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By Stacy Burling, Times-Picayune

Waste Management Inc. said the ash, which gained international notoriety as cargo of the Khian Sea in the 1980s, is bound for a facility in Lake Charles.

In the meantime, though, local leaders and Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials are keeping a wary eye on five barges loaded with the stuff. They are awaiting results of tests on the barges' contents.

Vivek Kamath, waste programs administrator for the Florida environmental department office in Palm Beach, said he'd be happy if the ash left the state before the test results arrive today.

"If they take it to another state as they were planning to originally, we would love that," he said.

For 12 years, the ash languished in Haiti, where it had been dumped on a beach, causing an uproar among environmentalists.

Although not responsible for the waste saga, Philadelphia agreed two years ago to pay up to $50,000 for proper disposal, possibly in a Pennsylvania landfill.

City officials did not comment on how the ashes came to be in Florida on Friday afternoon, and a spokesman for Waste Management, which is involved In the disposal, said those who knew the most about the case were unreachable.

Ann Leonard, an activist with Essential Action, an environmental group founded by Ralph Nader that works with environmental activists in developing countries, has been tracking the Khian Sea dumping case for years.

She keeps a jar of Philadelphia ash on her desk and considers it "abhorrent" that this city's trash could end up on the shore of a country such as Haiti. She thinks it should come back to Philadelphia.

Haitian sources told her, she said, that the ash left their country April 5.

Kamath said a Greek ship carrying the ash arrived in Port Everglades, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale about two weeks ago. Waste Management notified the state environmental department of the cargo and was told that it would have to produce tests showing the ash was not hazardous before it could be dumped in a Florida landfill.

Before it got the test results, the environmental department learned the ash had been unloaded onto five barges in Fort Pierce, farther north. Waste Management then said the ash was bound for Louisiana, Kamath said. Since then, Kamath said, Waste Management has produced documents showing the barge cargo is not hazardous, but the environmental department has taken samples of its own for testing.

While he is not suspicious, Kamath said, officials are keeping a close eye on the situation. "We wanted to know what they were going to do with the cargo," he said.

Kamath said the barges are not capable of making the trip to Louisiana. He did not know why the ash had been unloaded from the Greek ship but speculated that it might have been needed elsewhere.

Bob Benton, a Fort Pierce city commissioner, said he was disturbed to see the trash-laden barges while he was fishing. He wondered what this "junk" -- the ash is loosely covered with tarps -- was doing in "the city I've just spent $10 million revitalizing."

Benton started making phone calls. When he heard the ash's story, he began investigating whether he could kick the barges out of the port, which is privately owned. "If nobody else wants it," he said, "what's it doing in my back yard?"

Three of the barges have since moved farther south to Stuart, he said.

The Khian Sea's saga began in late August 1986, when the ship left Philadelphia for the Bahamas, carrying about 14,000 tons of ash from the city's two municipal trash incinerators. But the Bahamian government barred the cargo.

During the next 16 months, there were unsuccessful plans to dump the ash in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Costa Rica, Chile, Guinea-Bissau, the Cape Verde Islands and Turkey.

In January 1988, the Khian Sea tried to unload what the ship described as "fertilizer ash" at the Haitian port of Gonaives about 75 miles from Port-au-Prince.

The ash provoked an outcry, and within days, the ship was ordered to leave, but not before it had quietly dumped between 2,000 and 4,000 tons at the ocean's edge. While years passed and a court battle over disposal dragged on, the ash was moved five miles inland and contained in a yard surrounded by cinder block walls. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had found the ash to be nonhazardous, environmentalists were concerned about metals in it.

Meanwhile, after leaving Haiti, the Khian Sea sailed around the Caribbean Sea, along the African coast, across the Mediterranean Sea and through the Indian Ocean. Somewhere between the Suez Canal and Singapore, the remaining 11,000 tons of ash disappeared. When the ship, which changed its name to the Pelicano, arrived in Singapore on Nov. 26, 1989, its holds were empty.

In 1993, two Annapolis, Md., businessmen who operated the Khian Sea were sentenced to prison by a federal district judge for the dumping.