What the Trucks Brought: Grand Bois, Part 1

From Inside the Rest of Louisiana

Grand Bois was too small to appear on most maps.

In the early 1990s, journalists and researchers who made the trip there described it like this: a stretch of aluminum-sided houses along State Route 24 in the black-marsh country of south Louisiana, about an hour and twenty minutes south of New Orleans. Live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Bayous thick with alligators, catfish, and crawfish. Inhabited by about 250 people, most of them of Native American and Cajun descent, Grand Bois straddles two parishes, Lafourche and Terrebonne, and thus belongs fully to neither. No post office, no grocery store, no school. What it had was a church, a bar, a welding shop, and a community so tight-knit that people left their car keys in the ignition and celebrated almost everything with a crawfish boil.

The Houma Indian people have lived in this region for generations. Clarice Friloux — who would become the most outspoken resident of Grand Bois during this crisis — traced her roots to a great-grandfather who raised cattle south of Grand Bois until the hurricane of 1915 destroyed everything and pushed the family north. Her roots were over a hundred years deep in that ground.

On a morning in March 1994, eight tractor-trailers rolled into Grand Bois.

They were headed for a treatment facility on land leased to the Campbell Wells Corporation, where 16 open pits were dug to process toxic sludge from oil fields. The trucks had come from an Exxon petroleum-treatment plant in south Alabama, loaded with waste laced with benzene, toluene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic. For ten days, 81 trucks in all made the trip. Contract employees in white protective suits stirred the sludge back and forth in the open pits with equipment that looked like gigantic eggbeaters, working it until it evaporated or leached into the ground. They called what they did to the waste "working it over."

The people of Grand Bois were not told what was coming. They were not asked whether they consented. They woke up one morning to find the trucks already there.

"When the trucks took the curve, the smell just took over the community," Clarice said. "The kids were getting off the school bus with their shirts over their faces. They stayed sick with diarrhea and dizziness for several days. Our noses were burning, sore throats. You'd wake up with swollen, puffy eyes."

Clarice's brother, R.J. Molinere, was driving his family to a boxing match in Larose one afternoon during the dumping. As they passed the facility, his children threatened to vomit. He pulled off the road. The vapors took their breath away, leaving their eyes swollen and teary. That night, he laid towels across the cracks of his house’s doors to keep the fumes out and made rounds in the dark, putting his ear to his children's mouths to make sure they were still breathing.

The facility also sat on the St. Louis Canal, a bayou dug decades earlier to haul cypress timber to the Intracoastal Waterway, which meant waste arrived by barge as well as truck. "They could come in the middle of the night and just poison us," Clarice said. There was nothing to stop them. Legally, there still wasn't.

Here is something that matters for understanding everything that follows.

In 1980, in the wake of the 1979 energy crisis, Congress granted petroleum exploration and production companies an exemption from hazardous-waste-disposal regulations that applied to virtually every other industry in the country. The exemption left the regulation of oil field waste disposal to individual states. In Louisiana, where the petroleum industry employed tens of thousands of people and where the political relationship between industry and government has never been a secret, oil field waste was defined as non-hazardous.

This is why the trucks could come. Not because someone failed to notice, not because the system broke down. Because the system was working exactly as it had been designed to work. The waste that arrived in Grand Bois in March 1994 was, by federal statute, not hazardous. The men in “moon suits” handling it did not have to tell the community it was coming. The company did not need to seek permission. The state did not need to object. All of it was legal, documented, and exempt.

What was not legal, the residents of Grand Bois would eventually argue in court, was the negligence. That Exxon and Campbell Wells knew what was in the waste, hydrogen sulfide and benzene, and sent it anyway, into an unventilated open-air pit 333 feet from the tin-roofed home of a family with children, because the law said they could.

After 1994, Clarice Friloux says, everybody in Grand Bois got sick.

Chronic headaches. Rashes. Diarrhea. Chest pains. Dizziness. One grandmother, Joyceline Dominique, filled five composition books with a chronicle of her family's ailments. "I've had my life," she said. "If I go, so be it. But with the children, these are the best years of their lives."

Clarice herself was 32 in 1994, a homemaker and mother of two, quiet by temperament. She had no reason to think of herself as an organizer. She had never attended a parish council meeting. She did not know who the parish president, the state senator, or the governor was. This is not unusual. Grand Bois is a Houma Indian community, and the Houma have not historically had much reason to trust that the government was paying attention to them.

But her community was sick, and the trucks were still coming, and so Clarice started a petition.

For 17 straight days, she and others stood by the highway with a hand-lettered placard, asking people passing on Route 24 to sign. They collected 5,000 signatures. Then Clarice took them to the parish council meeting in Lafourche, and then to the one in Terrebonne, the first time she had ever appeared before either body.

State Senator Mike Robichaux, a physician who represented the area and who would become one of Grand Bois's most visible advocates, later explained what he saw in Clarice: "The Houma is a matriarchal tribe. Clarice is a natural leader. It's part of her bloodline. Both instinctively and by consent, Clarice represents what's in the minds and lives of the people in her community. She's their mouthpiece."

Then he placed it in a longer frame: "In the plight of Native Americans — five hundred years of tears — this is not even a chapter. It's a couple of pages in the history of abuse."

By 1998, blood and urine tests conducted by Dr. Patricia Williams, director of the Occupational Toxicology Outreach Program at the LSU Medical Center in Shreveport, had found that 74 percent of the 99 women and children she tested had stippled red blood cells, a deformity typically associated with heavy-metal poisoning or chemical exposure. "Normally, you would find zero," Dr. Williams said. "So, when you see such a spectrum with all these different children from different households, you have to say there's an outside environmental reason."

The real estate market in Grand Bois had collapsed. Nobody would buy a house there, and no bank would lend money to anyone trying to. The residents who wanted to leave discovered they couldn't, not without walking away from whatever equity their homes had held. Residents lined Route 24 with homemade signs depicting the Grim Reaper, warning of toxic chemicals.

"With all our proof, we should have shut this place down five times," R.J. Molinere said.

And yet the facility was still operating.

Governor Mike Foster — a first-term Republican described by reporters of the era as "friendly to business," who had reported more than $200,000 in Exxon oil lease royalties on his state ethics forms the year before — said he remained unconvinced that the waste site was the source of the community's health problems. He said he was tired of it and wanted it resolved. "It is not good for the state of Louisiana to have these kind of allegations floating around out there."

Clarice Friloux and her neighbors were about to take him to court.

Part 2 — The Legacy — examines the lawsuit, the organizing, the partial regulatory wins that followed, and what the Four C's Governance Framework reveals about why the pits were never fully closed.

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If you want to see Grand Bois for yourself — the highway, the facility, the residents speaking in their own words — Louisiana Public Broadcasting documented this story as it was unfolding. Their short film is a good primer on the community and the conditions that made the lawsuit necessary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5NXzyiC5X4

From Inside the Rest of Louisiana is a public scholarship series applying the Four C's Governance Framework to environmental justice case studies across Louisiana. The series draws on source materials from the People, Places & Power curriculum, a free Environmental Justice curriculum developed by Mimie Laurant during her time at the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

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References

Ray, J. (2002). Guardian of Grand Bois: Clarice Friloux — homemaker, arm wrestler, sludge fighter. Sierra Magazine. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2002-1-january-february/guardian-grand-bois

Sack, K. (1998, July 13). Louisiana town goes to trial over waste pit. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/13/us/louisiana-town-goes-to-trial-over-waste-pit.html

Solet, K. (2005, April 19). Grand Bois case changed the landscape of environmental battles. Houma Today. https://www.houmatoday.com/story/news/2005/04/19/grand-bois-case-changed-the-landscape-of-environmental-battles/26832652007/

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