Eastbound drivers on Jefferson Highway near the Atalco refinery are welcomed to St. James Parish with an anti-littering sign barely legible beneath a layer of chemical residue emitted by Atalco. (Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)

GRAMERCY — There’s a small area along the Mississippi River’s east bank where the land, buildings and roadways are rust-colored and where the air is frequently filled with the same mineral that covers the surface of Mars.

That spot, about 45 miles west-northwest of New Orleans, is near the entrance of the Atlantic Alumina plant, known better as Atalco, the only bauxite refinery in the United States. Bauxite is a rock composed of aluminum oxides and other heavy metals such as iron oxide — the same compound that gives Mars its famous rusty hue.   

Periodically, the bauxite dust travels across the river and blankets the small, historically-Black community of Wallace. In other instances, Atalco has discharged large plumes of white-colored dust from the refined alumina that has traveled as far as 4 miles from the facility. The plant occupies roughly 3 square miles of land at the St. James-St. John the Baptist Parish border.

For Shamell Lavigne, who lives in Wallace, the red remnants from Atalco are one of the many industry-caused hazards of living in St. James Parish. She is an organizer with Rise St. James, a community activist group that focuses on environmental justice.

“Any given day you can pass by over there and, if the wind is blowing a certain way, it’s blowing that red dust,” Lavigne said. 

For years, Lavigne said, rumors have circled in the community that the dust particles from Atalco might contain mercury or arsenic. Both toxic metals have been found in the slurry that spilled from recent levee breaks around Atalco’s manmade “red mud” lakes. 

The series of breaches and leaks dating back to last year are detailed in thousands of documents from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. An LDEQ spokesman only confirmed that an investigation into Atalco was ongoing when asked for comment. 

The sludge has repeatedly escaped from containment areas and contaminated a public drainage system that flows to the Blind River Swamp. Lab testing of impacted water and soil samples from those discharges found poisonous heavy metal elements — some at concentrations far beyond the legal and safe limits, government records detail. 

Atalco has not responded to multiple interview requests from the Illuminator.

Gramercy resident Gail LeBoeuf, 72, has lived roughly half a mile from the Atalco facility since 1999 and believes it could be a source of some of her health problems. 

She was diagnosed with liver cancer in 2022, adding to the prevalence of cases along the Mississippi River corridor that go back decades. It has given rise to the label “Cancer Alley” to describe the area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the population has one of the highest concentrations of cancer diagnoses in the nation, according to data from the EPA’s air toxin mapping tool.

Studies have linked the cancer to the area’s high levels of pollution, especially in predominantly Black fenceline communities next to industrial facilities. Nearly 70% of Gramercy residents are Black, according to U.S. Census figures. This includes LeBoeuf, who also has bronchitis that she believes could be the result of Atalco’s particulate matter discharges. 

Residents, some as far as 5 miles from the plant, periodically find their property and vehicles covered in a layer of red bauxite dust or white powder from the making of alumina.  

Elevated levels of arsenic are present in the waste product of alumina refining. Recent medical studies have found that even low levels of arsenic exposure through drinking water can cause bronchitis and certain other respiratory diseases, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

“It’s hard to think it’s not environmentally related,” LeBoeuf said of her illnesses, though she added that her doctors can’t say for certain how much the industrial pollution is to blame.

Pollution by air, land and water

Neighbors of the Atalco alumina refinery face exposure to dust and waste throughout the process, according to a review of regulatory documents. Plus, the facility has repeatedly poured toxic waste into the Mississippi River — and skirted the blame.

From its dock on the river, the Atalco facility receives constant shipments of crushed bauxite ore from its mining operation in Jamaica, where it is extracted near communities that — just like in Louisiana — are routinely caked in a layer of red dust.

When the ships arrive at Atalco, the dock has a system that unloads the bauxite powder from the ship and into a hopper connected to a conveyor belt that carries it into the refinery. Unloading the bauxite from the ship into the hopper is one of the more environmentally risky points in the process because it is prone to spills and wind exposure that carries the red dust into the atmosphere. The company recently installed a fogging system on the conveyor in an effort to minimize the wind-blown dust, though records show it has broken down at times.

The fogger also does nothing to minimize airborne dust from the dried chemical residues in Atalco’s red mud lakes.  

Although Atalco was formally notified of the levee breaches surrounding its lakes in August, there were many earlier signs of trouble at the facility. 

LDEQ’s file on the company contains multiple reports about the facility’s pollution leaving chemical residues on homes, vehicles, plants and waterways.

Atalco has an interior system of containment ditches designed to catch chemical spills, stormwater runoff and the wastewater used to process the bauxite. The system is separate from the public drainage ditches that run along the highways outside of the facility. One of Atalco’s ditch systems has an outfall pipe that drains into the Mississippi River, so LDEQ requires the company to treat its process wastewater — which is water used for industrial processes — to keep it relatively free from hazardous contaminants and monitor it with basic water quality testing such as “potential for hydrogen” or pH levels.

Clean water has a neutral pH of around 7.0 on a 14-point scale. Values below 7 are considered acidic, while values above it are considered alkaline. Any extremes at either end of the scale, below 4 and above 10, often indicate the presence of dissolved chemicals that can be hazardous or even fatal to humans, animals and plant life. 

Under the provisions of its river outfall permit, Atalco is prohibited from discharging wastewater with a pH over 10.0 for more than 446 minutes, or just over 7 hours per month, an EPA standard. Most fish cannot survive in water with a pH level over 9.5. Atalco’s outfall monitor consistently detected amounts far greater in the months leading up to the discovery of the red mud lake levee breaches in August 2024.  

One of the highest readings occurred in February 2024, when the facility discharged waste with a pH of 13.2 for a total of over 19,000 minutes — nearly two weeks. That discharge was 43 times greater than what the EPA allows. Records show Atalco exceeded that permit limit almost every month — discharging highly caustic chemicals into the Mississippi River — going as far back as July 2023.  

In nearly every occurrence, the company blamed either the weather or some other third party, telling LDEQ the discharges could not have been prevented. For the discharge in February 2024, Atalco blamed it on a power outage and a lack of steady suppliers for the chemicals needed to neutralize high pH discharge, records show. The state has not penalized the company for those incidents.

Hotline complaint

On April 10, 2024, authorities received a more specific warning sign. Someone filed an anonymous complaint with the National Response Center regarding a “release of an unknown red and orange material onto the ground and into the roadside ditches” surrounding the Atalco plant, according to LDEQ records. 

“Caller states that nothing has been done for clean up and the vegetation is dead in that area,” the complaint noted.  

The National Response Center is a federal communications center that manages a 24-hour hotline for the reporting of chemical spills, train derailments and port security incidents throughout the country. Most complaints reported come from government officials or workers in the industrial and transportation sectors. 

U.S. Coast Guard Coast personnel who staff the hotline are trained to screen complaints and, if necessary, forward them to the agencies most appropriate to respond. For this complaint, the Coast Guard wrote an incident report and immediately notified LDEQ. 

The state agency initiated an investigation but did not visit the facility until 10 days later. During that site visit, the state inspector drove along the highways surrounding the Atalco plant but did not see anything suspicious in the ditches.

The LDEQ inspector then called Atalco on April 22, 2024 — 12 days after the complaint — to ask about the allegation. Atalco’s environmental manager, Charlotte Hooker, told LDEQ that heavy rainfall brought a lot of surface water to the facility. She acknowledged the plant saw a spike in discharges into the Mississippi River but denied that Atalco was polluting the public ditches outside of the facility. 

During the company’s discussion with LDEQ, someone noted that the anonymous caller may have simply witnessed run-off from nearby farmland with red-orange colored soil, according to the inspector’s report.

LDEQ accepted Atalco’s explanation and closed the investigation, according to state records. 

If the investigation had continued, Lavigne said LDEQ might have discovered the levee breaches sooner but doubts if it would have made much of a difference. She said the agency doesn’t do much to compel companies to prevent accidents or clean them up when they happen. She and other residents said authorities are reluctant to enforce regulations because of Atalco’s status as the only remaining alumina plant in the country. 

“I do think that they’re protected in that sense,” Lavigne said.

Atalco became the only remaining domestic source of alumina in the United States after the only other bauxite refinery, L’Alumina, located in Ascension Parish, closed in 2020. 

Previous infractions

Following a 2017 compliance inspection, LDEQ cited Atalco for 78 state Environmental Quality Act violations, mostly related to the company’s air pollution permit. In 2020, the state negotiated a fine of $75,000 and allowed Atalco to deny any wrongdoing. 

At the federal level, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has cited Atalco for 370 violations since 2021 mostly for caustic material spills, according to an Advocate report. The company paid over a half-million dollars in fines related to those violations.

The residents of St. James and St. John parishes have long been aware of Atalco’s incidents and say the threat of fines has done little to curb the company’s pollution practices. 

Kristy Cambre, a long-time resident of one of the Gramercy neighborhoods closest to Atalco, noticed a layer of white dust covering her vehicle the morning of May 23. 

“It didn’t just wash off quickly or normally,” Cambre said. “Some spots kind of bubbled almost like I was rinsing off a soap.”

The red dustings used to appear more frequently, but Cambre and other residents are now seeing more of the white substance.

The red dust comes from the raw bauxite ore or the dried residue from the red mud lakes, while the white dust is the refined alumina. Mounds of the refined alumina piled on the ground can be seen from the roadways when driving by the facility, and clouds of both white and red dust can be seen coming from Atalco’s shipping dock and its conveyor belts.   

Cambre said she never reports the dustings to authorities, but some of her neighbors have. LDEQ’s file on the company is filled with incident reports prompted by citizen complaints, mostly about the chemical dust and about rust-colored water filling the public ditches. 

In most of those cases, LDEQ records show inspectors would not substantiate the complaints, writing that they have no way of knowing whether the red dust came from Atalco or some nearby farms. 

Farms surrounding Atalco grow sugarcane, and the Illuminator could not find any with finely powdered rust-colored soil.

In most cases, the inspectors reported in their records that they spoke with Atalco executives but never that they spoke with any of the farmers who purportedly have rust-colored soil.  

“They’re turning a blind eye to it,” LeBoeuf said.

Craig Calcagano, alderman-at-large for the town of Gramercy, agreed with LeBoeuf’s assessment. He said he first noticed Atalco’s lakes leaking waste in early 2024 and reported it to both the company and LDEQ, but nothing was ever done about them, he said. 

“They’re the only alumina plant in the country, so they ride that horse every time they get in trouble,” Calcagano said. 

The company has occasionally paid some fines over the years, but nothing has really changed because the pollution continues, Calcagano said. Atalco’s chemicals cover his property on an almost daily basis, he said. The public drainage ditches run red when it rains, and the Blind River Swamp across from the facility is dying, according to the alderman. 

“When it starts destroying everything you got, which you work all your life for like everybody around here, what can you do?” Calcagano asked. “When we complain, we complain on deaf ears because they don’t want to hear it.”

Atalco’s pollution also affects people who don’t live near the plant such as Teresa Williams, who works at a facility down the road from Atalco and said her car gets splattered with rust-colored residue every time she drives to and from her job. 

Gary Watson, a Wallace native who still owns property there but now lives in New Orleans, said the pollution is one of the reasons he left. 

“There should be outrage,” Watson said after he was told of the levee breaches. 

Lavigne, the community activist, said she is concerned about the people who work at Atalco who might be exposed to the toxic chemicals.

One of the more notable incidents occurred July 5, 1999, when an explosion at the plant injured 29 people and dispersed caustic waste. A federal Mine Safety and Health Administration investigation found that a power outage led to a buildup of pressure in the four giant tanks used to heat the caustic slurry. 

LDEQ records indicate the facility has seen numerous other incidents in recent years, including seven incidents since May 2022, resulting in chemical and diesel spills, severe burns to workers that required hospitalization and one death when 45-year-old Curtis Diggs fell into a pit of sodium hydroxide because a grate used to cover the area was missing. (Read more below) 

In previous incidents, Atalco has always claimed its red dust is non-hazardous, which is also a position the EPA still holds. However, recent studies have linked bauxite dust exposure to certain diseases. 

This additional research has prompted the EPA to issue warnings about bauxite’s potential to contain toxic metals and trace radioactive elements, though the toxicity is generally more concentrated in the red mud byproduct. 

Slawomir Lomnicki, an environmental scientist at LSU, said the danger with Atalco’s red mud lakes is the potential for the toxic metal to leach into the groundwater. 

Another risk is that the red mud in the lakes can dry out and turn into airborne dust that can be carried off by the wind, according to Ganga Hettiarachchi, a professor of soil and environmental chemistry at Kansas State University. 

It’s unclear what, if any, consequences Atalco will face in connection with its many permit violations. So far, LDEQ has issued a warning letter for 23 violations in connection with the levee breaches, providing little solace to some of the residents in St. James Parish.

“It looks like, you know, they’re gonna be protected,” Lavigne said. “They’re definitely one of the plants that’s been on our list of really dirty plants.”

The post Red Alert: Public reported problems at Atalco refinery long before inspectors found levee breaches appeared first on lailluminator.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article exhibits a Center-Left bias primarily through its detailed focus on environmental justice concerns, corporate accountability, and public health impacts affecting predominantly Black communities near the Atalco alumina refinery. The language emphasizes the negative consequences of industrial pollution, regulatory shortcomings, and the lived experiences of affected residents and activists. While the reporting is fact-based and supported by official documents and expert studies, the framing leans toward advocating for stricter environmental enforcement and greater corporate responsibility. It highlights systemic environmental racism and regulatory failures, aligning with Center-Left priorities on social equity and environmental protection without adopting an overtly partisan or ideological tone.