Previously on drilled.
My only regret is that I did not try hard enough to keep them out, and they need to try everything to keep them up. They do not want Formosa in there.
That was Diane Wilson in Texas talking about her thirty year battle with Taiwanese petrochemical company for Mosa. In Diane's defense, she didn't know Formosa was coming to her town. She didn't know about them at all until they'd been there a while and started planning a massive expansion in Louisiana, where the company is hoping to build a nine billion dollar complex with fourteen different plants. It's a different story.
Residents and activists knew about the project almost immediately because they were already fighting the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries all over the region.
So I worked with the Bucky Brigade, and we were working in Saint James Parish in regard to the Value Bridge pipeline.
So when Formosa came to Saint James Parish, Louisiana, the community was ready for them.
There is a drive to build and expand more petrochemical plants all over the country, and certainly Louisiana is ground zero for that, and within that, Saint James is in the bullseye, and so they built the southern leg of the Dakota Access pipeline in Saint James Parish. I was already working on that, and then in the midst of that, this is this, you know, horrible idea of formost and last coup job.
That's our story today. I I mean Western Love. This is drilled season six, the bridge to nowhere. Today the continuation of one plastic.
Pipelines, and we gotta fight for most of them. We will not allow them to pick our ancestors out of his ground and put them somewhere else. We're gonna stand up for Saint James Pear. This is our home. We're not going anywhere for Massa have a have a fight on their hands.
The Triumphant music you hear is the soundtrack to a twenty three minute promotional video for Most of Plastics posted to YouTube in January twenty twenty one. Here's how they describe this project in Saint che Parish.
FPG will continue to build downstream petrochemical plants and also plans to invest nine point four billion US dollars to build a large petrochemical complex in Louisiana. FPG will also evaluate the feasibility of expanding its investments in the future.
So, like we talked about last episode, Formosa's taking advantage of cheap shale gas in the US to fuel its buildout of petrochemical plants. Shale gas is another term for natural gas, or fract gas or fossil gas. It's the stuff a lot of US companies have been drilling out of rocks over the past decade. Part of the reason for MOSA is expanding so much in the US is not just because of all the cheap gas. It's also because the government in its home country, Taiwan, refuge to
give the company permits. It's violated so many environmental regulations over the years that it's considered a bad actor. So Formosa looked around the world for a place to expand, maybe somewhere with weaker environmental regulations, and they found it in the American South. But while state officials welcomed them with open arms, they may have underestimated local residents.
And this isn't just any plans, but it's being called the largest facility in the States producing products like plastic bottles and grocery bags. So what's at stake for people like Sharon, who have called Saint James home all our life and who really benefits from the petrochemical industry.
Almost immediately, the community in Saint James Parish started asking questions about how exactly this new plant for Moosa was planning was going to benefit them. Sharon Levine saw nothing good about the plan right from the jump.
When I heard that for most was coming into Saint Jane. The governor announced it in the spring of twenty eighteen, That's when I first heard about it. And then in the fall of twenty eighteen, that's when I started righting the James. I started in my house. It was about almost ten of us in here, and we were all roused up because we wanted to do something about it.
Sharon was born and raised in Saint James. She spent most of her life as a school teacher, but today she's the leader of the community's opposition to Formosa. I reached her by phone on a hot day in Louisiana, and she told me it was her daughter who first told her about the Formosa project. They call it the Sunshine Project, and then Sharon saw it on the news that night. It was presented like a done deal. The parish council, the governor, everyone had signed off on it.
But within weeks, Sharon had invited her neighbors over to her house to talk about what they were going to do. That day, she started a faith based activist group to fight the project, Riise Saint James, and she's devoted every minute of her life to the effort ever since. Rise joined up with other groups in the area and they started marching, protesting, and looking for legal help. Within a few months, Formosa was back on the local news, but this time the story was Sharon and her opposition to
the project. Here she is on WWLTV.
When they say it for Mosa was coming in looked like something inside of me. Just click because it's coming right next to me. It's almost two miles from where they want to build.
Sharon lives in Saint James Parish, right in that bullseye and Rolfuss was talking about. It's smack in the middle of what's called Cancer Alley on the Gulf Coast, a stretch of the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans that's currently home to more than two hundred oil refineries, petrochemical plants and manufacturing sites, and no surprise, some of the highest cancer and asthma rates in the country. Sharon's a retired school teacher, and she remembers what life was
like before her home earned the nickname Cancer Ali. It wasn't even that long ago.
When I was a little girl. We had beautiful trees for corn, trees, fruit trees. My daddy raised our foods and we lift off the land. Everything was full, vibrant and so pretty, the green grass and everything. Then back in the sixties, that's when the first industry came down in Saint James.
The bulk of that industry is concentrated in the black neighborhoods of Saint James Parish. If you look at the demographics of the parish, it seems very mixed, almost exactly fifty percent black fifty percent white.
But those chemical facilities are also concentrated in the districts of Saint James Parish that are predominantly black.
This is Jane Patten. She was born and raised in Louisiana and now works as both a campaigner for the Center for International Environmental Law and as the director of no EAIST Louisiana.
So the parts of Saint James Parish that are predominantly white have significantly fewer and in at least the case in the case of at least one district, there are no chemical plants in that majority white district. And yet the two majority black districts in Saint James have almost all of the petrochemical footprint, plastics production capacity, an aluminum plant, there are several oil refineries, so this is a very significant industrial footprint and it's very visible when you're driving
around the parish. So as the local community in Saint James likes to say, Saint James's full.
Over the past few years, local resistance has been mounting and the region has attracted national attention from environmental law groups too. Here's Julie Teal Simmons with the Center for Biological Diversity.
You were at a meeting in Texas about the oil and gas industry and the petrochemical build out, and I met with Anne Rolfuss of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and was just astounded to hear about this new plastics plant proposed for Saint James Parish, Louisiana.
Anne Rolfus is the founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice nonprofit in Louisiana. She's the woman we heard from at the top of the episode talking about the fight against Bayou Bridge, that southern leg of the Dakota Access pipeline that was built through Saint James. So Anne and Julie were talking and it didn't take long for all of them and Julie, Sharon and Jane to
start working together. At the time, in twenty eighteen, several nonprofit organizations and community groups had started fighting new permits for facilities in Cancer Alley and tax breaks that the oil industry was looking for in the area too. More on that. After the break.
In twenty sixteen, the governor, in response to a lot of organizing and advocacy, the Louisiana Governor John Bell Edwards issued an executive order changing the way that the exemptions for local property taxes were granted. So instead of having a state board do it and they always got a rubber stamp, they then had to get approval from each local permitting authority, and the industry didn't like that so much.
This is Jane Patten again.
And so since that executive order has been put in place. They've been trying to push legislation through the state legislature to centralize the decision making, to try to actually put the original terms of the taxi emption program back in place. There was a whole constitutional amendment that was voted on last year that tried to put the actually a more generous version of the pre existing taxes emption program in place, and they lost, and that again was due to really
significant local organizing. It was actually really tied in by that time with the campaign against Formosa because the Formosa plant is within its first ten years of existence supposed to get approximately a billion dollars in local tax breaks.
A petrochemical plant that the community doesn't want that will be a significant source of income for the company and of pollution for the region is getting a one billion dollar tax break over its first decade of operating. That's after tightening the laws around tax breaks to industry.
And they're going to be building in a parish that is really strapped for cash, a parish that is having to fire thirty of its public school teaching staff this school year because they don't have enough funds to pay them. And Formosa is actively trying to not have to pay their local property taxes, and of course they're not more guilty of that than any other industry actor. They all don't want to pay their property taxes, but that doesn't help a local community.
Julie Teel Simmons organization had been working on various issues in the Gulf Coast ever since the deep water oil spilled back in twenty ten, but it hadn't gotten involved in any of the Cancer Alley fights until the FOREMOSTA proposal came along.
This foremost a plastics plant proposed for Saint James Parish, is on a twenty four hundred acre site and the build out of the facilities it will have fourteen different plants. It literally is bigger than some many Louisiana towns and it really is an industrial city that we're.
Talking about over in Texas. Diane Wilson heard about it too, and she was worried.
Those people in Louisiana, in Saint James Parish, in that little that's what they got to look for.
They got no idea.
It will destroy everything.
They got everything. Sharon Levigne has already seen her community emptied out as industry has come in and with Formosa, enough was enough. Sharon's deeply religious, and she says God told her to fight this one. I feel like you guys have been a lot more successful than many other communities fighting these things. Why do you think that is?
I think because he's God's combined.
It's a little hard to hear Sharon in this recording, but she says Rise has been successful because they've been clued to God and what they're doing. Early on, the community groups opposing FORMOSA linked up with environmental law groups like Julie Peel Simmons group, the Center for Biological Diversity.
We started looking into it, and we've worked with golf groups a lot, for example on the BP oil spill. And this facility, though, just presented such an intersection of all the issues that we care about. So this facility would not only be built on top of wetlands and adjacent to the Mississippi River and adjacent to really important national estuary, but it also would create a massive amount
of air pollution. It's going to be it's the single largest proposed source that we've been tracking of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. It's going to be permitted to it has been permitted to emit thirteen point six million metric tons of CO two every year. It's the equivalent of three and a half coal fired power plants. Just to give you some context.
Today, there are several different lawyers fighting FORMOSA on multiple fronts. Simmons' group is focused on a federal complaint against the Army Corps of Engineers, which was in charge of issuing Formosa permits to build on wetlands in Saint James.
Obviously, this project sits right on the Mississippi River, right next to the levee, and there are wetlands on site and adjacent to the property that connect to this national estuary, and fishing grounds and recreational grounds that folks like to use, and obviously will also impact the Mississippi River, and they want to build a dock and do a lot of work that will impact waters and wetlands. So the Army Corps still has jurisdiction over that that is not delegated
to the States. So we commented on the proposed permit, obviously opposing it for a whole host of reasons.
Then there were the local permits that Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality had to issue for the project.
So we were approached by a local resident who has lived in Saint James all her life and was concerned about particularly the environmental justice aspect of Formosa's proposed plan because her community, which is predominantly African American, has been overburdened with industrial pollution.
This is Kimberly Terrell with the Tulane University Law Clinic. The woman she's talking about there isn't Sharon Levin, but she is a member of Sharon's group Rise Saint James. The first chance the public got to formally voice their opposition to the project came when Formosa applied for its air permit.
So the first thing we did was the attorneys at the clinic submitted comments on Beverly's behalf regarding environmental justice concerns for Formosa's air permit. You know, that was important to raise those issues before DEQ made its decision in order to be able to challenge that decision.
One of the things that Terrell and her colleagues argued was that Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality ld EQ had looked at outdated information to determine the environmental justice impact of the Formosa plant. Here'sterrell's colleague Devin Lowell.
This petition just challenges deq's environmental justice analysis that they did and put in analysis there in air quotes. DQ in this decision used outdated cancer risk information to the claim that there was no evidence that the nearby community already faced a disproportionate burden from air pollution, but that
information was outdated when they made the decision. There was updated information that showed that in fact, the community of Welcome, which is closest to the proposed facility, actually faces cancer risk in the eighty six percentile from air toxics, which is much higher than the state average.
And Rolfus is involved in that suit too, as is Simmons, who's working on both the state and federal fights. Despite a lot of opposition, the Army Corps approved Formosa's permit to build on those wetlands in September twenty nineteen.
This decision was one of the worst I've seen. They issued a very very short decision document that just had so many holes in it. And so in January of
twenty twenty, we went to federal court. We actually filed in the District of d C where the headquarters for the Army Corps is, and we filed a lawsuit challenging the Army corps issuance of this permit on many many grounds, and there are violations of law under the Clean Water Act, but also the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.
Both the federal and state cases are ongoing, but Formosa's opponents have stacked up some wins. A judge just ruled in the state case that Luisiana de Eq has to go back and look at current information to make a decision on the environmental justice impact of the plant, and the Army Corps has put a halt to building on those wetlands because the facility wasn't just planned for wetlands, it was planned for old plantation sites.
There was a discovery that there are at least two cemeteries of former slaves unmarked burial sites on that site, and there are several other anomalies on the property, which is the word archaeologists used to define areas that can't be ruled out as significant historic properties. So we also had a claim in our lawsuit stating that the Army Corps violated the National Preservation Act by failing to adequately assess and protect those sites.
That made this a constitutional case too, and the Center for Constitutional Rights came on board to help.
And so we've been assisting Rise Saint James in other ways or helping them unnurse the information about the burial site on the property make sure that they can have access to those sites.
This is Pam Speace, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. She filed a public records request to see if she could figure out if Formosa knew about the graveyard before it submitted its plan.
What we know from the public records request is that the company was actually wanting to remove cemetery if they found it on the Acadia plantation, because where that site was located is where they wanted to place a utility plant that would power the because this complex is so massive, right, it's going to need its own utility plant, and that's exactly where it was going to be located.
So if they found.
Graves on that site, they were in the position of having to either reconfigure all of the site plans or seek permission to remove those remains, which would have been a really big deal. So I would imagine it's because either they just didn't think about it and didn't think it's worth reporting out and nobody would care, or they realized that people would care a whole lot and didn't want to call too much attention to it.
Whatever happened, it was good enough to pause the project at least a bit that the Army Corps permitted until next year. But it was more than just a delay. This news also brought a lot of negative attention and national press to the project. When Sharon Levine wanted to have a Juneteenth celebration at the site of the graveyard, her petition was initially denied, but she fought that decision and she won. She and her group had that celebration first in twenty twenty and again this June.
Oh, we're saying we had a whole agenda insane and opening prayer and like to turn.
This into sacred ground by a blessing with holy water.
The minister's just the grave site. Some people give some accountability of what they experience in Saint Change, and some are little history of different things in Saint James.
For Spees, it's sent a powerful message.
Well, I think the graves have done something very profound. They have really erased what was an imaginary line between the past and present.
M I.
You know, I think it made it. It's all, it's
all very present right now. That's the you know. And I certainly think for folks and Rhymes and in the community, the rediscovered connection to these graves is so profound and it it gives them more strength and courage and commitments to the struggle, and they certainly I don't think there's any way you can divorce what's happening now in terms of the sighting of these facilities and who's burying the biggest burdens from the history of slavery in that area.
It's all.
There's a straight line connecting at all.
Next time on drilled what happened when the pandemic made plastic a little more appealing.
There's a remarkable instance of this where you have an industry representative actually fantasizing, and I'm using this word very advisedly, fantasizing that they'll be able to get the public to rep bananas and apples in plastic packaging in the name of hygiene and finding the COVID canda and if there's any And I think that that is a testament to how oh, really optimistic the industry is about how it's going to be able to exploit COVID nineteen to fill that gap in plastic demand.
Drilled as an original production of the Critical Frequency Podcast Network. The show is reported, written, and hosted by me Amy Westerveldt. Additional reporting this episode from Sarah Dern in Louisiana. Our producer this season is Juliana Bradley. Our editor is Julia Ritchie. Our theme song this season is Death Song by b Beamon. Additional music for the season composed by Elliott Peltzman. Our
artwork for the season is done by Matthew Fleming. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton at the First Amendment Project. You can find additional reporting and photos for this season on our Twitter feed at we Are Drilled or online at drillednews dot com. If you're a fan of the show, please consider supporting us in two ways. One, if you want to spend some money and get some extra bonus content at early episodes, check out our Patreon at patreon
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