Down on the Batture

Gypsum

- 129 Gypsum On a summer day so still the only oxygen in New Orleans was down by the river and the woods on the batture held the heat like a furnace, out of the trees staggered a tall man wearing black boots, black jeans, an unbuttoned black vest, black hat, and an assortment of neck chains, and dragging an enormous wooden cross. From a distance he looked like Jesus in a cowboy movie. It was Ricky, instead, and it took him several minutes to haul the cross to the riverbank, lay it down, and start taking off his clothes. Stripped to only his undershorts, he waded into the water and sat down. I could hear him saying,“Ahhhh!” As I approached, Ricky submerged completely and then came up like a hippo, blowing air and grinning. His face was covered with a coating of silt. The mud in his hair made a kind of gray plaster on dark locks. He looked supremely happy; he was mud man. The very next day, by chance, I saw the same look in a newspaper photo of a boy in a river on the other side of the world. The boy’s head was coated with a gray clay that all but shut his eyes. Out of the clay he was smiling. He didn’t have a clue. The news story started here with a corporation named Freeport McMoRan, the city’s only member of the Fortune 500. Freeport owned several fertilizer plants upstream that brought in gypsum rock from Florida, crushed it, poured acid through it, and bled out phosphorous, for fertilizer. The piles of crushed waste, however, were several times the size of the original rock and had been rising - 130 Gypsum in ever more unwieldy piles along the riverbank, taller than any natural features in south Louisiana. Freeport feared that, with heavy rains, their waste piles could fall over. It had a better idea: bleed the piles directly into the Mississippi. The difficulty was, some of the contents were nasty. Some were radioactive. In the mid-1980s the federal government was backing away from environmental protection across the board, and Freeport received its discharge permit without a blink. There was a small hitch, however . Louisiana would have to permit the discharge too. Normally, this was no hitch at all because Louisiana, as many southern states, took the view that environmental requirements were an obstacle. Its job was to shepherd industry past them. The state environmental agency referred to industry as its “clients” and to the public as “others,” which gave you a pretty good idea of where you stood. The one agency unhappy with all of this was the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board, which had to deliver clean water from a river carrying pollutants from a hundred industries upstream. It did not see the additional loadings from the gypsum stacks, a whopping twelve million tons a year, as good news. The board began a little crusade up the river, rounding up allies to oppose the Louisiana permit. This was not a difficult sell. These parishes, like New Orleans, depended on the river for drinking water, and nineteen of their intake pipes were within a few miles of the piles. Unlike New Orleans, they did not have sophisticated monitoring or treatment systems. These were poor, rural parishes, and they were right in front of the train. The public hearings heated up. I entered one at city hall in New Orleans as a woman at the microphone was putting a small girl up on the lectern and saying,“I do not want her to glow in the dark!” Behind her a class from Lusher Elementary held small, handmade signs saying “Dump Jim Bob!” A short while later, National Geographic carried a photo of the gypsum stacks with a quotation saying that drinking water out of the Mississippi below them would be like wrapping your child’s lips around the tailpipe of a car. That was me speaking, a bit over the top. The rhetoric had left the barn. - 131 Gypsum The legal problem was that the Mississippi was a big river, and tracing a particular discharge to a particular harm was all but impossible . Freeport was betting on that difficulty. During the hearing process, however, an obscure requirement surfaced that no discharge could upset the existing ratio between two elements, phosphorous and nitrogen, that produced algae blooms. Lo and behold...