Down on the Batture

IT

- 147 IT “Honey, they going to do what?” Teresa Róbert looks out over the field between her kitchen and the Mississippi River to the green swell of the levee and, behind, the tops of the batture trees. Her friend Ruby has called. “Don’t you read the paper, dawlin’?” she says to Teresa, who has two tiny boys running underfoot and another baby on the way. “Ruby,” says Teresa, “I haven’t got time to read the paper,” or watch the news on television either, she is thinking. Teresa is fully occupied with the kids and running a little restaurant called The Cabin with her husband, Al. The rest of life is for other people. “Teresa,” Ruby says,“they going to build a big toxic waste plant by you, barges coming in off the river and all.” She pauses, skimming the item, and then adds,“It’s going to be the biggest one in the world.”Teresa looks away from the tree line and begins to pace the kitchen, dangling the phone cord behind. Over the next few years her shoe heels will hammer the surface of the kitchen floor into hundreds of tiny circles as she works the telephone. Teresa Róbert now has a third job. You can travel from New Orleans to Baton Rouge on the interstate and never see a thing, or you can take the River Road that winds along the batture as if it were driving under the influence, following the horseshoe bends, one hand out to the levee to steady yourself and on the other side a forgotten landscape of small towns, refineries, and chemical plants that light up the night sky.About an hour into the journey you come into Burnside, a row of stores, a - 148 IT handful of cottages, and, out across the field, an old slave quarters now restored and operated as The Cabin by the Róberts, who will end up changing everything about environmental protection in Louisiana. Not by design. The Róberts were not revolutionaries. Al owned a fuel distributorship tied to the nearby Texaco refinery. Teresa, in her twenties, was raising children and making menus. But here was Governor Edwards announcing to the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate that the Industrial Tank Corporation (the name would change to International Technology as the game went on, but it was always called “IT”) of California was going to build the “world’s largest hazardous waste disposal facility” (a claim later reduced to the largest in the United States), on 1,100 acres of land, in Burnside . With its own loading dock and road up from the river to the treatment building, it would even look like a plantation. Louisiana industry produces a staggering amount of hazardous waste. In the 1970s much of it was sitting around in rusting drums, or open pits, or was simply dumped into the river. One year earlier a young man named Curly Jackson opened up the cock valve of a truck full of hydrogen sulfide in a field near Bayou Sorrell and was killed on the spot by the fumes. A subsequent report by the television program 20/20 showed a reenactment of the incident, followed by an interview with Governor Edwards, who quipped, characteristically, that“you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The omelet he had in mind was the hazardous waste business , which was beginning to boom elsewhere in the country. He saw no reason for his home state to miss out. What followed was a Louisiana Hayride. For openers, the state would need a hazardous waste plan. By coincidence, a Louisiana official ran into an IT representative at a meeting in California, and a marriage quickly followed. IT would do a study for the Louisiana plan. It would hire as its consultant the firm that had also been hired by the state to write the plan itself, closing the loop. Lo and behold, the plan recommended a large facility at a single site, Burnside , Louisiana, where, of all coincidences, IT had been negotiating - 149 IT a $1.4 million deal for the land. Within a few days after the plan’s approval IT bought the site. In effect, IT had approved its own project. The governor’s prediction was looking very good. There was only a state environmental review to go. It didn’t look good to the Róberts and their friend Ruby Cointment...