Save Ourselves: The Environmental Case That Changed Louisiana
| Author | Oliver A. Houck |
| Position | Professor of Law, Tulane University. The research assistance of Claire Yancey, Tulane Law School |
| Pages | 409-442 |
Save Ourselves: The Environmental Case That
Changed Louisiana
Oliver A. Houck*
You can drive the interstate from New Orleans to Baton
Rouge, Louisiana in about an hour, or you might take the River
Road. In that same hour’s time you will emerge from cane fields
and chemical plants into the town of Burnside; its stores, a school,
and a row of frame houses. Out across the way is an old slave
quarters converted to a restaurant called The Cabin and run by a
family named Robert. But for the Roberts, you would also be
driving by the largest hazardous waste disposal facility in the state,
perhaps the country. Or, as the Governor claimed, the world.
The Roberts were alarmed by the prospect. With a friend, a
retired nurse, they formed a small group called Save Ourselves.
Because, as they saw it, no one else would. Many years later, after
a journey that seemed several times to leave them dead by the
roadside, the case of Save Ourselves would make Louisiana legal
history and revolutionize environmental decision making in the
state.1 The landscape would never be the same.
Nothing in the Save Ourselves outcome was foreordained. The
odds for winning were slim. The odds of making new law were
beyond imagination. Had this case not occurred, it is doubtful that
another would have come along to replicate it. The Save Ourselves
opinion arose from disparate sources, each of them human, each
operating on its own logic, up to a massive and prolonged
collision.
We could, of course, continue to read and practice law
effectively without knowing anything about Save Ourselves other
than the requirements it left behind and mark its passage. We
would be much the poorer, however, because the story of this case
says so much about Louisiana’s difficult marriage with the notion
of environmental protection and what it takes for this protection,
even today, to work. At bottom it requires people, which is where
this story begins.
Copyright 2012, by OLIVER A. HOUCK.
* Professor of Law, Tulane University. The research assistance of Claire
Yancey, Tulane Law School ’10, and Roman Griffith, ’11, is acknowledged with
gratitude.
1984).
410 LOUISIANA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 72
I. THE CALL
It started with a telephone call from Ruby Cointment, an old
friend, who had been reading the morning paper.2 Theresa Robert,
a 26-year-old housewife with a house trailer to keep, a small
restaurant to run, and a three-year-old loose on the floor did not
have time for the paper, but she could tuck the telephone receiver
under her ear and keep on with the dishes. “Honey,” she asked,
“they going to do what?” Ruby said, “they going to build a toxic
waste dump by you, barges coming in off the river and all.” She
paused, reading ahead, and then added, “it’s going to be the biggest
in the world.”3
Ascension Parish lies south of Baton Rouge along the
Mississippi River, its landscape capturing Louisiana’s transition
from a plantation economy to a new one based on oil, gas, and
chemicals. At their peak, columned dwellings in all shapes and
colors lined the river from the capital city to New Orleans, a grand
promenade for the steamboats passing by.4 The Civil War,
however, broke the back of the sugar economy. By the end of the
war, the number of plantations had dropped from 1,400 to less than
200, most of these on the road to decay.5 One hundred years later
the best living examples still standing—Tezcuco, Houmas House,
San Francisco, Nottoway—were found in and around Ascension,
shoulder to shoulder with chemical plants and oil refineries, a new
kind of plantation culture that made the air smell funny from time
to time and left dead fish on the surface of bayou waters. Slowly
and unwillingly, a state deeply dependent on petrochemicals began
recognizing that their byproducts were dangerous and that
dumping them wherever convenient was not a good solution. With
this recognition, however, came a golden prospect.
2. Interview by Claire Yancey, with Theresa Robert, Al Robert, and Al
Robert, Jr. in Burnside, La. (October 23, 2008) [hereinafter Robert Interview].
The quotations that follow are taken from this interview.
3. See Sonny Albarado & Penny Perkins, Waste Unit Set on Site for
Airport, MORNING ADVOCATE (Baton Rouge), Oct. 18, 1979, at 1-B
(“Ascension Parish Police Jury President Vincent ‘Cy’ Tortorich Responded
with a shocked ‘What!’ when told Wednesday that property his parish and East
Baton Rouge Parish were considering for an airport location will be used instead
for the world’s largest chemical waste treatment complex.”).
4. The River Road, WWW.NPS.GOV, http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/louisiana/
riverroad.htm. (last visited March 19, 2011).
5. John McQuaid, Transforming the Land, TIMES-PICAYUNE, May 21,
2000, http://www.nola.com/speced/unwelcome/index.ssf?/speced/unwelcome/
stories/0521transforming.html; Mary Gehman, Touring Louisiana’s Great River
Road, available at http://margaretmedia.dawesbiz.net/river_road/intro.htm (last
visited April 12, 2011).
2012] SAVE OURSELVES 411
The problem was pressing. U.S. industries in the early 1980s
were generating around 600 billion pounds of hazardous waste
each year—roughly one million pounds per minute.6 The State of
Louisiana, 31st of the states in size, led the nation in hazardous
waste production,7 with over 16,000 pounds for every person in the
state—much of it discharged directly into the river or in open pits
and underground cavities, eventually finding its way into local
wells, swamps and streams. At the time the Save Ourselves lawsuit
was coming on, there were close to 3,000 water discharge permits
for 183 million tons of waste a year in Louisiana, most of it into
the Mississippi River below Baton Rouge, the drinking water
source for nearly 1.5 million people.8 Jefferson Parish estimated
that over 213 million pounds of 50 different toxic chemicals passed
by its water intake pipes each year.9 The contamination of the New
Orleans water supply became so notorious that it prompted passage
of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.10 Researchers at the time
also noted striking correlations between consumers of Mississippi
water and certain forms of cancer, including rectal cancer, which
they explained by the rectum’s function in the resorption of
water.11 The chemical industry denied any connection.12
6. PAT COSTNER & JOE THORNTON, WE AL L LIVE DOWNSTREAM: THE
MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND THE NATIONAL TOXICS CRISIS, 91 (1989).
7. Id. As of 2008, Louisiana was ranked first in the nation for the quantity
of hazardous waste produced, and 15th in the total number of hazardous waste
producers. AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CIVIL ENGINEERS, Report Card for
America’s Future, Louisiana, http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/state-
page/louisiana (last visited Oct. 18, 2011). 8. See COSTNER &
THORNTON, supra note 6, at 91.
8. See COSTNER & THORNTON, supra note 6, at 91.
9. Id. at 93.
10. JAMES L. AGEE, ENVTL. PROT. AGENCY, PROTECTING AMERICA 'S
DRINKING WATER: OUR RESPONSIBILIT IES UNDER THE SAFE DRINKING WATER
ACT (1975), available at http://www.epa.gov/aboutepa/history/topics/sdwa/
07.html. Environmental Protection Agency studies in the 1970s found,
respectively, 46 and 66 toxic and potentially toxic chemicals in New Orleans
and regional water supplies, while another survey found such high risk toxins as
carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, benzene, trichloroethylene and bromoform.
See Oliver Houck, This Side of Heresy: Conditioning Louisiana’s Ten-Year
Industrial Tax Exemption Upon Compliance with Environmental Laws, 61 TUL.
L. REV. 289, 314 (1986) (citing ENVTL. PROT. AGENCY, DRAFT ANALYTIC
REPORT: NEW OR LEANS AS A WATER SUPPLY STUDY (1974) and ENVTL. PROT.
AGENCY, PRELIM INARY ASSESSMENT OF SUSPECTED CARCINOGENS IN DRINKING
WATER: REPORT TO CONGR ESS (1975)).
11. See Houck, supra note 10, at 315–316 (citing GOVERNOR’S TASK FORCE
ON ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH, ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH IN LOUISIANA: THE
CANCER PROBLEM 165–66 (1984); Cancer Risk Higher From Drinking River
Water, Study Shows, MORNING ADVOCATE (Baton Rouge), Apr. 25, 1985
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