Probiotics In New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina
Probiotic Bioremediation in NOLA
I’ve had my head buried in a few things. I even had a draft written for last week. I can’t find it. That’s why there was no post last week. I apologize for the gap.
On February 23rd, I presented to a group suffering from chemical and mold toxicities. I have presented to this group many times, but this was the first time I did it while not working for my former employer. My presentation was primarily focused on our efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I had been working with probiotics for nine years by the time the hurricane was creeping into New Orleans (NOLA). I had experience in gardening and a little bit in agriculture, using probiotics to suppress fusarium and powdery mildew on plants. I clearly remember sitting at a friend’s house watching the weather forecast and realizing that the entire area would be flooded, water-logged, and eventually covered in mold. That night, I started to put together a plan to “Save New Orleans.” How naive I was to think it could really happen, but I was a dreamer and was sure we could help. The only problem, in my mind, was that we didn’t have any test results on mold in houses.
The next day I began searching for laboratories that ran tests on mold. I found one in Oregon that specifically did tests on household molds. I sent in our main product for testing. It didn’t do too well. There was only a small amount of suppression, and the spores were untouched. I went back to my partner, and we discussed a few options. We had some products we used to clean restaurants and thought that might work. We sent it in. It worked better, with nearly 99% of the molds being killed, but the spores were untouched. One more time, we went back to the drawing board. I asked the technician at the lab for ideas. He suggested we add some surfactant. Being a purist, I didn’t want to use synthetic chemicals. After some time, I found yucca extract. Yucca is a cactus. Its roots contain saponin, an active ingredient in soap. However, it doesn’t foam as much as modern soap, so we don’t use it much in cleaning today. It works for cleaning, the Native Americans used it for a long time, but we have a psychological connection between bubbles to clean. This revised formula destroyed the spores as well as the mold. And everything in it was certified organic.
Thus, we had something that would work and began our campaign to get into NOLA.
I was on the phone nearly 20 hours per day for weeks, chasing leads and figuring out whom to give our product to (yes, we were donating it!). I remember speaking with Senators and a General. One idea I had was to douse the flooded areas with our probiotics to remediate the areas like a lagoon. It's not always obvious that flood wasters contain everything they wash out, including wastewater and chemicals. Around NOLA are many refineries and chemical storage facilities for agriculture and other uses. The flood waters washed many of these sites, washing the chemicals into neighborhoods.
For two weeks, I got nowhere. Then, I received a phone call from someone who said, “We’re the Yellow Shirts. We are first responders on the scene. We have a base in Baton Rouge. We have a guy that referred you. Could you meet with him, and we will meet you to help people?” I couldn’t believe it! And I knew the name of the person they mentioned. He worked for our direct competitor. I went but didn’t tell anyone what was in our containers.
On the ground in NOLA. We went to a building on Canal Street. We remediated the entire building with the probiotic products I formulated and brought with me. The guy with me was being interviewed by people I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was too busy working the machinery to remediate the building. We visited a mayor in a nearby parish and went through several other parishes, all under police escort. It was truly amazing and heart-wrenching to see all the devastation. I was there for about a week and left, expecting to start receiving some calls from the group, but there was no word.
Months later, I found newspaper clippings from our meetings where all of my body, but my foot, was cut out of the picture. Their contact had set up an agreement with our competitor. They were using their product and our protocol.
Six months after the hurricane, I received a phone call from a man named “Thunder.” What a great name! Thunder was part of a group of people who no longer lived in NOLA but had family there. They all worked the telephone lines to network. There were no Zoom meetings back then. My partner and I would get on calls with people in this group and discuss remediation methods and how to protect people from mold. We made a conscious effort to teach people to protect themselves. We set up a trip to meet some people in Slidell, Louisiana, and go into the 9th Ward, the area hardest hit by the hurricane. We aimed to remediate at least five homes, create a training video, and set up a large meeting to present these protection methods to the people. By the time we left, we had remediated ten homes and made the training video. The group did their meeting a few weeks later. It took time because phone lines and power were still out in many areas, even after six months. Over the following four to six months, they were able to remediate two hundred homes with our donated product.
Some of the homes that were being remediated had been underwater for several months. One house we went into still had water in the walls four months after the water was drained out. Mold grew from the ceiling to about a foot above the floor. Mold was in the insulation inside the walls. It was on the carpet. It was in the bathtub and up the shower curtain. It was everywhere!
First, we set up our cameras in the yard and demonstrated how to suit up to protect from the molds. We showed how to prepare the probiotics. We diluted the probiotics in water at 1 part probiotics to 10 parts water in a pump sprayer with a wand. Then, we went into the building and sprayed everything from floors, walls, ceilings, and anything that was in the house. We started deconstructing the house after letting the probiotics work on the molds. The furniture and carpet were first taken outside. In the street, they were resprayed and thrown into a pile (the city was coming around with heavy equipment and disposing of all deconstruction material). We tore out the walls and insulation and continued until everything left the building. We ran fans to cool and dry it. Then we sprayed the studs until they were visibly moist and let them air dry.
We left instructions to mix the probiotic into the plaster/taping compound, primer, and paint for the reconstruction. This would provide long-term protection from mold regrowth. We also suggested that they run the probiotics in vaporizers once per week until all their neighbors were done with reconstruction and the debris was out of the street. It was months until everything was done. Somewhere along the line, the NOLA group had a public meeting. The state came up and asked for their EPA approval for what they were doing. Since they didn’t have one, they had to shut down.
I came through the area a year later, and there were still damaged buildings left untouched. My dream of “saving New Orleans” never really happened, but we did help at least many families regain their homes.
Please check out my book, Probiotic Oral Health, available on Amazon.
What a harrowing story. You did save New Orleans! Without your help, all of those houses would have been destroyed and that much more mold would have poured into the area. Take heart, you did good work!