HJBR Nov/Dec 2021

at the scene of the disaster. Editor Did you see, with those plants shut- ting down, that there were releases that would affect the environment? Honoré Yes. That is still to be determined, the amount of pollution that was released. We know a couple hundred pipelines were leaking and abandoned oil wells, which is an inherent problem, because the federal government and the state government have allowed an enormous amount of abandoned oil wells to be left — they call them orphan wells. The federal government, in one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen, have allowed big oil to leave abandoned pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico — hundreds of miles of aban- doned pipeline left in federal waters, which come through state water. Editor Are they leaking? Honoré Yeah. That leaked. So, we’ve got more work to do there. That’s not the hurricane’s fault, that’s man-made disaster when we leave those and then don’t clean them up. Editor With that, one of the two cell phones the General had in his pocket rang. It was a call about Haiti, and he told the other person on the line he would be there in five minutes. Before he left, the General also expressed an interest in the impact of air pollution in fence-line communities in Louisiana’s chemical corridor. He pointed us to an arti- cle he co-wrote with Peter J. Fos, Peggy A Honoré and Kirstin Patterson recently pub- lished in the International Journal of Fam- ily Medicine and Primary Care, “Health Status in Fence-Line Communities: The Impact of Air Pollution,” http://www.remedy publications.com/open-access/health- status-in-fence-line-communities-the- impact-of-air-pollution-7944.pdf. I thanked him for his time. I don’t think we have seen the last of this Louisianian’s impact on our state. n