Donald Trump in the Bayou
Mike loves the waters of Louisiana more than anything in the world. A vote for Hillary Clinton would protect the Clean Water Act and secure the Environmental Protection Agency. But there is one thing more important to Mike than clean water: pride in his people. 1 2 3Majestic century-old cypress trees crashed in slow motion and disappeared into the gaping mouth of the sinkhole then forming. Two clean-up workers had cast out booms not far from the sinkhole to contain an area of water shiny with oil. To steady their boat, they tied it to a nearby tree, which then slid into the sinkhole, as did their boat, though both men were rescued.
In the following weeks, pristine swamp forest was replaced by oily sludge as the earth began to leak natural gas. “During a rain, the puddles would shine and bubble, like you’d dropped Alka Seltzer tablets in them,” Mike said. Gradually, gassy sludge infiltrated the aquifer, threatening the local drinking water.
What had caused the sinkhole? The culprit was Texas Brine, a lightly regulated, Houston-based drilling company. It had drilled a hole 5,600 feet beneath the floor of Bayou Corne to mine intensely concentrated salt, which it sold to companies making chlorine. The drill accidently punctured one wall of an underlying geological formation called the Napoleon Salt Dome, three miles wide and a mile deep, sheathed in a layer of oil and natural gas. (One hundred twenty-six such domes lie under Louisiana’s land and water and are often mined for brine, with toxic chemicals sometimes being stored in the resulting cavities.) When the drill accidentally pierced the side of a cavern inside the dome, the wall crumpled under the pressure of surrounding shale, sucking down everything above it.
The sinkhole grew. First, it was the size of one house lot, then five house lots, then the length of Crawfish Street. By 2016, it covered more than 37 acres. The pavement of the main road into and out of Bayou Corne began to sink, too. Levees along the bayou, originally built to contain rising waters in times of flood, also began to go down, threatening to extend the oily sludge over nearby grassland and forest. Meanwhile, shell-shocked evacuees doubled up with family members in spare rooms, campers, and motels, turning to each other for news of the expanding sinkhole.
Environmental Protection: Missing in Action
Mike backs his boat into the canal. I climb in. It sputters to life and putts out into the wider bayou. “Around here you pull up bass, catfish, white perch, crawfish, and sac-a-lait,” he says, “at least we used to.”
Mike was a water baby. He loved to fish and could describe the habits and shapes of a dozen kinds of local fish. He headed for the water as often as he could, although he got little time off. So “environment” wasn’t simply a word to him; it was his passion, his comfort, his way of life.
Mike has long disliked the idea of a strong federal government because “people come to depend on it instead of on each other.” He grew up in a close-knit community not far from Bayou Corne on the Armelise sugarcane plantation, the fifth of seven children of a plumber and a homemaker. As a boy, he tells me, “I went barefoot all summer, and used to shoot crows with my rifle, use the guts for fish bait.” As an adult, he worked as an estimator, measuring and pricing materials used in constructing the gigantic platforms that house oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. As a child of the old South who grew to manhood in an era of big oil, he was for state’s rights and wanted even state government kept to a minimum.
This, however, was the last situation he’d ever imagined being in. “We’re a close community here. We leave our doors unlocked. We help each other rebuild levees during floods. You got the two-beer levee job, or the four-beer one.” He laughs. “We love it here.”
For a man who could lose himself for hours in his garage welding together parts of a two-seater Zenith 701 airplane from a kit, and who described himself as “to myself,” he welcomed the easy sociability of Bayou Corne. It wasn’t the simple absence of government Mike wanted; it was the feeling of being inside a warm, cooperative group. That’s what he thought government replaced: community. And why pay heavy taxes to help the government rob you of what you most prize?
At a distance, we see a sign nailed to the gray trunk of a Tupelo tree: “DANGER, KEEP OUT, HIGHLY FLAMMABLE GAS.” Around it in the water are concentric circles of bubbles, scuttling outward like small bugs. “Methane,” says Mike, matter-of-factly.
By mid-2013, officials had declared Bayou Corne a “sacrifice zone” and most of the 350 residents had fled. A small group of “stayers” like Mike were now criticized by the “leavers” who feared their presence suggested to Texas Brine that “it wasn’t so bad,” and so might lower the price the refugees could set for their suffering.
Everyone knew that the company’s drill had caused the sinkhole, but that didn’t settle the question of blame. To begin with, Texas Brine blamed Mother Nature, claiming (falsely) that earthquakes were natural in the area. Then it blamed its insurers and the company from which it rented space in the dome.
Both those who stayed and those who left were mostly angry at “the government.” For one thing, Governor Bobby Jindal had waited seven months before visiting the victims. And why was his first visit so delayed, he was asked, and why was it announced so abruptly on the morning of a mid-week day when most sinkhole refugees were at work?
Like so many of his neighbors, Mike Schaff had twice voted for Bobby Jindal and, as someone who had worked in oil all his life, approved the governor’s $1.6 billion tax incentive program to lure more of that industry to the state. For three years, it was impossible to tell whether the oil companies had paid a penny to Louisiana since, under Jindal, the job of auditing their payments had been handed over to the Office of Mineral Resources, which has close ties to the industry and between 2010 and 2013 performed no audits at all.
In Louisiana, on-the-books environmental regulations were laxly enforced by conservative state legislators many of whom were oilmen or, like Governor Jindal, took donations from Big Energy. An eye-opening 2003 report from the Inspector General of the EPA ranked Louisiana last in its region when it came to implementing federal environmental mandates. Louisiana’s database on hazardous waste facilities was error-ridden. The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (a title missing the word “protection”) did not know if many of the companies it was supposed to monitor were “in compliance.” Its agents had failed to inspect many plants and even when it did find companies not in compliance with state regulations, it neglected to levy or collect penalties.
The Inspector General was “unable to fully assure the public that Louisiana was operating programs in a way that effectively protects human health and the environment.” According to the state’s own website, 89,787 permits to deposit waste or do other things that affected the environment were requested between January 1967 and July 2015. Of these, only 60 — or .07% — were denied.
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