What Is Happening?
Sunrise Foods International and the Port of New Orleans have formed an agreement that would permit the company to lease the Alabo Street Wharf from the port for use as a grain terminal, importing organic grains from Eastern Europe. This agreement would last for an initial period of fifteen years, with the possibility of an extension. Port NOLA is issuing Sunrise Foods a series of payments totaling $10 million as an incentive for rehabilitating the existing wharf and expanding it beyond its current footprint. The project also involves some $3.3 million in payments from the project’s sponsors to Norfolk Southern to rehabilitate nearly two miles of long-abandoned rail lines running along the neutral ground of St. Claude in Arabi and the Lower 9th Ward and along surface roads in Holy Cross. The project’s sponsors anticipate making a significant return on these sizable upfront payments, with revenues for Port NOLA reaching as high as $55.75 million over the lifetime of the lease.
One might expect a project this substantial – bringing this heavy industrial operation into the heart of a residential community – would have been a topic of much discussion and debate in the months or even years leading up to the agreement between the port and the company.
That was not the case, however, as residents of the neighborhood remained completely in the dark about this agreement until late September 2024, when a Port NOLA representative happened to mention the pending project at a community town hall.
Since that time, the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (HCNA) has spearheaded an effort to raise awareness among neighborhood residents and people across the city, and to organize in resistance to this grain terminal that threatens to do serious, long-lasting damage to our community.
How is it that residents remained unaware of this project for so long? It’s because the secrecy was exactly the point. Sunrise Foods International and the Port of New Orleans have been aware from the start that, if the community was aware of what they were planning, there was no way residents would tolerate it. So, they have attempted to avoid giving residents that opportunity.
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What makes this project so undesirable? Consider the following:
- Sunrise Foods International’s grain terminal will bring up to twenty rail cars in and out of the neighborhood every weekday, blocking traffic along St. Claude from Arabi to the Lower 9th Ward and rolling down the middle of Alabo Street as close as fifteen feet away from people’s homes. The rail lines that cut through the neighborhood run directly on the roadway, with no crossing arms, lights, or safety precautions for children and pedestrians. And, because the crossings have no lights or arms, the trains will be required to blow their 100+ decibel horns four times at each intersection; more than twenty individual street crossings that are currently inactive (and have been for years) will be reactivated by this project.
- This grain terminal will also expose residents to grain dust – described by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “a complex mixture of husk particles, cellulose hairs and spikes, starch granules, spores of fungi, insect debris, pollens, rat hair, and approximately 5 percent mineral particles.” Prolonged exposure to grain dust is known to lead to chronic respiratory disease. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) does have guidelines that regulate it; but guidelines are not guarantees, and they will do nothing to stop grain dust from being spread into the community while unloading grain vessels, loading grain trains, or during general operations. An assessment by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources determined that grain dust could spread to cover an area encompassing much of the Lower 9th Ward, Arabi, and even some of the West Bank. Beyond all that, grain facilities introduce the risk of grain dust explosions. Over the past five years, there have been between seven and ten grain dust explosions around the United States every year.
- Danger of trains and grain aside, this project will also wreak long-lasting negative economic repercussions on the neighborhood. Train traffic noise and pollution have been shown to decrease residential property values by approximately 7% within 750 feet of the rail line; this translates to a potential loss of some $15 million for neighborhood residents. And that doesn’t take into account the commercial economic losses the community is likely to sustain from residents moving away from the site and disruptions to economic centers like the budding Arabi Arts District, which the rail lines will cut in half.
So with all that said, it’s understandable why Sunrise Foods International and the Port of New Orleans have kept quiet about this grain terminal, and have been unwilling to share information since the community became aware of its potential impacts in late September.
Much of the information we’ve uncovered about this grain terminal has come through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The port initially didn’t want to reveal the name of the company they planned to lease the wharf to, and they never informed the community about the company’s plans to expand the wharf beyond its current footprint.
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For the company’s part, Sunrise Foods International has taken pains to avoid conducting an environmental impact statement; the project’s sponsors avoided accepting funding from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), and instead opted to pay the $3.3 million it would cost to rehabilitate the rail lines in order to avoid federal regulations that would have required them to assess the project’s impacts on the environment, as well as on the historic neighborhoods the rail lines run through, and on the people who live there.
These are the headwinds that neighborhood residents have been fighting against since becoming aware of the project. And these are the risks our community is facing. But the community is not simply going to accept this unwelcome and inappropriate intrusion; we are organizing and resisting, with efforts led by the HCNA and powered by the dedication of regular citizens like you.
Together we can pull this off, and stop Sunrise Foods International and the Port of New Orleans before they do any further harm to our neighborhood. But we need help in this fight. Please sign our petition, and consider whether you’re able to support us by making a financial donation toward legal fees associated with this effort or whether you can volunteer some of your time and skills to help protect our community.