Book-signing evokes the memory of Marine Shale battle

As a preschooler, April Leonard had a place to play outdoors and a bayou for swimming.

Then one day, the spacemen arrived.

“It was like a scene from ‘E.T.,’” Leonard remembered Thursday. “They were wearing space suits.”

They weren’t from outer space. They were technicians in protective gear, sent by environmental regulators to see whether pollution from the nearby Marine Shale Processors operation had contaminated the land and water near Leon-ard’s home.

The Frame Shop in Morgan City was the site for a book-signing Thursday with Dr. John W. Sutherlin, who wrote “Playing With Fire: The Strange Case of Marine Shale Processors” with Daniel Elliot Gonzalez.

The event was an occasion to gather for people who took part in the battle to have the controversial hazardous waste incinerator at Amelia shut down.

Marine Shale, which began operating in 1985, was billed by owner Jack Kent Sr. as a way to dispose of hazardous waste through incineration and mixing it with a polymer. The resulting products were glass-like pellets that were sup-posed to be suitable for use in paving roads.

But, Sutherlin argues, Kent maintained he was running a recycling operation, not a hazardous waste disposal business so Marine Shale didn’t obtain permits that would otherwise have been required under federal antipollution rules.

And there were signs that Marine Shale was actively seeking to avoid inspection and regulation, Sutherlin said. They include phony monitoring equipment and a cam-era atop a smokestack to provide warning when state inspectors were coming.

“Everything about this is a smoking gun,” said Sutherlin, a University of Louisiana-Monroe political science professor.

Forces began to line up against Marine Shale. Buddy Roemer’s election as governor in 1987 led to the appointment of Paul Templet to head the relatively new Department of Environmental Quality. Templet was more aggressive in pursuit of environmental violations than his predecessors.

The Tulane Environmental Law Clinic got involved, as did Wilma Subra, a scientist whose Iberia-based company was a go-to source for people with environmental concerns.

Subra, who received a round of applause from the 20 or so people at The Frame Shop on Thursday, brought science to the anti-Marine Shale side, Sutherlin said. Tulane brought the law.

But the energy came from local people who formed South Louisiana Against Pollution. Sutherlin said the group formed around a group of concerned women in the community. It’s a pattern he’s seen in similar cases.

“For whatever reason, women seem to do better job of stepping up ...,” Sutherlin said.

Their argument gained power when the Amelia area experienced an unexpectedly high number of cases of neuroblastoma, a tumor affecting the central nervous system. No definitive link between Marine Shale and the cancers was established.

Leonard’s family “doesn’t have [ill effects] that we know of,” she said. “But we don’t know what the long-term effects might be.”

Marine Shale ceased operations in 1996 in the middle of lengthy court battles resulting from action by the state and federal governments. Along the way, Kent was indicted but found not guilty of trying to bribe a judge in the case.

In 2008, the state and federal governments reached a settlement with Kent and Marine Shale, calling for $6.2 million in penalties and $7 million to be set aside for cleaning the site.

The political impact may have outlived the Marine Shale controversy.

Sutherlin said Kent was determined to defeat Roemer’s re-election bid in 1991. Pro Publica reported that Kent spent $400,000 on the governor’s race that year, the one that resulted in the runoff between former Gov. Edwin Edwards and former Klansman David Duke.

“Roemer was never elected to anything ever again,” Sutherlin said.

Pro Publica also opined that in the five gubernatorial administrations since Roemer, environmental regulation has never had the same level of priority.

“We still have open burning of hazardous waste,” Subra said, “and we still have detonation of hazardous waste. But we don’t have one of these.”