Cajun Heroes, Toxic Villians
How to Protect A Precious Louisiana Resource—and Your Family
by David Steinman
Ascension Parish—Eric Sanchez, head of the twelve-person crew that works for the Bay-ou Lafourche Fresh Water District up here in Donaldsonville, has taken me to one of the most strategic points in the state. This is where the Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche meet and the moth-er river once emptied twelve percent of its flow into its smaller fork. Together, the two supply the tap water for some 1.3 million Louisianans.
The meeting point of these two storied arteries also happens to be at Ground Zero for the most vital environmental health issues of our time. All the signs and symptoms of a warming world seem to have come to a global boiling point here in Louisiana. Record low levels of the Mississippi in 2023—combined with drought, the saltwater wedge that moved up the river and widespread intrusion into the wetlands—have all of us talking about climate change. Portions of Louisiana, along the gulf, have already succumbed to the sea.
But we can’t discuss these statewide issues without acknowledging how they intersect with our own per-sonal health. The more than one million Louisianans whose water is sourced from the Mississippi River or Bayou Lafourche literally are imbibing in their own daily lives the chemicals of global warming—and, po-tentially, their own cancer and reproductive harm.
Here in the heart of Cancer Alley, Eric’s crew is re-sponsible for maintaining a badly outdated pumping station built in 1955—“really an antique,” he says. The river was never this low when it was originally built. He shows me the diggers, dumpers, and cranes work-ing in the mud where the new pumping station is under construction and slated to be online in 2025. But, until then, Eric’s crew bears an enormous responsibility.
“Maybe it will change. But the last two years have been bad,” Eric says and takes me up to the pumping station along the river bank.
He lifts a manhole cover to take me down below to where I shouldn’t be. If the water were really high as it used to be, this would be beneath the river. But for now, with the roaring backdrop, I look down at the muddy frightening powerful swirling river water.
“It’s a mighty machine even when it’s low,” he says over the swooshing sounds. “Yes, we can suck it up, but it should be higher.”
We climb back up to daylight. Eric drops the man-hole cover back into place.
“This pumping station has served its time and is pretty much maxed out,” he says and shows me the enormous backup diesel generator. “But, if I lose a pump we can feel it.”
Eric Sanchez, head of the crew that maintains the Donaldsonville pumping station for the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District, supplying the drinking water for some 300,000 residents.
He leads me down the levee over the soft grass of the battle ground of Fort Butler that Union forces built on this site in 1862 and later successfully defended. Not far from the river where tropical foliage grows in deep red soils is the site of the levee that was built in 1909 and that turned an unrestrained bayou into a stagnant waterway. The state was supposed to build locks and remove the levee. It never did.
“You see, back then Bayou Lafourche overflowed and turned everything into a wetland during the year,” Sanchez explains. “The levee helped to control the flow. Most of the people then were using cisterns and wells. We didn’t have the population as we do now. But the bayou became stagnant. So the state built this pump-ing station in 1955. Well, it’s 2023 going on 2024, and this baby is an antique me and my crew keep running twenty-four seven three hundred sixty five days a year. We’re caretakers, like doctors with three hundred thousand patients everyday. It’s stressful, now, but I do it. Because I love it.”
Eric puts his hand over his heart as if he has taken a vow.
Dustin Rabelais, executive director of the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District, at the Lockport gate, says saltwater intrusion threatens the water supplies for southern Louisiana.
I drive south to Lafourche Parish via Highway 3127 to the 307 and finally the 1 to Lockport, which heralds itself as the gateway to the Gulf of Mexico. And it literally is a gateway. This is where the battle to control the flow of saltwater into Bayou Lafourche is being fought. It’s a
fierce battle because of the saltwater intrusion creeping up farther and farther into the bayou’s freshwaters that supply sustenance to Thibodaux and other small towns.
I meet Dustin Rabelais, CEO of the Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District. We walk along the banks of the bayou by where it intersects with Company Canal. The steel walkway rattles beneath our shoes and over the bay-ou’s softly flowing green water. He shows me the sluice gates that control the flow. By closing off some of them, the rate of flow can be increased to aid uptake by the water treatment plants. On the other hand, additional measures must be taken to prevent intrusion of saltwater.
Because of the record low levels of the mother river that have gone on for more than half a year, the bayou is also very low, and the Gulf of Mexico’s saltwater is push-ing into its waters. If allowed into the portion supplying drinking water to Thibodaux, which is where we’re near, that would be a human health disaster. High sodium levels are a cause of high blood pressure, kidney disease, and pregnancy complications, among other maladies.
“We sank a small barge on the gulf side of the gates,” Dustin tells me. “The barge blocks off the water from entering, allowing the salt to settle out. The chloride sinks to the bottom and fresh water flows into the rest of the bayou.” he says.
“This is the longest I’ve seen it this low though,” Dustin adds and takes out his flow charts for the last seven months that show disturbingly lower and lower extremes.
I continue my drive from Thibodaux via State Highway 316 to Houma.
The weather becomes cloudy and the pressure changes, and now I realize the gulf is nearby. The air is thick, heavy, and overcast, and with one good storm the waterways are about to overflow or so it seems. These waterways are as vital as paved roads to a way of life that is under attack by the toxic chemicals that are part of our times, and people seem to be getting inadequate help from the state. The water is held in place by ca-nals and the intracoastal canals that go all of the way to Florida. But without these artificial bulwarks, this land would be underwater.
I make my way to the cream-colored brick build-ing housing the Terrebonne Parish Consolidated Waterworks District #1 treatment plant to learn more about how the raw water received from the bayou is fil-tered and made safe. John Gautreaux , the plant super-visor, comes out, greets me, and takes me inside.
“I have bad news,” he says. “We’re completely shutdown.”
“What happened?” I say as we enter the quiet of the waterworks.
“Bayou Black is way too salty, and that’s where our plant draws water from. You know, we’ve had these problems before but only a week or two. This one has been going on since July with no end in sight. The level of sodium in the water is over one thousand parts per million, and we don’t want it to be more than one hundred fifty.
It was never this way in the past. The saltwa-ter intrusion issue might have impaired Bayou Black for a few weeks out of the year but not like this.”
“What are you going to do?” I say.
“If you’re talking about long-term, I don’t know. For now, our other plant draws its water from Bayou Lafourche.”
“That’s your backup?”
“Yes.”
“The saltwater is pushing up at Lockport.”
“Oh yeah, there’s saltwater everywhere,” he says. “That’s all everyone is talking about. You should go out to Isle De Jean Charles if you really want to see what’s going on.”
John quickly shares that I’ll get it when it comes to rising seas, climate change, and global warming.
I take Highway 24 to get out of town and pass Dollar General stores with their tall yellow signs.
The roads all go along the waterways; picturesque fishing boats, with small nets to catch shrimp and fish, line the docks aside the banks.
It must be brackish water but just fresh enough, I am thinking. The boats are small, built for narrow shal-lows, not open water. Their bottoms are way too flat. No keel boats. Everything seems controlled. The water is contained. But how is it contained? Is it really? If so, for how long?
John Gautreaux, of the Terrebonne Parish Colsidated Waterworks District, says that more toxic contaminants could be removed with improved methods of water treatment.
Isle de Jean Charles is an island in Terrebonne Parish that, like much of coastal Louisiana, is rapidly disap-pearing into the Gulf of Mexico due to coastal erosion and sea level rise.
The island once encompassed more than 22,000 acres, but today only 320 of them remain. The sole link to the mainland—Island Road, built in 1953—is often impassable due to high winds, tides, sea level rise, and storm surge.
I start out on the road between the waters. It is like it is parting the sea. It is a few feet above the water that is chop-py and rough with lots of bird life and egrets and pelicans.
Residents of this island, predominantly of American Indian ancestry, represent an incredibly unique and di-verse culture of people who have lived here for many hundreds of years (after being removed through treaty from their original lands). However, the land where res-idents and their families once hunted, trapped, grazed animals, and farmed is now open water.
In 2016, Louisiana was awarded $48.3 million in Community Development Block Grant funds to work with residents of Isle de Jean Charles to develop and imple-ment a structured and voluntary retreat from the island into safer communities, making Louisiana the first state to officially begin to account for climate change refugees. This included developing The New Isle, about forty miles north of Isle de Jean Charles with more than five hundredhomes, walking trails, a community center, commercial and retail space, and other amenities designed in conjunc-tion with island residents. But the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation sued the state for discrimination. They still didn’t want to leave, they said. And when they did, much of their culture was destroyed. The homes promised were shoddy. Then the state reinforced the infrastructure of the island they had left to preserve what remained for non-natives.
There’s a fire station and some homes remaining. But the signs of a town here are almost all gone. The sidings from homes are piled up like cardboard, waiting for time and the winds to wear them down and scatter what re-mains until the waters come and cover everything and take it all.
I experience a continuous slow falling, sinking feeling driving down the long and narrow road rising above the churning wind-driven waters all around on my way to the tip of what remains. I feel as though the road is a gang plank. I stop and get out to take pictures but am near-ly blown back into my car by the wind. I take my time to find the right shots. Time disappears. The waters are wild. The ocean just keeps on coming. The water isn’t friendly. It’s salty. It is reassuring to get back into my ve-hicle and see less water. A goat stares at me from the bal-cony of a home. I pass back to Klondyke. All of it is going to be gone. Because the water is coming for these towns. too. I’m thinking of all of the old blues songs that were written about the floods of the Mississippi Delta region. The great floods. The Biblical floods of Tupelo and Lake Ponchatrain. They all ask when the levee breaks where are you going to go?
Sharon C. Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James, has led the fight to stop the Formosa plastic plant. (pictured on the right)
BACK TO GROUND ZERO
I take Highway 20 east to St. James Parish and meet with Sharon C. Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James and winner of the 2021 Goldman Environmental prize. I have come here because the battle Rise St. James is waging against the Taiwan-based plastics group, Formosa, will impact and possibly decide the state’s future. The question we must ask is whether to sacrifice so much of our state to the ocean in exchange for one more plastic plant because the toxic chemicals it will spew, if built, will hasten global boiling and loss of more and more land.
Formosa has proposed to erect a chemical factory that would cover three thousand acres on the site of ancient burial grounds at the old Buena Vista planta-tion and tip the scales in favor of more water and air pollution and climate decimation, if it is built. The land will become an industrial jungle without life and only chemicals.
We drive along the river and past the plants such as AmSty, BASF, Koch, Marathon, Exxon, Pinnacle Polymers, Louisiana Sugar Refining, and so many more they truly become too numerous to put into place.
“People in the homes beside them are dropping like flies and the chemical companies want to buy more of the land when they die,” she says.
Sharon is not going anyplace. Nor is her family or any of the other folks in Cancer Alley. Or anybody else south of Baton Rouge. We are in this one together as citizens beyond politics. We all bear the same love for our land as the folks in Houma or Isle De Jean Charles. Rise St. James, supported by Earth Justice, has fought off Formosa in the courts for more than five years. But recently an appellate court ruling over-ruled the lower district decision. This is a siege, and they need support.
Local, state, and federal officials frequently assure us that a mixture of one or two parts per billion of atrazine, hexachloropentadiene, phthalate, carbon tetrachloride, benzene, and simazine, all of which are being found in our local drinking water here in the river parishes, is okay for a baby or the fetus to be exposed to during preg-nancy. They tell us it is safe for our kids and the rest of our families. But the facts from published, peer-reviewed studies show that children who are exposed at every-day levels for a lifetime get more cancer and sickness-es. Their offspring tend to be sickly with less chances of having healthy children. Don’t let them gaslight you. The rates of cancer in the state are among the highest in the nation. Public officials down play the risks. But they’re not looking out for your health.
Here are the big ten tips you need to know to protect your family:
1. Your attitude should be zero tolerance and taking personal responsibility for your health.
2. Filter your tap water. The most effective home system is one that combines reverse osmosis with activated carbon and fits beneath the sink. Such systems can run around three hundred dollars. But even a faucet-mounted system available online for around twenty-five dollars will provide protection.
3. Double filter your tap water. Buy a pitcher filter to further remove contaminants. Zerowater makes a high-performance pitcher filter that will remove chemicals of concern.
4. Filter your shower water and garden hose. Filters for each of these run around twenty-five dollars when purchased online.
5. Know if your local school filters the water kids drink from fountains or that is used for food prepa-ration, showering, and swimming. All of these can be sources of harmful exposures.
6. Check with your favorite restaurants. Many filter their water if only for better tasting coffee. Let them know that a restaurant that filters its water is one you will frequent.
7. Pack a stainless steel container with your child for school or other places where they may be forced to otherwise drink water from public sources.
8. Try to avoid buying bottled water. Although we all imbibe bottled water sometimes, when it comes in plastic, you end up perpetuating its wasteful use.
9. Buy organic foods. Ths will help reduce your ex-posure to dangerous pesticides like atrazine being manufactured here and used on the sugar cane fields. Buy organic sugar products. Did you know that Florida has some 25,000 acres of organic sugar cane fields? We couldn't find any at all in Louisiana. The state's farmers are missing out not only on a booming market but surefire way to keep atrazine from our drinking water.
10. Use safe products around the home. Many clean-ing chores can be done with distilled white vine-gar, rubbing alcohol, and a little liquid soap. Using laundry detergents free from ethoxylated alcohols can prevent carcinogens like dioxane from enter-ing public drinking water supplies.
On the way to Isle De Jean Charles, the tide is rising and the ocean adding salt to our freshwater resources. Our fisheries accountability up and down the river will also be impacted.
It’s true that we’ve made great gains in water qual-ity for the lower Mississippi, thanks to the 1972 Clean Water Act. But our water systems are being challenged in ways they never have been before, and our knowledge of the true health effects from low-level chemical expo-sures has grown exponentially including their intersec-tion with climate change and environmental justice.
Federal clean water regulations in place aren’t strict enough for families to raise healthy children. The poli-ticians can say your tap water is safe all they want, but that won’t make the atrazine and HEX go away. Or the high cancer rates and special education needs. Or the rising tide.
We have to educate our elected officials and demand accountability up and down the river. ▪