The Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip
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“This is about as stupid as stupid gets!” he spits, diving into a story that conveys how Louisiana’s lax oversight can actually lead to things exploding. A military facility in northern Louisiana called Camp Minden contained 18 million pounds of old explosives, much of which had been stored improperly by a military contractor, including gigantic 880-pound sacks of propellant left outdoors and exposed to the baking Louisiana sun. On October 15, 2012, a tremendous explosion rocked the site, shattering windows in homes four miles away, generating a toxic mushroom cloud that rose 7,000 feet into the atmosphere. The local sheriff told people the cause may have been “a meteor.”
One hundred miles south in Colfax, a company called Clean Harbors has been burning old military and industrial explosives out in the open on metal sheets, releasing arsenic, lead and radioactive strontium into the environment. “Here we are in the 21st century and they’re using Roman army methods,” fumes the General. The burns are illegal under the Clean Air Act but Clean Harbors was granted an exemption by Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality. “This is one of the few places in America an open air burn of military explosives would even be permitted,” he says. Activities too toxic for other parts of America are regularly shuttled to Louisiana, often at the eager request of the state’s politicians. “Louisiana,” says the General, “is a dumping ground.”
Near Alexandria, in central Louisiana, two plants that use coal-tar creosote and pentachlorophenol to pressure-treat and preserve wooden objects like rail ties and telephone poles operate directly adjacent to communities. Historically, wood was cooked with these chemicals then laid outside, where chemicals escaped into the air and leaked into the soil and groundwater, often flowing from these facilities in open ditches. One plant drained into a schoolyard. Pentachlorophenol contains dioxins, which are used in making chemical weapons, like Agent Orange, and can peel away human skin and cause leukemia. As for creosote, exposure to even small amounts, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, can lead to blistering and peeling skin. Regulators have continued to reject the plants as a health hazard. “Please,” the General begged city officials at one 2015 meeting, citing a man with strange blotches across his face, “please, please, please on behalf of these poor people, do something.”
Residents in Bossier City, Louisiana, near the Arkansas border, have also suffered from living adjacent to a wood preservation plant. A Louisiana State University toxicologist found leukemia rates here to be 40 times the national average. In 2001, a reporter visited the community and spoke to Harold Quigley, who grew up beside a ditch the plant used to funnel away creosote waste. “He spent summer nights sleeping on the side porch, breathing the fumes from the plant,” the reporter noted. Harold’s family health history: two cousins lost to leukemia; sister had breast cancer and also suffered an aneurism; mother developed four different types of cancer; two brothers both got skin cancer and both bore sons with birth defects; a nephew’s wife has birthed two stillborn babies.
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https://longreads.com/2017/07/13/the-louisiana-environmental-apocalypse-road-trip/
