Eyes wide-opened

It’s one of those situations which makes our editors lament, “Only in Louisiana.”

As we note in our feature article this week from our partners at The Lens, St. James Parish’s Mosaic Fertilizer, LLC stored 700 million gallons of highly toxic fluids in what was essentially a phosphogypsum trench just east of the Mississippi River – and now the mutinous reservoir is in danger of leaking.

Not from double walled tanks, to protect from spills, as other states require. An open-air trench.

Not tanks backed up with concrete catch basins below—well away from water-sources. A thin rock-plastic trench in a flood plane is all that keeps Mosaic’s hazardous chemical waste at bay.

And nobody bothered to wonder whether the constant movement of the ground at the sugarcane field next-door could actually undermine the trench. After all, that would have taken eyes to see.

“I’m Shocked, Shocked,” says the Casablanca police inspector that there’s gambling in his city — just before he collects his winnings. Essentially, uneven soil caused by the compression of farm-tiling created a “shear plane” about 95 feet below the natural ground. Anyone who has ever driven a tractor could tell you of such a resulting possibility at a nearby property.

Moreover, it doesn’t matter that the toxic fertilizer “process water” will not flow into the Mississippi, as that would be uphill. Downhill sits Lake Maurepas and most of Louisiana’s freshwater fish stocks. Oh, and by the way, those waters eventually flow into the Lake Pontchartrain basin, providing most of the metro region’s potable water.

No one should be surprised. Mosaic Fertilizer is subject already to a 2015 Federal consent decree to avoid an expensive lawsuit, requiring the Minnesota-based company to spend $1.8 billion to clean up its production waste — specifically, its corrosive wastewaters stored at eight plants in Florida and Louisiana, including its St James ‘Uncle Sam’ plant.

Mosaic’s careless castawaying of carcinogenious chemicals, in a riverfront area so polluted that locals dubbed it “Cancer Alley”, stands as merely the latest example of a refinery taking advantage of the poorer people of Louisiana.

Not accidentally, its Uncle Sam plant sits in the proverbial middle of the “Black Belt” — African-American majority communities stretching from South Kenner to the Memphis Delta. In other words, environmental racism plays a little bit more of a factor in how the chemical conglomerate chooses to house their toxic process water than most opt to admit. Would Mosaic have dreamed of putting this gypsum trench of fertilized waste near Uptown New Orleans or English Turn?

Probably not.

This article originally published in the February 11, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.