Last month the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality reopened the Old Gentilly to receive demolition debris, reasoning that the state needs a nearby place to dump the Katrina waste because there's so much of it -- an estimated 22 million tons' worth -- and it would take too long to transport all of that debris to more modern, more distant landfills in St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

Then, early last week a group called the Louisiana Environmental Action Network filed a lawsuit seeking to force the state to shut the Old Gentilly back down, contending that the site is ill-suited to dispose of soggy debris from swamped homes because it isn't lined to keep contaminants from leaching into the groundwater and it isn't ringed by containment berms. You can read the Washington Post's and Associated Press's accounts of the run-up to and filing of the litigation here and here.

Then, last Friday, with the lawsuit's ink barely dry, fire broke out at the Old Gentilly Landfill. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that firefighters snuffed the blaze quickly, but speculation about its source still smolders.

Meanwhile, the Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans "one of the biggest environmental cleanups ever attempted: scraping miles of sediment laced with cancer-causing chemicals from New Orleans' hurricane-flooded neighborhoods."

The Army Corps' plan will involve "crews using front-end loaders to scoop up contaminated sediment that Hurricane Katrina left in yards, playgrounds and other spots throughout the greater New Orleans area." Though in some parts of the city, the story says, less extreme measures such as planting grass to cover contaminated yards will be called for.

The task, the article emphasizes, will be huge and complex, "with crews covering nearly an entire city and its suburbs while maneuvering around the remaining debris and damaged houses."

It's tempting to make a bad joke like "That sounds like Mardi Gras to me" or "And you thought New Orleans couldn't get any farther below sea level." But really, this is too sad to joke about. I was lucky enough to partake of the crazy crescent twice, and it was surely the most joyous, beautiful, wacky place I've seen. And now it seems that the best we can hope for is that its people will somehow be able to resurrect some scattered vestiges of its crushed, drowned glory.

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.