What the Trucks Brought: Grand Bois, Part 2
From Inside the Rest of Louisiana
Before March 1994, Clarice Friloux had never been to a parish council meeting.
She was a 32-year-old homemaker and mother of two with a quiet temperament, and the kind of woman who, by her own account, had no reason to think that government concerned her. The Houma have lived in south Louisiana for generations and have not historically had much reason to trust that the state was paying attention to them. Grand Bois was not a place that called press conferences. It was a place where people fished the bayous, left their keys in their cars, and took care of their own.
Then the trucks came, and her community got sick, and something shifted.
"I became angry," she said. "And when I became angry, I became active."
She started with a petition, spending 17 days standing on the side of the highway. She collected 5,000 signatures and took them to the two parish councils that governed Grand Bois, appearing before a governing body for the first time in her life. She wrote letters. She made phone calls. She drove to the Capitol in Baton Rouge. She taught herself the procedural steps to force responses from agencies that had not asked for her input and were in no hurry to provide one.
In 1996, with legal support from Tulane University's Environmental Law Clinic, 129 residents of Grand Bois filed a lawsuit against Exxon and Campbell Wells Corporation, seeking damages for the health effects they had suffered since 1994. It was the first major environmental lawsuit brought by a Louisiana Native American community.
The 1998 trial in Thibodaux, LA, lasted five weeks.
Residents testified about headaches and rashes and about children too sick to go to school. Dr. Patricia Williams presented the blood and urine test findings — 74 percent of the women and children she tested with stippled red blood cells, a deformity the state's own researchers could not fully explain away. Community members carried Joyceline Dominique's composition books into the courtroom; five volumes documenting four years of their family's ailments, month by month, in the handwriting of a grandmother who said she had already had her life and was fighting for the children.
The jury awarded the plaintiffs $1.8 million in damages.
It was a significant moment, not just for Grand Bois but for environmental justice litigation involving Louisiana Native American communities. The Houma had walked into a Lafourche Parish courtroom and won. The evidence they had gathered, the testimony they had given, the years of documentation that Clarice and others had collected, organized, and kept. It had worked.
Then the defendants appealed.
The Louisiana Third Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the verdict in 2001, ruling that the plaintiffs had not provided sufficient scientific evidence to establish a causal link between the waste site and their health conditions. The jury's judgment was overturned because causation had not been proved to the court's satisfaction.
Unfortunately, this is a common outcome in environmental justice litigation. What the appeals court required was not proof that the community was sick. The link between known exposure and documented illness is extraordinarily difficult to establish in legal terms. It was not considered proof positive that a facility handling benzene, toluene, hydrogen sulfide, and arsenic had operated 333 feet from their homes. The standard of proof required is one that communities like Grand Bois are structurally least equipped to meet: it requires independent laboratory analysis, expert witnesses, and longitudinal medical studies.
So, the pits remained open.
By the mid-1990s, Clarice had become one of the most recognizable environmental advocates in south Louisiana. She testified before the state legislature. She appeared on 60 Minutes with Ed Bradley in 1997, one of the first times Grand Bois received sustained national media attention. She traveled to Washington, D.C., to speak before federal environmental and health agencies. She built relationships with environmental lawyers, state legislators, journalists, and other Gulf Coast communities dealing with similar conditions.
She also built something closer to home. She co-founded the Grand Bois Community Action Group, which became the formal organizational vehicle for the community's ongoing advocacy. It held meetings, tracked regulatory developments, pressed the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality for monitoring, and kept Grand Bois legible as a place that had not given up and was not going away.
Senator Mike Robichaux, who had been advocating alongside the community since the early days, pushed repeatedly at the state level for regulatory reform. He called for stricter oversight of oilfield waste-disposal sites and for the Louisiana DEQ to take the community's health complaints seriously as a monitoring trigger, rather than a public relations problem to be managed.
In 2003, after years of pressure from Grand Bois residents, environmental advocates, and legislators, the Louisiana Legislature passed Act 312, which reformed the process for bringing environmental contamination cases to court and required more rigorous environmental remediation standards for oil and gas waste sites. It was not solely a result of the Grand Bois litigation. Still, the Grand Bois case had built the public record, the legislative relationships, and the political will that made the reform possible. Kimberly Solet, reporting for the Houma Today in 2005, described the case as having changed the landscape of environmental battles in Louisiana, noting that it had galvanized a generation of environmental advocates and established a template for community-based environmental litigation in the state.
The pits at the Campbell Wells facility were eventually closed and remediated — not because the appeals court agreed with the jury, but because sustained organizing, regulatory pressure, and public attention made continued operation untenable. By 2005, the company's representatives were still insisting the site had never posed a health risk. "The allegations made against us are extremely incorrect," one spokesman said. "I don't know what else can be done to show how safe we are."
Clarice Friloux became, over the course of this fight, a different person than she had been in 1994. The quiet homemaker who had never attended a parish council meeting had testified before the United States Congress, had spoken at conferences and universities, and had trained other community members to organize, document, and show up. She had also remained in Grand Bois. When the real estate market collapsed, and no bank would finance a home purchase in a community with toxic waste pits nearby, the residents who might have wanted to leave discovered they couldn't. The community's inability to leave was itself a condition of the harm.
And yet, when asked why they stayed, residents did not talk about the real estate market. It was the place itself. The bayou. The crawfish. The people. The hundred years of roots.
R.J. Molinere, Clarice's brother, said it plainly: "None like this place here."
Part 3: The Diagnostic — applies the Four C's Governance Framework explicitly to Grand Bois, naming what Community, Clarity, Consent, and Choice looked like in a place where the system worked exactly as designed.
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.
References
Louisiana Legislature. (2003). Act 312. Louisiana State Legislature.
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/
Verdin, M. (2004). Industrial balance, Grand Bois, Louisiana [Archival pigment print]. Art Without Boundaries. https://www.artwithoutboundaries.art/monique-verdin-blog/blog-post-title-one-khhka-96t8h
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