By contrast, from 2007 to 2015, as mentioned, Governor Bobby Jindal drew $1.6 billion from schools and hospitals to give to companies as "incentives." This strategy put some chickens in some pots, of course, and indirectly took them away from others. Like nearly everyone I talk to, Mayor Hardey twice voted for Governor Jindal, as did his family. And were he alive today, very few Louisianans would vote for Huey Long.
When I ask Hardey about his political orientation—he was a moderate Republican—he immediately answers, "I've had enough of poor me." As he explains, "I don't like the government paying unwed mothers to have a lot of kids, and I don't go for affirmative action. I met this one black guy who complained he couldn't get a job. Come to find out he'd been to private school. I went to a local public school like everyone else I know. No one should be getting a job to fill some mandated racial quota or getting state money not to work." Jindal had reduced state money for "poor me's." With the jobs coming in now, we "ought to close the unemployment office," Hardey declares. "You can get a $15 to $18 [an hour] job flagging" (i.e., holding traffic flags around construction sites).
The second of five children, Hardey had learned to stand his ground among friendly competitors for parental attention. And it was rare that he pleaded "poor me." He had become a beloved and effective defender of his community. But it was industry itself, he felt, that had permitted him to access his own potential, and to become the man he was.
"In grade school and high school," he tells me solemnly, "I wasn't anything. I couldn't comprehend things." Might he have had an undiagnosed learning disability? I ask. "No," he replies simply. "I just couldn't comprehend. And I wasn't an athlete, either. There was nothing I was good at." But he continues, "When I got to the plant, starting in the maintenance department, I discovered I could do things. They promoted me from there. When I retired I was an instrumentation foreman overseeing a lot of operators, and had a salary of $180,000." Phillips 66 had done for Hardey what college or the army did for others: helped him discover his native intelligence, feel honored, provide handsomely for his family without leaving his ancestral home—achieve the American Dream.
Why couldn't blacks and legal immigrants do the same? he thought. As a young man in the 1970s, seeking work in the plants, Hardey had been told, "We had to fill our quotas for blacks." Was this truly the case, I wondered, or was this what company recruiters told white job seekers they turned down? He was not a racist, Hardey told me, but he favored no special breaks for blacks or foreigners. In a racially separated world, it's possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them. Maybe, Hardey thought. But that seemed a problem you could fix without the federal government horning in. Hardey had worked his own way up despite federal intervention, as he saw it.
Others I talked to felt the same, only more strongly. Government-sponsored "redistribution"? No! Hardey's family members had all prospered. But in other families, some struck it rich, others got drunk and divorced and ended up poor. The family was a chancy redistribution system all its own, it seemed. After the 2008 crash, too, some got rich, others got poor. And you didn't want the government playing favorites on top of that.
It felt better to stick to the free market, to industry, to a company like Phillips 66 or Sasol.
And Governor Jindal's $1.6 billion incentive to lure industry to the state? "Good idea," Hardey says. Sure, these were the richest companies in the world, and Louisiana was a poor state. "But you needed to sweeten the deal to get companies to come to Louisiana instead of Texas," he explains. "Now my grandson will have a good job here!" Maybe from a national point of view, it didn't matter if Sasol located in Houston or Lake Charles, but for Bob Hardey and his son and his grandson, it mattered greatly.
As for pollution, the mayor thought it was a problem from the past. "We used to vent bad stuff," he says, "but the EPA restricts flares now." As for cancer, he thinks it is mainly genetic. "My dad's worked in and lived near the plants all his life, and I have too, and so have my brothers and son, and none of us have had cancer. But the best man at my wedding worked in and lived around the plants just like we did. And he got cancer. His brother died of it. His cousin got it. It's genes." But he adds, "I'll tell you where they do have a problem, that's east of here, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. There, it's the chemicals."
Do We Need Good Schools and Nice Parks?
How could Westlake or Lake Charles prepare to attract new workers to the area? A 347-page Regional Impact Study, largely funded by Sasol, asked this question. "Family recruitment may present a challenge," it noted neutrally, "due to the general perception of South Louisiana as portrayed in the media." The town needed to "improve the quality of life" in order to recruit professional chemists, engineers, and physicists from elsewhere.
To do this, they had to become highly desirable places to live, with state-of-the-art public schools, innovative art and music programs, magnificent parks, freshly paved sidewalks, clean lakes to swim in, and exciting museums open regular hours. Lake Charles had a beautiful historic district, but city officials had recently approved a large cell tower in the midst of it. As for public water, a 2014 early summer "swim at your own risk" advisory issued by the Louisiana Office of Public Health warned residents of such things as sewage overflow and polluted storm water runoff in local rivers, lakes, and marshes, and advised them not to put their hands in local water if they had open wounds.
The governor, as mentioned, had cut money for schools, parks, and pollution control. By 2015, under Governor Jindal, funds for the state's twenty-eight public colleges and universities had been drastically cut. Louisiana has long stood 46th out of 50 states in per-student spending on public education. According to the Louisiana Commission on Higher Education, since 2008 the governor has eliminated $800 million from the higher education budget, leading to cuts of academic programs and the loss of 854 faculty and 4,734 other employees. Students were thrown into turmoil. Many faculty were looking to relocate. The possibility of recruiting the best minds in the nation ground to a quick halt. Only after public outcry did the governor restore some funds to public education—and cut public health and environmental protection instead.
As for poor public schools, the study suggested "re-drawing attendance zones to accommodate growth in enrollment," and added, matter-of-factly, that the state should "explore options and ramifications of ending the Desegregation Order." Now a privately funded report was telling the town Sasol was moving into that its public sector was down on its heels. Your first-rate integrated schools? Where are your un-cracked sidewalks? Your clean lakes? To attract outside talent for the private sector, it turned out, you needed a thriving public sector, for which the two-term, Tea Party—supported governor had drastically cut funds.
Mayor Hardey was trying hard to get money from Sasol so he could welcome the newcomers to a more beautiful and upgraded Westlake. But Sasol turned out to be a tough bargainer. Sasol needed water for industrial purposes and wanted Westlake to dig a new well. But it would only pay 25 percent of the cost with the state of Louisiana paying the other 75 percent. For the repaving of heavy-haul roadways—on which Sasol was virtually the only heavy hauler—the state, parish, and town (with a grant) paid 90 percent, Sasol, 10 percent. While the Regional Impact Study called for a state-of-the-art public sector in Westlake and Lake Charles, Governor Jindal had cut state funds to the bone. Mayor Hardey had to struggle with the unwelcome thought that Westlake was a "poor me."
Strange Events
Meanwhile, missing from the speeches at the groundbreaking ceremony and from the memories of nearly everyone I spoke to was an event that took place near these very grounds: the largest chemical leak in American history. The leak was discovered in 1994 in a forty-year-old, mile-long underground pipeline connecting Condea Vista to the Conoco docks, which were a few miles from the Arenos' home on Bayou d'Inde. The pipe carried ethylene dichlo
ride (EDC) and was used to store it as well. EDC is known for its capacity to penetrate dense clay and much else. A slow leak had gone undetected for decades. By the time it was discovered, eighteen to forty-six million pounds of EDC had sunk through the southern Louisiana blackjack clay, and scientists feared it was heading for the Chicot Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for the 700,000 people of southwest Louisiana.
In 1994, Condea Vista hired cleanup workers to remove as much EDC as they could, some 1.6 million pounds of it. But the cleanup crews were given inadequate protective gear. "The guys were out there in their galoshes and blue jeans digging with shovels, and putting in sump pumps," one man told me, "no respirators." No one warned them about the effect of EDC on breathing, on cardiac arrhythmia, or on fertility. Many cleanup workers fell ill. "The men had a hard time breathing," an involved lawyer recounted. "But Condea Vista management told them their illnesses derived from other causes."
Finally five hundred cleanup workers sued Condea Vista. Attending public hearings on this was a tiny group of environmental activists, among whom was the ever ebullient Lee Sherman—Lee's wife, Miss Bobby, was the group's secretary treasurer—as well as Mike Tritico and Harold and Annette Areno.
Strange things began to happen. Files went missing from the lawyer's office. A new man joined the group, became its leader, and then started disrupting meetings with accusations of wrongdoing until, confused and discouraged, the tiny group disbanded, never to meet again. It wasn't until 2008 that people learned the cause of these strange events. And even after it became known, the tarnished memory of Condea Vista had faded. The new owner of the plant—one having nothing to do with the scandal—was Sasol.
As Mayor Hardey drives us back to Town Hall, I am beginning to understand more about the context of the right. As the Cerrell report had suggested, companies may try to avoid challenge by moving to communities that tend to be conservative, Republican, Catholic, high school educated, and not activist. In the case of Westlake, one of those very people had become a public-spirited mayor. The plants had allowed Bob Hardey to discover his high intelligence and capacity for leadership, his dignity, in ways his schools had failed to do. The plants allowed him to gather his entire family around him and, on a generous supervisor's salary, keep them in high comfort. Wherever the top brass of Sasol and other incoming plants lived, Bob Hardey's large, loving family, his church, his neighbors were all right there in Westlake.
Hardey didn't see how the federal government had helped him; if anything its affirmative action policies had almost gotten in his way. But industry had been hard on Hardey too. "Four generations of Hardeys have lived in Westlake. And now with Sasol expanding," he tells me, "a lot of my family is forced to move. My brother has already moved. My son and his wife were finished building their dream house, and now they're moving out."
His voice softens. "We have a family cemetery in the middle of the Sasol expansion. It's shaped like a triangle, and the land all around it is zoned 'heavy industrial' now. So our family cemetery will be surrounded by Sasol on all sides. But the company has promised to give us access. My grandmother is buried there, eighty-six when she died. And a nine-month-old baby girl we lost is there too. I want to be buried in that cemetery."
7
The State: Governing the
Market 4,000 Feet Below
The community of some 350 residents had long gloried in what they called a "piece of heaven." The neat, modest homes faced Crawfish Stew Street on one side and a canal on the other, leading to the bayou and extraordinary vistas of wide-winged water birds swooping gracefully from water to tupelo and cypress. Nearly everyone had a boat, knew the good fishing spots, got on with their neighbors, and enjoyed a good crawfish boil. Mike Schaff had said of his Bayou Corne neighbors, we're nearly all "Cajun, Catholic, and conservative, predisposed to the Tea Party." But among them, Mike Schaff was the most ardent—he had joined the Tea Party, gone to meetings, spoken out. Raised in a shotgun house in the sugarcane field we had driven through together, and a lifelong employee in oil, Mike wished to feel himself in a nearly wholly private world, one as far as he could get from government taxes and regulation. But what would happen, I wondered, if a community of people such as Mike suffered a sudden catastrophe that, beyond any doubt, could have been prevented by respect for government regulation? What was his understanding about the state? Could I see why he felt as he did? These questions had led me to Mike Schaff and the Bayou Corne Sinkhole.
Because just that catastrophe occurred in August of 2012. First, neighbors noticed tiny clusters of bubbles on the surface of the water. Had a gas pipe traversing the bottom of the bayou sprung a leak? A man from the local gas company checked and declared the pipes fine. At the same time, Mike recalls, "We smelled oil, strong." Then he and his neighbors were startled by the shaking and rumbling of an earthquake. Since earthquakes had never before occurred in this part of Louisiana, one woman imagined a "garbage truck had dropped a dumpster." A single mother of two living in a mobile home a mile from Bayou Corne thought her washing machine was on, then remembered it had been broken for months. A man was eating dinner from his TV dinner tray when it began to shake. As Mike recalls, "I was walking in the house when I felt like I was either having a stroke or drunk, ten seconds; my balance went all to hell." A while later, he noticed a jagged crack zigzag across the concrete underneath his living room carpet. Lawns began to sag and tilt in strange directions.
Not far from Mike's home, the earth under the bayou was beginning to tear open. As if a plug was pulled in a bathtub, a hollow "mouth" of a crack in the bottom of the bayou began sucking down brush and pine from the surface of the earth. Majestic, century-old cypress trees crashed down in slow motion and were dragged sideways into the bubbling water, drawn down into the gaping mouth of a sinkhole. Down went bush, grassland, and even a boat. An oily sheen had appeared on the surface of the water, and to prevent its spread, two cleanup workers were called in to cast booms around the oil not far from the sinkhole. To do this, the two men tied their boat to a tree, standing in it to do their work. But the tree began to tilt and drift. The workers were rescued in time but their boat disappeared into the sinkhole.
In the following days and weeks, polluted mud was thrown back up onto the surface of the water in a weird and terrible exchange of pristine swamp forest for oily sludge. Oil oozed to the surface of the water, and natural gas emanated here and there from land and water. "During a rain, the puddles would shine and bubble, like you'd dropped Alka Seltzer tablets in them, Mike says. The sinkhole grew. First it took the area of a house lot, then a football field. By 2015, the sinkhole stretched over thirty-seven acres. Then the gassy sludge had also infiltrated the aquifer, threatening the drinking water.
Residents noticed that the main road into the community began to sink and feared it would cave in. Levees along the bayou, originally built to contain rising waters in times of flood, had also begun to sink, threatening to extend the sludge beyond their boundaries.
The Cause and the Blame
The culprit in this strange accident was a Houston-based drilling company, Texas Brine. As its name suggests, Texas Brine drilled for intensely concentrated salt, which it sold to manufacturers of chlorine, and which is also useful in fracking. It drilled down 5,600 feet beneath the bayou into an enormous underground geological formation called a salt dome—unseen and fairly common in the Gulf. In a highly risky maneuver—disregarding the advice of their own consulting engineer, and with the okay of a government official also aware of the danger—Texas Brine drilled underneath Bayou Corne. On the books were regulations that were disregarded by both company and state.
The drill accidentally pierced a side wall of a teardrop-shaped cavern inside the Napoleonville Dome. (The Napoleonville Dome is an underground block of salt, three miles wide and a mile deep, sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas. It is well known to people in the area, but not much outside it, and private companies drill deep inside the salt to hollow out pocke
ts, large and small, some shaped like straight posts, others like mushrooms or cones. Inside them, companies store chemicals.)
When the drill pierced the side of one cavern inside the dome, a catastrophe slowly unfolded. Weakened, one wall of the cavern crumpled under the pressure of the surrounding shale. Water was sucked down, drawing trees and brush with it. Oil from around the dome oozed up. The earth shook. In places its surface tilted and sank.
The disaster drew public attention to a vast underground world— previously unknown to me—and raised important questions about how a free-market economy in a highly regulation-averse culture was handling toxic chemicals in some 126 salt domes in Louisiana—plus more offshore— stored from 3,000 to 18,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth.
In the Napoleonville salt dome, a lively commerce was going on. Petrochemical companies own fifty-three caverns and some seven more companies rent space in them. These are valuable, large storage depots for the many chemicals used in oil drilling, fracking, and plastic manufacturing. Texas Brine rents six caverns. Dow and Union Carbide owns others into which they have pumped fifty million gallons of ethylene dichloride (EDC). While it surprised me to learn how far down into the earth free enterprise went, such underground storage systems have long been accepted practice in the Gulf region; the National Petroleum Reserves have themselves long been stored in a similar way.
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 11