In the wake of the recent explosion in Roseland, a flow of unidentified contaminants –– black, oily, and smelling like asphalt –– has made its way down the Tangipahoa River and is visible at least as far downriver as Ponchatoula.
Observers worry about the effects on the river, and possibly Lake Pontchartrain.
Toxic runoff hit the Tangipahoa more than a week ago after an Aug. 22 explosion sparked a fire that raged for days at Smitty’s Supply, an oil and chemicals producer in Roseland more than 40 miles upriver from the lake. The fire’s billowing smoke left soot and residue on cars and roofs, while runoff ––containing still-unknown chemicals from the plant, along with firefighting foam used to extinguish the blaze –– flowed directly into the Tangipahoa.
While neighbors and former employees shared complaints about Smitty’s that date back at least a decade, environmentalists told The Lens that current spill-cleanup barriers will not keep chemicals from traveling to the lake. Experts familiar with the chemicals that Smitty’s kept on site voiced concern about their toxicity and whether agencies are effectively stopping their spread.
Soon after the explosion, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepped in to take command of the cleanup and investigation. To prevent the oil slick’s spread, EPA officials instructed contractors to place floating oil-spill containment booms in the Tangipahoa and local ditches and drains.
But the booms are designed only for oil, said Scott Poston, the owner of Hidden Oaks Campground, which sits on the river 13 miles before it enters Lake Pontchartrain. “This is not a normal oil. This is chemicals,” he said. “The chemical is just going underneath the booms.” He walked to the edge of the river, where the oily substance was visibly escaping the containment boom. On the other side of the river, the black tarry substance was washing onto the shore, darkening logs and brush.
To place the absorbent boom into the river, cleanup crews accessed the river through Hidden Oaks, said Poston, who gave permission to state and EPA officials, with hopes of keeping the mess from spreading further.
Poston estimates that it takes about 30 hours for water to travel the 25 river miles from Roseland to his campground. He saw signs of contamination on Sunday, two days after the fire.
First, a sheen crawled downriver, he said. Then the black, oily substance arrived. The “strong petroleum smell” grew strongest by Monday at the campground’s small beach, where people usually go swimming. By Wednesday, the black gunk was readily visible at Lee’s Landing, less than 10 miles from Lake Pontchartrain.
“I’m sure some of this will get all the way to the lake,” Poston said.
According to a map released by the EPA, the river was impacted as far as 47 miles downstream, but the contamination was halted at Lee’s Landing Marina, just before Joyce Wildlife Management Area. Residents, however, shared photos on social media that appeared to show sheen beyond that limit, at the mouth of the Tangipahoa where it empties into the lake.
Cleanup crews face challenges in this terrain, said Matthew Allen of Northshore Riverwatch, because the Tangipahoa is “a wild river” –– there are few places to access the river to deploy booms and try to stop the contamination’s spread.
Development along the river is limited, because it’s a designated scenic river, known for its canoeing, swimming, and fishing. Those uses also amplify the possible harms of a toxic spill in this area, said Allen, noting that recent heavy rainfalls would also wash toxic soot into the river. It will take months for all of the soot from the fire zone to be gone, he said.
The integrity of the Tangipahoa is vital to its wildlife, those who swim and canoe in it, and those who fish professionally in its lower stretches, Allen said.
But this level of spilled oil and chemicals can also kill off crucial vegetation underwater and at the river’s edge that currently mitigates flooding in the area by slowing down the flow of the water, he said. “If all the trees and underbrush die off from this, floodwaters can move faster and make things worse.”
‘There’s some stuff in the river’
Last week, local officials had no specific details about what was in the parish’s air and water. On Thursday, Tangipahoa Parish President Robby Miller praised Smitty’s response to the incident and noted that some samples had to go through a testing process longer than the six days that had elapsed. He didn’t yet have additional information, he told residents.
“There’s some stuff in the river,” Miller said. “We don’t know what it is.”
So far, neither Smitty’s nor government officials have provided information about what exactly burned and spilled. The EPA doesn’t yet know the amount and types of contaminants, but the agency completed water sampling on Friday, Aug. 29th, a spokesman said.
Still, past documents filed with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) can shed light on what the pollutants may be.
Smitty’s is a “petroleum lubricating oil and grease manufacturing” industry site that generates hazardous waste, the documents show. Each month, Smitty’s generates more than 220 pounds of “non-acute hazardous waste,” according to documents filed in February that cover the 2024 calendar year.
Earlier this year, Smitty’s reported to the state that its Roseland site generates a monthly total of hundreds of pounds of hazardous waste –– some of which become more dangerous to human health after ignition, experts say.
The hazardous waste created by Smitty’s falls into four categories: ignitable hazardous waste (like kerosene), benzene, tetrachloroethylene (used as a metal degreasing), and spent nonhalogenated solvents (acetone, for example), according to the LDEQ documents.
Manufacturing plants are often located near rivers because they need to pump in water to cool their equipment or for other processes. Typically, the facilities put the water through a treatment process and discharge it back into the river through outfall canals and piping. Smitty’s had previously, in multiple months, reported non-compliance for discharging excess pollutants like oil and gas into its outfall canals.
But on the day of the incident, an unknown amount of untreated substances flowed through Smitty’s outfall system.
The LDEQ inspector who responded to the explosion described “fire water/oil/chemicals observed escaping outfalls from facility…material observed in Tangipahoa River,” according to the incident report filed that day.
Firefighting foam, hazardous waste feared within the Smitty’s explosion runoff
To experts consulted by The Lens, the most worrisome hazardous waste that Smitty’s generated is a colorless liquid known as tetrachloroethylene (PCE), a likely carcinogen that gets more dangerous when it’s burned.
“Within a fire, it could transform into other toxic substances,” said Carla Ng, an associate professor of environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She explained that when PCE is ignited, other chemicals form, including chlorinated dioxins, which are carcinogenic and highly toxic.
Those are the same kind of toxins that caused alarm after the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Ng said. If the hazardous wastes escaped containment, or even if they burned and became soot, they could be carried into waterways.
Drone footage reveals, and the Amite Fire Department confirmed, that the majority of structures at Smitty’s have been incinerated. That raises the likelihood that some of the more hazardous wastes were caught in the blaze. On Monday, as cleanup began, another tank at Smitty’s experienced a blowout.
Ng also noted that firefighters extinguishing a chemical fire typically use chemical foam that is also hazardous. That makes it even more important to track runoff from fires, she said.
Firefighting foams typically contain PFAS, a “forever chemical” that’s come under scrutiny for the risks it poses to human health. Linked with increased incidents of over a dozen cancers in firefighters, foam with PFAS was banned from use in Louisiana for training exercises starting in 2022, but the foam can still be used to fight fires and other emergencies. The first, bellwether personal injury suit is scheduled to begin next month, focusing on the foam’s links to kidney cancer in Pennsylvania towns where it got into the drinking water.
The Amite Fire Department confirmed they used AFFF, a type of foam containing PFAS, when they responded to the fire. Response was later taken over by a private firefighting company, US Fire Apparatus, who declined to share information with The Lens about the type of foam they used. Though newer types of firefighting foam use less toxic types of PFAS, they are also more water-soluble and therefore harder to contain with booms if they enter waterways.
Retrieving oily ‘product’ from the river
It remains to be seen how much of these chemicals burned and spilled due to the fire at Smitty’s.
On Thursday, 820,000 gallons of “product” had been retrieved, including 213 “barrels from the water,” said Miller, the Tangipahoa Parish president, who said responders had deployed hundreds of absorbent booms and pads and five sets of motor-driven drum roller skimmers, moving circular drums that roll at the surface of the water, attracting oil, which is scraped off by a wiper and sent to storage. .
For its part, the EPA declared it had found nothing harmful in the air, and in a statement said it had deployed 14,200 feet of boom along 45 river miles. The “EPA is containing any remaining onsite hazardous materials and recovering unburned material from the facility in ditches, ponds and the Tangipahoa River,” Ed Mekeel, public affairs specialist with the EPA, told The Lens.
But the drums and booms only capture contaminants that float on the surface – and even then they’re imperfect, said Ng. “Booms work well for oil,” she said. But a mixture of chemicals carried along with the oil may sink to the bottom or move within a different part of river water, she said.
Some experts say that if environmental agencies are testing only for certain chemicals, they will miss the most harmful discharges caused by the explosion.
Water samples collected by the EPA the day after the explosion showed concerning levels of toxins, including arsenic, chromium, and lead. LDEQ’s air samples so far only measured the total amount of volatile organic compounds in the air, rather than specific ones like the dioxins that Ng is concerned about.
The agencies may not be testing for the right contaminants, said Mike Tritico, a long-time Louisiana activist with a background in biology.
Like Ng, Tritico is very concerned that Smitty’s tetrachloroethylene may have burned.
When PCE ignites, it creates chlorinated dioxins that are fat-soluble, which means that they don’t dissolve in water but will accumulate in the fatty tissues of mammals.
Initially, dioxins would be found in the oily residue floating on the Tangipahoa’s surface. But when the pollutants separate, the dioxins would enter the water column. Once in brackish Lake Pontchartrain, they would sink to the bottom and mix with the sediment.
From there, dioxins would be slowly consumed, getting into crabs and shrimp and making their way up the food chain to larger fish and mammals like seabirds, dolphins, and humans. In some places with contaminated sediment, officials have issued consumption advisories for crab and shrimp, especially for pregnant women and children.
The toxin can persist in sea-floor sediment for a century, research shows. “It’s not biodegradable, and so it persists and becomes entrained into the food web,” Tritico said. “That will happen with the stuff that got into the Tangipahoa River.”
Smitty’s had a history of violations – now “we want transparency”
Even before the explosion, Smitty’s Supply Inc. had racked up a long list of violations and registered grievances from neighbors. A WBRZ investigation found 70 incident reports concerning Smitty’s had been filed with LDEQ since 2011, including one from a former employee who says the company deliberately mislabeled hazardous loads leaving the site by truck.
In June, Dannie Hemphill of Roseland, who lives less than a mile from Smitty’s, made a complaint with the LDEQ. He reported a powerful gas smell coming from Smitty’s around 3 a.m.: “It has been happening off and on but not this bad…come from the area Smitty’s at. I do not mean to complain but it’s bad in my house.”
The soot and material that fell from smoke clouds after the explosion was unusual, which concerns Hemphill. Some of what fell was hard, he said – like little pieces of metal that he then had to brush off his roof. “There was flakes of metal. They’re still magnetized,” he said. “I heard flakes hitting it [his roof] one night.”
Smitty’s is owned by Chad Tate of Roseland, per regulatory filings, and has been a registered business in Louisiana since 1984, according to secretary of state records. The company has laid off employees since the explosion, and is facing a class-action lawsuit.
For Matthew Allen, of Northshore Riverwatch, it seems clear that much of what happened at Smitty’s could have been predicted – and could have been prevented.
As soon as Allen saw the explosion and the large fire, he knew it would lead to contamination in waterways, he said. But watching the process, he has seen mitigation that didn’t kick in fast enough and a company that didn’t have a decent emergency plan.
Moving forward, he’d like to know exactly what LDEQ and the EPA are doing. “We want transparency from the government. What are y’all testing for? What are the numbers? What are you going to be able to do about it?”