One year after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, UMR civil engineer Jianmin Wang will present findings from research he conducted in the Big Easy to the American Chemical Society's National Meeting and Exposition Sept. 10-14 in San Francisco.

Wang and colleagues collected 238 soil and sediment samples one month after Katrina hit and analyzed them for pesticides and heavy metals. The pesticide levels were "generally not of great concern," but as many as 50 percent of the samples contained arsenic and 30 percent in their leachaets had lead equal to or above maximum level of those metals allowed in drinking water.