mud and material out to the curb, where it's eventually going into the storm drain system. Every rain we get for the next six months or beyond will put more material into the lake.
From the perspective of chemical or environmental contamination, it could have been much worse. One advantage is that we have so much water in the city and that dilutes out the chemicals. People shouldn't have an irrational fear of chemicals in the water. I'm more concerned about the viral and bacterial things. There's going to be a lot of gastrointestinal and public health issues.
Are the schoolyards and people's yards going to be so contaminated that we're going to have to scrape them up? That's the big unknown right now. It's not a very rosy picture, I'm afraid.
We don't see the very elevated levels of toxics that would make you think of this water as toxic waste.
While there are a lot of chemicals in the water, they probably don't rise to the level of an acute toxin. Probably the biggest danger right now is the sewage.
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