Louisiana: The State We're In; 249; The Silent Disaster; Hazardous Waste

Production funding for this program was provided in part through contributions to Friends of Louisiana Public Broadcasting. The following program is an LPB public affairs production, Louisiana: The State We're In, with Beth George and Ron Blome. Good evening. Welcome to this edition of Louisiana: The State We're In. This week, in a departure from our normal format, we devote most of our time to an in-depth look at the growing problem of hazardous waste disposal, a problem that has received increased attention since the death of a young man in the Bayou Sorrel waste disposal site. But before that story, here are some highlights of news from around the state. On Thursday, the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approved

plans to merge the state's four schools for the blind and deaf. That plan was prompted by federal mandates calling for an end to predominantly black and white institutions. In the Legislature this summer, passed an act placing the BESE board in charge of the merger. Under the plan for deaf schools, the two will be unified into the Louisiana School for the Deaf. The two schools for the blind will be merged into the Louisiana School for the Visually Impaired. With political activity picking up around the state as congressional elections near, congressional hopeful Buddy Roemer's father, Commissioner of Administration Charles Roemer, was sounding himself very much the candidate as he addressed the Baton Rouge Press Club. But Roemer denied that he had any firm plans to run for governor in the next election. The question was asked, "Am I going to run for governor?" My answer is that I am the Commissioner of Administration. I'm concerned about Governor Edwards' programs. I'm dedicated to helping him with those programs. And I think it's much too early at this time to make that decision. I would say that I would not want to preclude myself from consideration next year.

But it's not something that I have an announced program at the present time. Asked if he intended to remain active in politics Roemer said he had no intentions of retiring. I intend to have an active part in the election of the next governor. I can tell you that. You can misinterpret it any way you want to, but I haven't, I haven't gone through the discomfort you have, serving as commissioner of administration three times as long as anyone in the history of the state and put up with Edwards, you know, programs. [Laughter] And endure being included in Clyde Vidrine's book, then expecting to resign. I serve at the pleasure of the governor and I, I certainly try to keep him happy. This week, plans to close the mostly unused F. Edward Hebert Navy Medical Center in New Orleans were announced. That hospital was named after former New Orleans Congressman F. Edward Hebert. And that hospital will cease to be operated as a federal facility next month, but may be converted to private medical

use. $450 million in tax-exempt revenue bonds that will pay the way for an offshore superport south of Morgan City were sold out this week as soon as they hit the market. The managers of the project called it the largest municipal bond issue in financial history that is not backed up by taxes. Once again Commissioner of Insurance Sherman Bernard is in the news. An attorney representing the Louisiana House went into court Friday to settle who would collect a $500 fine from Bernard and his deputy. They were held in contempt by the Legislature this summer when they failed to testify before a committee investigating the Insurance Department. That case is unique because it's the first time someone has been cited for Contempt of the Legislature while the lawmakers were in session. But the Insurance Commissioner's difficulties didn't end there. In copyrighted stories published by The Times Picayune and the Los Angeles Times, it was revealed that officials of a controversial Louisiana bail bond firm and a California bank evidently gave false statements under oath last week at an Insurance Commission hearing to determine the financial holdings of Roger Williams Insurance Company. Sherman Bernard issued Roger Williams its bail bond license over

the protests of his examiners who did not believe the company had the necessary $1 million in capital and surplus. The hearings were held by Bernard to resolve the matter. I hope that this clears it up once and for all, because there have been numerous allegations made by the Sistrict Attorney in New Orleans, which he has not seen fit to substantiate other than run to the press. And Representative Harry Hollins... This is an open hearing, Mr. Connick. Please, you are a witness here and you are a witness to these people. Representative Harry Hollins of Lake Charles has seen fit to team up into a duel and run to the press for some obvious reasons. This is the Insurance Department of Louisiana. It will make a determination and not Mr. Harry Connick or Mr. Harry Hollins. Thank you very much. Nevertheless, the matter is hardly at an end. New Orleans District Attorney Harry Connick has a matter before a grand jury. He entered the investigation at the prompting of State Representative Harry Hollins whose insurance subcommittee has been investigating the Roger Williams affair.

For decades, Louisiana has played the convenient host of the nation's petrochemical industry, an industry which brought jobs and prosperity to our people. But it also brought something else. It brought chemical waste and the problem of its disposal. In recent weeks, we've mentioned the growing concern among the people of Bayou Sorrel about this very problem, concern that grew out of the death of a young truck driver in late July. And this week Governor Edwards declared a six month moratorium on the start up of new waste disposal sites. For the past two weeks, LPB has been looking into the chemical waste problem as we see in this report, The Silent Disaster. It moves across Louisiana in a shroud of anonymity, moving unnoticed across the bayous and down the roads. And once behind the high fences and locked gates it's dumped into pits or pumped into the ground. It's the byproduct of a modern society, a witch's brew of chemicals and waste that nobody wants anymore. Even state officials don't know how many waste pits there are across Louisiana. The estimates run into the hundreds. This one at Bayou

Sorrel is closed for now, standing as an ugly monument to the silent disaster that's poisoning our land. The disaster that killed 19-year-old Kirtley Jackson. He worked for his father's waste trucking firm. The Iberville Parish coroner says he apparently died of chemical asphyxiation while unloading his truck early on the morning of July 25th. There are government standards for these pits, but mostly the owners operate by their own rules. Some good and some bad. And, until recently, state and local government offered only token efforts to face the issue. The death of Kirtley Jackson may be changing that, but for the residents of Bayou Sorrel, the promises of future action hold little value. You can't expect several hundred poor people to mount the kind of legal 'cause it would take the trials. I'd sure like to see what would come of that. Because that well will be putting waste on somebody else's property at some point in time. And it seems like

again the big boy gets to stick you with the junk whether you like it or not. Columbus Millet and other residents of Bayou Sorrel, stirred by the death of Kirtley Jackson, gathered before the Iberville Parish Police Jury on August 14th. They were there to protest plans by Rollins Environmental Services to reopen a deep waste injection well in their community. Rollins recently bought that well from a company named Claw owned by Cyril Hines, the same man who owned the nearby pit where Kirtley Jackson died. Incidentally, government officials say that Hines has been slow to deliver documents in the Jackson investigation. LPB tried to contact Hines through his office, but our calls were not returned. At the police jury hearing, state conservation officials said they believe the Claw well was in good shape and they said they reissued the permit to Rollins, something which local resident Millet found hard to swallow. In light of the fact that the Commission files were filled with complaints on this operation, I guess my question to the state is why didn't people have an opportunity to

go ahead and attend a public hearing on this rather than just go ahead and automatically improve the well? If you were an unbiased outsider, would you not see enough complaints in those state files to make you think that maybe we ought to re-examine this permit? Since the August 14th hearing, the Rollins Corporation, which has a pretty good record as the disposal industry goes, has concluded that the well won't hold pressure and needs extensive testing. But beyond the technical problems, their operation faces a legal challenge as they fight a new parish law banning all waste disposal operations. For many people reading the headlines of the fight at Bayou Sorrel, it may have seemed a new problem. But for the Edmund and Dave Ewell families across the river and north of Baton Rouge, the problems of badly managed waste pits was nothing new. Nine years ago their cattle started dying and the hair fell off their dogs as a black oily goo started spreading across five hundred acres of their bottom land. The source was a group of pits operated by Petro Process of Louisiana, pits which accepted the waste of 14 major

corporations and, according to Edmund Ewell, those pits were constantly overflowing onto his land. When the pits would fill up, and when I say full they were running over and they when they get so full, they would be on a Sunday afternoon or a Saturday afternoon they would, you'd see a big smoke in the back of the place. They'd be burning them out. And they would burn them down. It'd burn way up in the night. Sometimes when they'd have a flash flood, they'd take pumps and put on the backside of these ring levees and start the pumps and let the just pump continuously over the levee. Discharge would be running down in the swamp.

It went in the ground. It went down. And you can see white sand in those little bars, on the edge of bars and just take a stick and stick down about three or four inches and stuff ought to come right to the top. It'll come right to the surface. But since that time we've quit using the swamp altogether. It's cut off about four hundred fifty, five hundred acres of land from the family, you know, in this place and we used it every winter for winter rains. You'd say it's pretty dangerous for somebody to walk through that land? Just day before yesterday, it's two little young boys that moved in here from Monroe next door on the next one in from the highway. And it so happened they lost their dog during the night and they were looking for the dog and they went down in the woods and came back.

They stopped over at my brother's house and wanted to know if they could use the hose to wash off, that they were burning up. So they've gotten in some - they didn't know what it was. Crossed a vine and got something on them. It was burning them. That's what it is, I'm sure. The Ewell family turned to the courts in their fight suing Petro Process and the 14 corporations that use the dump. After a record- long jury trial, they won a $30,000 judgment. After that, Edmund Ewell dropped out of the court fight in the face of mounting legal fees and frustration, but his brother Dave is appealing the award and asking for an extra $170 million to restore the land. Under the court award, Petro Process was to cease liquid dumping, something Mr. Ewell says they still do. We photographed the pits by shooting over a fence, but we couldn't tell what was in the dump. The people answering the phone at Petro Process headquarters wouldn't talk about the operation. And one worker at the site was obviously distressed by our picture taking. Yeah, the officials here don't seem to want to talk about this whole thing.

Still dumping stuff in here? Nothing but dry. Y'all doing some expansion around here these days? No sir. We're just taking a few pictures. We'll be moving on in a couple minutes. We're just dumping dry stuff. That's all we're doing. It wasn't always that way, was it? Well, all ya gotta do is look at the records and you know that it wasn't. As if the Ewell family didn't have enough to contend with with Petro Process to the north, they have a large disposal operation run by Rollins to the immediate south of their property. They say Rollins is the better of the two neighbors since they quickly clean up spills and are responsive to complaints, but they are still bothered by fumes from the Rollins incinerator. Members of the Ewell family say they feel surrounded and frustrated by the pits and Edmund Ewell says it's more than just his problem. [Ewell] We'll have it

as long as we live. And our children'll have it. If we continue to own this place, we'll still have problems here, which was done nine years ago. I don't think they can, it's, you know, it's just a bad deal. And looks like someone would try to do something about it not only this place, everywhere. I see trucks going up the Mississippi dumping. I don't know what they got up there and none of my business. I don't even know where they're going, but I know they dumping up there just to get it out of Baton Rouge or get it away from these plants. Something should be done. That's the way it looks to me. I know they've caused a lot of problems on this one particular place, but it's going on - some of it has washed into the river, a lot of it's going into the river. And they tell me down in New Orleans people drink the water out of the

river. The Ewell Family turned to the civil courts in their search for help, but in Iberville Parish they're using a different approach. They passed a law prohibiting waste disposal. Just telling people that they have to do a certain thing and not making sure that they're doing it, uh, just didn't get the job done. We, uh, you have to assume and I understand that it seems this way, that they're assuming that everyone is gonna be honorable and it just doesn't work that way. These people are out to make money. And if there are shortcuts to making that money I'm sure they're going to take, probably take that chance. Louis Sanchez, vice president of the Iberville Parish Police Jury and parish manager. He is the leader of the fight against future waste disposal in the parish. It's hard to say that you know some people aren't honorable, but this has been a proven thing here at Bayou Sorrel. It's a pity again I say that it took the life of a young man to

bring everyone's attention to what was really going on over there. The Iberville ordinance flatly prohibits any disposal of hazardous waste in the parish. But it is clearly aimed at stopping disposal sites like those in Bayou Sorrel. Onsite disposal operations, like this one at Dow Chemical, are being overlooked by parish officials and Dow officials act as though nothing unusual has happened even though their plant may be technically illegal. The law itself may be on shaky constitutional grounds since a similar measure by Evangeline Parish was struck down by the state Supreme Court. But Sanchez says they took the action because they felt abandoned by the state, an opinion that some state officials only mildly protest. Well, I think that you would, the circumstances that have arisen in the past few months would surely indicate that we hadn't done the job that we should be doing in the state of Louisiana as far as hazardous waste is concerned. I don't think that the chemical companies have been

instructed or mandated to do specific things. It's just been an accepted fact in the state of Louisiana. And you know as long as someone is not telling you that you have to do something you're not going to do it, economically speaking. Jim Hutchinson is the state's man on the spot in developing hazardous waste policy. As deputy secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, his job is to guide a new state law controlling hazardous waste into operation next year. We did have a bad situation in Bayou Sorrel and that doesn't mean that all pits and lagoons are hazardous and the people are not doing what they say they're doing. That is a circumstance. However, we must realize that the state of Louisiana has some eighty-three chemical plants in it and we are the number four producer in the United States of chemical waste. And we're going to have to dispose with dispose of our waste in some manner. What I say that we haven't set any laws forth to mandate the type of storage programs

to ensure that we have the safety of our people. I can't find that on the rolls. It's not there. And I think that's our obligation and our charge is to come up with a total plan and when and it goes back to where I was talking about from the transportation, the identification, the emissions, all the way down to the working hand-in-hand with the Conservation Commission on the injection wells, which is in our department. I've talked to him at lengthy details and we are coordinating our programs hand-in-hand and I think that you'll see a total cooperative effort between the Commissioner and the Department of Natural Resources. [Blome] That takes care of what we're going to do in the future. But what about right now? Do you know what's out there in those pits? [Hutchinson] No we do not know what's out there, to be honest with you. I do not feel that we have an accountability and we can identify what's in those pits today. In the past, the jurisdiction over hazardous waste has been fractionalized among many state departments that when Kirt Jackson died at Bayou Sorrel it was the responsibility of

the state health department run by Dr. William Cherry. Why has it been a problem for the department? Do you think it's been a low priority or what is the difficulty in regulating this sort of thing? No, it hasn't been a low priority. We, we permit these dumps. The permits specifies what should go into these dumps and we would trust those folks that we gave the permit to to be dumping what they were permitted to do. And so our inspections were, our on-site inspections were sometimes as much as months apart, but we found out that the folks weren't always doing what they were permitted to do and a case in point is the dump that we closed over at Bayou Sorrel. What I've said now is that even though we are short of personnel in terms of to do this, I still have sanitariums in every parish in the state, at least one up to many and they're going to inspect these dumps and they're going to do it weekly. As the state officials

paraded before the Iberville Police Jury, it became evident that the state's policy of dealing with hazardous waste was tied to one key element - blind trust. They expected the pit operators to do as they said. But the profits on some disposal operations are enormous. One pit operator bragged that he cleared $300,000 a month over his expenses, which ran about $20,000. And to Louis Sanchez, that's where the system came unglued and why the parish had to act on its own. We can open the eyes of public, state officials and federal officials to the fact that the people in Louisiana and local government of Louisiana are not going to stand by and have things done in a haphazard manner, jeopardizing their life and their property. And I think the people are fed up with it. It's, it's a shame if local government can't enact some kind of laws to take care of the well-being of their constituents, the people in the parish, if no one else is doing it. And I

don't think, I don't think this country has gotten that bad yet. I think the somehow or other the law needs to turn to our favor. I'm hoping it does because when we can't protect the people that we're supposed to be representing then we're in a bad shape when no one else is doing it. If the parish didn't wake up state government, the headlines did as it became clear that hazardous waste was turning into a silent disaster. And Governor Edwards Thursday announced his six month moratorium on the start up of new disposal facilities. Six months from now we believe that we will have been able to have hearings, promulgate rules and regulations, get a better grip on the situation and then provide some guidelines for licensing and permitting, which will make it possible to safely dispose of waste in areas where humans, wildlife and the environment will not be damaged. But until that happens I think that we just better stop for a while and take a better look at the situation. [Blome] The Bayou Sorrel

pit did not have a permit of any sort to be dumping chemical waste and there seems to be some evidence that it is you fly over south Louisiana you see pits everywhere. The problem seems to be that a lot of people just aren't applying for the pits. They're going ahead and dumping it. So how will this moratorium affect that. Are you going to go looking for those pits now? Well, certainly we will stop people who are disposing of waste in an illegal manner wherever and whenever we find them. And the public is invited to notify either my office or the Department of Natural Resources or Dr. Cherry's office if and when any such evidence is found. What about the crud that's already out there, the stuff that's already poisoned the land. Is there going to be any program to try and clean that up or... [Edwards] To the extent that we can, but bear in mind that we are late getting in this business. I accept some of the responsibility, just as everyone else in public life. And I'm simply going to do everything that I can to avoid the problem in the future, to provide some rules and regulations, get more people involved in the process and do what

we can retrospectively, as well as prospectively to protect the interest of the people of this state. Why do you think we've been late? Is it because we, we had a system that was based on good faith, good faith that operators and chemical companies were going to follow the rules we had. Well, because we have been a state very interested in the importation and encouragement of industry and we have been as liberal and lax as possible in helping them to dispose of waste because we were interested in the jobs and the economic advantages and no one can fault us or the prior administration for that. But, we have probably reached a saturation point where we ought to revalue our situation and position and provide even better balance between the two concepts. The Governor's program offers a short term Band-Aid fix to the larger problem, but if real progress is made it will come from House Bill 600 passed by the Legislature this year. That bill by Representative Manny Fernandez of Chalmette establishes a cradle-to-grave handling procedure for hazardous waste and Fernandez believes it's a big

step forward in stabilizing the disposal industry. [Fernandez] In this record-keeping system, we feel that we can abolish a lot of the fly-by-night operations or the operations where a person just picks up a chemical waste for indiscriminate disposal. When you started looking into this, this matter and putting together your interim study, were you shocked at some of the practices you learned about? Yes, as time went on. You know, it begins with something that was an idea, a concept that we should be able to control hazardous waste because Louisiana is, as you know, the fourth largest producer of hazardous or dangerous materials. As the progress went along in the legislation, I was amazed to find so many incidents of indiscriminate disposal that have just recently come to light. It really surprised me at that time. The state has now promised action to contain the silent disaster of hazardous waste, but for the Ewell family and the people of Bayou Sorrel the promises sound familiar and

empty and to them Governor Edwards can only offer his own good faith. We're certain it's going to change. We've already changed and I simply say that the problem has been called to our attention in a very unfortunate, but dramatic way and I'm going to use the powers of my office and the powers of state agencies to protect the best interests of the people. And let me also say that one instance is too many, but you know it's not one of those situations where every nook and cranny and bend of the river has the problem. The isolated problems have been highly publicized and and possibly in some instances amplified, but nevertheless it is there and it is something that we should no longer close our eyes to and we ought to look realistically at it, not only for today, but for the future. The story certainly doesn't end with the Governor calling a six-month moratorium. I understand late this week there have been some new developments in the story. And this is a story we're going to see a lot of late developments on. Early Friday morning, the autopsy

results that took a month to complete finally came in. Kirt Jackson did die of gas that came out of that pit. Also, the Jackson family has filed a half million dollar lawsuit against the company that owned that pit. Monday we'll see more developments as the Iberville Parish ordinance goes up before its constitutional court test. Ron, the Governor indicated this was an isolated incident. In your research have you found that it indeed was. I don't think it is because even Dr. Cherry said in the segment that there may be some 300 of these pits across the state. And one thing when, when people see isolated fish kills or they see the grass killed along the highway, Wildlife and Fisheries people say a lot of times these are trucks that they didn't want to drive all the way to the pit and they just dumped the load along the highway or into the convenient bayou. So it's all over the place. It seems that citizens in other parts of the state other than Bayou Sorrel are getting upset about this problem. I think there's a mood for something, a parade around Lake Charles. We'll see a sympathy march in Lake Charles. They've had their own problems, which were highly publicized last year and there are instances all across the state that have gotten publicity.

We'll be following that story as it progresses and we will be presenting some other in-depth news stories next week and we hope you'll join us then on Louisiana: The State We're In. I'm Beth George for Ron Blome. Good evening. [Theme Music] Production funding for this program was provided in part through contributions to Friends of Louisiana Public Broadcasting. The preceding was an LPB production