By Tristan Baurick (The Times-Picayune, The Advocate), Lylla Younes (ProPublica), and Joan Meiners (The Times-Picayune, The Advocate), October 30, 2019
Over a half-century, Hazel Schexnayder saw this riverside hamlet transformed from a collection of old plantations, tin-roofed shacks and verdant cornfields into an industrial juggernaut.
By the early 1990s, she’d had enough of the towering chemical plants and their mysterious white plumes, the roadside ditches oozing with blue fluid, the air that smelled of rotten eggs and nail-polish remover, the neighbors suffering miscarriages and dying of cancer.
“We were inundated with plants,” Schexnayder, now 87, said. “We didn’t need any more around here.”
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