Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement

Introduction

xiii inTroduCTion Not long ago, Louisiana was renowned for the uniqueness and beauty of its landscape. This magnificence was the backdrop of my early life when I came to Lake Charles as a young woman of eighteen in 1959. Today, so many years later, I still think of the brilliance of the gifts of air, land, and water that we have.You will hear of those gifts in the essays of most of the women and men in this book, and, more, you will hear of the resilience of both the state and its residents. Touted as “the Sportsman’s Paradise” for decades, the state’s vast wetlands, bayous, and upland forests are remembered for nurturing the communities of families who hunted, maintained gardens, and created distinctive cultures, in parts, Creole and Cajun, in other parts, more mainstream southern. This natural bounty formed the backbone of Louisiana’s economy. Fisheries , timber, agriculture, and oil and gas—all of these industries and many others took root in Louisiana over the centuries and greeted me as a young woman who married into a family whose members have lived in Sulphur for six generations. This community is located in Calcasieu Parish (called counties elsewhere in the United States), along the coast of the southwestern part of the state. Early on, I saw how the petrochemical industry, in particular, had come to dominate the state’s economy after World War II. The Mississippi River and the Calcasieu Estuary were close enough to southern Louisiana’s oil and gas fields to provide both fresh water for production processes and major navigation channels for shipping products. By the 1970s, over two hundred petrochemical facilities were operating along the river and the estuary, making a range of products used worldwide. These industries brought new wealth to Louisiana and created tens of thousands of very welcomed jobs. Yet after years of what I can only describe as both a lovely and sheltered life of being a mother and a wife, I came to see that industry had other, less beneficial consequences as well. To a large extent, the state’s petrochemical facilities operated with a free hand. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) was not established until 1984, and even then its power to enforce laws and levy fines was restricted. The combination of intensive production and decades of lax regulatory oversight devastated Louisiana’s xiv introdUction environment. By 1990, Louisiana ranked first in the nation for discharging toxic pollution into the air, ground, and water.1 My first venture into promoting a different sort of response came earlier. On September 28, 1982, the national (NBC) evening news showed a huge, billowing, and uncontrollable fire that was releasing chemicals into the atmosphere . The fire had erupted when forty-one Illinois Central Gulf (ICG) railroad cars carrying toxic waste derailed in Livingston, Louisiana. Many of them burned and exploded, sometimes hurling flames and toxic ash more than 110 feet into the sky. It was reported as the worst train derailment accident in Louisiana’s history, and twenty-seven hundred people had to be evacuated. I registered this as a problem that I could do nothing about. On October 23,1982,a month after the accident,the headline on the front page of our local newspaper read, “BFI, ICG Pass Dumping Buck.” The article stated that contaminated soil from the Livingston train derailment was being shipped in overloaded eighteen wheelers from Livingston, Louisiana, and being dumped in Willow Springs in an eighty-five-acre landfill owned and operated since 1972 by Brown & Ferris Industries Chemical Services, Inc.,a subsidiary of Brown & Ferris Industries (BFI).2 No one wanted to take responsibility for transporting the toxic waste to Calcasieu Parish.When the news media found out about the waste entering our area, forty truckloads had already been dumped in the landfill. This angered me, but what spurred me into activism was the fact that the Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) had dismissed speeding and other violation tickets to the truckers hauling the waste. Questioned by the media, DOTD secretary Paul Hardy said,“I will ask the Violation Review Committee to review all tickets pertaining to this emergency situation on a case by case basis, and request that the committee consider voiding these citations in view of the extenuating circumstances.”3 What he failed to mention was that by voiding the fines, it would cost the State of Louisiana thousands of dollars. I was astounded that the contaminated soil...