“I do not feel they have it anywhere close to under control.” “If there’s any kind of spill, we’re looking at a world-class environmental disaster,” said Darryl Malek-Wiley, a senior organizing representative with the Sierra Club who has been tracking the Mosaic plant since the 1980s, when it unsuccessfully lobbied the EPA for permission to dump all gypsum waste into the Mississippi River. Since the shifting wall was first reported to state authorities on 10 January, the company has been scrambling to reduce the imminent threat of a gypsum break. Even at the best of times, the storage site across from Melancon’s house, known as the Uncle Sam site, is an eyesore that has been under a consent decree since 2015 for releasing excessive amounts of sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid mist into the air.Ī farmer who grows sugarcane on Mosaic property adjacent to the gypstack was the first to alert the company to the problem last December, when he reported a land bulge – about 2,000ft long and 100ft wide – that was pushing on the north wall of the gypstack, causing it to move. The Mosaic fertilizer plant has been a continuing source of concern among many residents since opening in the 1970s. “They just let us die out here,” said Washington about the experience of living in Cancer Alley. “We feel that it’s environmental racism, because basically where most of the plants are located is where black people are staying,” said Barbara Washington, a lifelong resident of the area and a member of Rise St James, the environmental justice group formed by parish residents. “They don’t tell us anything.”įor many residents in this predominantly black area, LDEQ and the companies behind pollutive industries have a virtually non-existent approach to community health and safety. He lives in a house two doors down from Melancon. “None of us knew what was up,” said Matthew Jacques, 28, said of the situation. It is owned by the Mosaic Company, a fertilizer producer, and lies directly across from her front porch.Įven as the Louisiana department of environmental quality (LDEQ) considered the discovery of the shifting wall in January an “emergency condition” and Mosaic told some farmers that it leases land to that they could not be on the property for months, residents only heard about the situation after it was reported in the local news. Melancon is affiliated with a group of activists, led by black women, many of whom can trace their ancestry to former slaves from nearby plantations, fighting on multiple fronts to stop further industrial development in this already heavily polluted and economically disadvantaged area.īut that giant lake of industrial waste, and the piles of phosphogypsum containing it, is the most concerning to Melancon right now. Her municipality neighbours Saint John the Baptist parish, which is the focus of a year-long Guardian series, Cancer Town, examining the fight for clean air in an area that has the highest risk of cancer due to airborne toxins, according to US government science. The 87-year-old lives in the heart of an area known as Cancer Alley, a stretch of land between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River with a dense concentration of petrochemical and industrial plants, and some of the nation’s highest cancer rates.

Photograph: Phin Percy ‘They don’t tell us anything’ “If that broke open, how could you contain it all?” wondered Melancon from her front patio.Īnd fears of exactly this scenario of a breach grew dramatically in January, when it emerged one of its walls was found to be shifting by as much as 0.7in a day, potentially threatening to spill its store of 750m gallons of toxic, radioactive wastewater on to surrounding lands and waterways. Melancon lives close enough to the big “gypstack” mound as it’s known, to hear occasional sirens and loudspeaker announcements. It has reshaped the horizon in this parish, which has transitioned from a center of slavery, to black-owned farmland, to an industrial corridor. The massive white mound is shaped like a giant bathtub, formed with a naturally radioactive element called phosphogypsum and filled with toxic cargo. It is a gargantuan manmade 960-acre lake containing hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic, radioactive water that sits on top of a 200ft pile of waste byproduct, an enormous, chalky white wall that makes the bulldozers and cranes atop look like children’s toys.

Russian river mosaic stack