Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

  Still, I wondered, if one company could drill one hole in one cavern and cause a sinkhole that made methane gas bubble in rain puddles, what else could happen, with earthquakes now in motion, and other EDC-filled caverns nearby—all in a culture in which the very idea of regulation has fallen into very low esteem?

  My keyhole issue had taken me 4,000 feet down into the earth. And following it down the hole was the Great Paradox: the Tea Party feared, disdained, and wanted to diminish the federal government. But they also wanted a clean and safe environment—one without earthquakes sending toxins into aquifers or worse. But here was the rub: didn't America need a culture of respect for the safeguarding of such concerns? Don't we need government workers—ones with no skin in the game—to do the safeguarding? How did my good, bright, and caring friend Mike Schaff and others put these two desires together?

  The Minimal State

  Dapper in a blue shirt and khaki pants, Governor Bobby Jindal steps down from his helicopter and strides rapidly toward a cluster of waiting officials and restless refugees from the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, as it is now named. Many residents, seven months on, are still homeless, doubling up with relatives, living in trailers, motels, and campers. One couple had celebrated Thanksgiving in a twenty-four-hour Laundromat because they had nowhere else to go. Burly security men with close-shorn hair and dark glasses fan out around the governor. Hand outstretched, Jindal walks rapidly forward to greet officials and listens, head tilted, hands on hips, to their words. He moves toward a podium set in a green field not far from the sinkhole.

  The earth had opened ominously on August 3, 2012. Four months later, on December 16, 2012, a resident posted on his Facebook page:

  Where Are You Bobby Jindal?????

  You were elected to be the leader of our State.... Bayou Corne/ Grand Bayou... was declared a State of Emergency by your office on August 3rd [2012].... There are mini earthquakes, methane, benzene and hydrogen sulfide being released into the community. This community has been through hell and back and is still living a nightmare. In my opinion and many others you have... done absolutely nothing helpful to this community.

  Seven months after the disaster, on March 19, 2013, Governor Jindal visits the sinkhole for the very first time. He has helicoptered in from Baton Rouge, forty miles away—"it's only a five-minute ride," one disgruntled resident tells me—to address the gathering.

  With a line of white-shirted officials behind him and a thin scattering of distressed residents, arms folded, facing him, Governor Jindal speaks rapidly and emphatically from a fact-studded script. The very pace of his talk conveys mastery, urgency, busyness, and, perhaps, avoidance. The state is doing all it can to help, he tells the gathering. He's appointing an independent Blue Ribbon Commission. He's on the case.

  The governor finishes his prepared remarks and calls on local officials to speak, before finally opening himself to restless residents for questions. One resident asks the governor why he waited seven months to come the short distance. Noting that the governor announced his visit only at 9:00 A.M. of the morning he was to arrive at 2:00 P.M. the same afternoon, another asks why, after the seven-month delay, such short notice? Why was the meeting also set for two o'clock on a weekday when most people would be at work? Had the governor seen the sinkhole?

  By now, the homes of 350 residents were part of a "sacrifice zone," as officials called it. A geologist hired by Texas Brine had earlier explained to shocked residents that "nobody in the world has ever faced a situation like this." Was a nearby cavern, still being drilled into, also in danger of collapse? When would the gas, the earthquakes stop? The Blue Ribbon Commission is looking into it, the governor says.

  A Two-Beer Levee Job

  To drive to Mike Schaff's home, I turn right on Gumbo Street, left on Jambalaya, pass Sauce Piquant Lane, and park on Crawfish Street, opposite a two-story yellow wooden home. The street is deserted, the grass high. Planted around his yard are fruit trees—satsuma orange, grapefruit, mango, and fig—but the fruit hangs unpicked.

  "I'm sorry about the grass," Mike says as he greets me wearing an orange-and-red striped T-shirt, jeans, and boots. With the sweep of a muscular arm, he points to an unpruned rose arbor, "Just haven't kept the place up." Mike has set out coffee, cream, sugar, and a jar of peaches to take when I leave.

  "This has been the longest six months of my life. To tell you the truth, I'm depressed," he says. "Five years ago I moved here from Baton Rouge to live with my new wife," he says, pouring us coffee. But "with the methane gas emissions all around us now, it's not safe. So my wife has moved back to Alexandria and commutes to her job from there. I see her on weekends. The grandkids don't come, either, because what if someone lit a match? The house could blow up."

  Mike sleeps uneasily. He has placed a gas monitor in his garage and checks it from time to time. "The company drilled a hole in my garage to see if there was gas under it. There was: 20 percent higher than normal." He avoids lighting matches. He lives day to day among his cardboard boxes, keeping watch over his neighbor's property and a wary eye on wandering feral cats.

  The governor had issued an evacuation order for all residents of Bayou Corne, but Mike could not bring himself to leave. "I'm here to guard the place against a break-in—there've been quite a few—and to keep the other stayers company." After a long pause, he adds, "Actually, I don't want to leave."

  "Excuse this," he says, pointing to a jagged crack in the cement to the side of a rolled-up carpet. "The earthquake caused that. We never had earthquakes before the sinkhole, or methane gas rising from our lawns."

  After coffee, Mike walks me to the edge of his backyard, speaking in the present tense as if his life is ongoing: "This is where we have neighbors in for crawfish boils." Visible across the canal, and up and down it, are other patios with grills, yoo-hooing distance across. But now, he tells me, "It's no longer Janet and Jerry. It's no longer Tommy. It's no longer Nicky and his wife. It's no longer Mr. Jim." He points around. "It's Texas Brine, Texas Brine, Texas Brine, and Texas Brine. It'll be eighty-eight weeks this Monday," he continues. "As of now there's me, Tommy, Victor, and Brenda, and that's it." Texas Brine has been negotiating prices to buy neighbors out.

  It had been a close-knit community with a shared devotion to fishing, hunting, wildlife, and conservative politics. Married five years to his beautiful new wife—Mike's third marriage, his wife's second—this is the last situation he'd imagined being in. "We're a close community here." He gestures around as if to introduce me to invisible friends. "We have our own Mardi Gras, parties at Miss Eddie's Birdhouse." The husband of a neighbor, a bird-lover, had built a structure to shelter birds, considered noisy by neighbors. After he died, his widow converted it into a party house with a Jacuzzi and strobe lights. "We help each other rebuild levees during floods. You got the two-beer levee job, or the four-beer one." He laughs. "We love it here."

  Other Bayou Corne refugees I would interview said the same. One man named Nick showed more photos of children parading around the neighborhood in decorated bikes, neighbors in decorated golf carts, and boat trailers for the Mardi Gras Bayou Corne Hookers Parade, celebrants dancing in the street—some years to the music of a live band. "We used to have fishing tournaments. The winner was the one with the heaviest catch, and we ended up holding a fish fry."

  Even if government helped people—and he didn't think it did much— government should never, Mike felt, erode the spirit of a community. He had grown up in a dense circle of aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, all within walking distance from each other on the Armelise Plantation. Now in his sixties, Mike felt happy to live in a community as close and cooperative as the one he had known as a boy.

  For a man who could lose himself for hours in the garage assembling a two-seater Zenith 701 airplane from a kit, and who described himself as "to myself," such a community brought cheer. The sociability of Bayou Corne brought him out of himself. It wasn't the simple absence of government Mike wanted, it was the feeling o
f being inside a warm, cooperative group. He thought the government replaced that.

  His was also a love of place. Just as Mayor Hardey loved Westlake, Mike Schaff loved Bayou Corne. Just as Sasol was expanding onto Hardey family land, so Texas Brine had taken over Mike's home. But there was a difference. Hardey's family had been handsomely paid, his own home was unharmed, and he didn't mind industry as a neighbor. But Mike's home was in visible ruin and the community he loved was scattered to the wind—to Mississippi, Texas, and other parts of Louisiana.

  Mike disappears into his boat garage and backs his boat out into the canal. I climb in. The boat sputters to life and putts out of the canal into the wider bayou. Swerving around dark stumps of dead cypress trees, we duck under strips of low-hanging Spanish moss, which look like fuzzy tatters of an old fur coat hang from cypress, tupelo gum trees, and swamp maples. We duck again to putt under a low bridge, then speed into a widening vista. "Around here you pull up bass, catfish, white perch, crawfish, and sac-a-lait—at least we used to. Now? They're swimming in a methane bath."

  At a distance, we see a red, white, black, and yellow sign nailed to the gray trunk of a tupelo: "DANGER, KEEP OUT, HIGHLY FLAMMABLE GAS." The reflection of the warning wobbles in the rippling water. Mike points to small concentric circles of bubbles, scuttling outward like small bugs. "Methane."

  Rumor, Panic, Blame

  After the sinkhole, talk turned to blame, which ricocheted wildly from one thing to another. First Texas Brine blamed Mother Nature. Earthquakes were natural in this area, officials said, which wasn't true. Then it blamed and sued Occidental Chemical Company, the company from which it rented space in the Napoleonville salt dome. Then Texas Brine's insurance company blamed Texas Brine and refused to pay insurance. Then Texas Brine sued the insurance company. The legal wrangling expanded. Only 1,600 feet from the cave-in, Crosstec Energy Services rented an adjacent underground vault in the dome, filled with the equivalent of 940,000 barrels of butane gas. Wishing to continue business as usual, Crosstec sued Texas Brine on grounds that the cave-in had prevented them from expanding and led to the loss of storage contracts it could have made with companies wanting to rent. In 2015, Texas Brine sued yet another company, Oxy Petroleum, for $100 million for weakening the cavern wall by drilling too close to the cavern's edge back in 1986 and so causing the disaster in 2012. And so it went.

  Meanwhile, still doubled up with family in spare rooms, trailers, and motels, shell-shocked refugees commuted to work from temporary quarters, turning to each other by e-mail and to the Internet and television news for updates. Anxious rumors flew. Would the stored gas ignite, causing a firestorm? Would earthquakes break the walls of other caverns containing dangerous chemicals? One alarmed writer for the Denver-based website Examiner.com feared an explosion "with the force of more than 100 H-bombs like the ones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Others called for calm and reason. Apparently wanting a break from the anxious talk, one man who'd stayed in his Bayou Corne home wrote on Facebook: "Took a break from painting patio furniture and caught eight of these li'l beauties [photo of fish] right from my pier in about an hour."

  Some contributors to a website called The Sinkhole Bugle blamed both the company and the government but aimed their deepest anger at the government. Dennis Landry, owner of Cajun Cabins of Bayou Corne, pointed out, correctly, that the state Department of Natural Resources "knew for months" that the Texas Brine well had integrity problems and didn't tell local authorities. "I'm very upset about it. ... I feel like I've been betrayed by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources." One man even described Texas Brine as the "fall guy."

  Moral Dirty Work

  It was becoming easier to understand why energy refugees were so furious at the state government. First of all, it turned out that the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources from 2004 to 2014, Scott Angelle, had known of the weak cavern wall but had given Texas Brine a permit to drill anyway. He had been transferred soon after the event to a different job and was now, to Mike's horror, running for governor. (Angelle later lost.)

  Indeed, the caverns had been casually regulated. Similar accidents had occurred in the past and been forgotten—or remembered but discounted— like the structural amnesia the Arenos had encountered. Energy companies had understated the value of these caverns and their contents and had been undertaxed, it was discovered. The problem was not that the state government was too big, too intrusive, too controlling; it seemed to me that the state government had barely been present at all.

  Beyond this, there were different expectations of business and government. Companies made money and were beholden to stockholders; it was understandable if they tried to "cover their ass," people told me. But the government was -paid to protect people, so one could expect much more of them. Still, victims felt surprisingly hurt by Texas Brine, belying hope of a more personal touch. "After the sinkhole, company officials didn't come around to ask how we were doing. And after they reimbursed us, they gave us a month to get out," one aggrieved refugee told me, "When an ill eighty-three-year-old man asked Texas Brine for more time to get out they said, 'Okay, an extra week."' Texas Brine didn't care. They were all about money. Mike himself expressed mixed feelings toward Texas Brine. He offered a bag of Satsuma mandarins to the Texas Brine manager at the beginning of one community meeting, quipping, "These don't have razors in them.' Later he told me, "I laughed but the manager didn't." Victims were mad that Texas Brine "didn't have a heart," but not contemptuous. On the other hand, state officials were seen as tepid followers of corrupt higher-ups, whose envied new SUVs were seen as "paid for by my taxes."

  Overall, just how well did Louisiana state officials do in protecting its citizens? An eye-opening 2003 report from the inspector general of the EPA offered an answer. Charged with evaluating implementation of federal policies by each state within the nation's six regions, the report ranked Louisiana lowest of all in Region 6. Companies had not been required to submit reports. Louisiana's database on hazardous waste facilities was filled with errors. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (a title missing the word "protection") did not know if many companies were or were not "in compliance." Delays allowed sixteen facilities to discharge material into Louisiana waters without permits. The agency had failed to inspect many plants. Even when it found companies out of compliance, it had neglected to levy penalties or, if they were levied, to collect them. The inspector general concluded that he was "unable to fully assure the public that Louisiana was operating programs in a way that effectively protects human health and the environment."

  Why such low marks? Three reasons, the inspector general concluded: natural disasters, low funds, and "a culture in which the state agency is expected to protect industry." As for lack of resources, funding for environmental protection had been cut in 2012 from a previous 3.5 percent of total yearly state funds to 2.2 percent. An alert auditor had also discovered that the state had accidentally "given back" about $13 million to oil and gas companies that it should have retained in taxes. As for the pro-industry "culture," permitting was indeed relatively easy. According to the state's own website, 89,787 permits to deposit waste or do anything that affected the environment were submitted between 1967 and July 2015. Of these, only sixty—or .07 percent—were denied.

  Some state reports also reflected odd science. Comparing rates of pollution in different areas, detection levels were sometimes set high in the one and low in the other. In a 2005 study of the Calcasieu Estuary, Louisiana state scientists inexplicably concluded that it would be dangerous for children aged six to seventeen to swim in estuary waters, but not dangerous for "children six and under." Such reports were also nearly unreadable. One typical report read: "Analyses reported as non-detects were analyzed using method detection limits that were higher than the comparison values used as screening tools."

  Sometimes the state simply lowered standards of protection. In an astonishing example of this, the Louisiana State Department of Health and
Human Science offered advice to officials in other state agencies on what to tell the public about which fish are safe to eat. Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a "cancer slope factor," the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: "Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish," the document reads. Baking, broiling, and grilling are good, it said, because "the fat drains away from the fish and shellfish." Discard "juices which contain the fat... to further reduce exposure," it says. "Some contamination, like mercury and other heavy metals, however, are pervasive in the edible fish tissue," the report continues, in scientific deadpan prose, "and remain in the fish and shellfish even after cooking."

  The report was shocking but it also made a certain grim sense. If the companies won't pay to clean up the waters they pollute, and if the state won't make them, and if poverty is ever with us—some people need to fish for their dinner—well then, trim, grill, and eat mercury-soaked fish. At least the authors of the protocol were honest in what was a terrible answer to the Great Paradox. "You got a problem? Get used to it."

  Protocol for Issuing Public Health Advisories for Chemical

  Contaminants in Recreationally Caught Fish and Shellfish

  Mike Schaff had heard nothing of this advice, but when I describe it, he shakes his head. "There it is again, more bad government. Why raise salaries? Take Steve Schultz, who heads our Department of Natural Resources. When he first went to work for me and other Louisiana taxpayers, he started at $30,000, probably bought himself a mobile home or efficiency apartment his family could fit in. Then he got raises and moved to some fancy subdivision. Say we increase the budget for environmental protection. His salary rises from $150,000 to $190,000. The more money we give him, the more reason he has to be a yes man to Jindal and oil. To me, a public servant who doesn't make very much is more likely to be dedicated to what he's doing."