Red Mud Lake 4 at the Atalco alumina refinery in Gramercy suffered numerous levee breaches, spilling arsenic, cadmium, chromium and other toxic chemicals into public areas and waterways for a period of several months. (Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
This article is part of a series on the environmental costs of America’s last remaining alumina refinery.
State environmental regulators have discovered more pollution discharges from the waste containment lakes at the Atlantic Alumina facility near Gramercy, just months after citing the refinery for spewing toxic waste containing arsenic, cadmium, chromium and other heavy metals into state waters.
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality conducted a compliance evaluation May 29 at Atlantic Alumina, also known as Atalco, and documented nine violations at the plant, according to public records available on the agency’s website.
The company did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Several of the new violations are similar to ones detailed in a recent Illuminator investigation into pollution discharges that occurred at the refinery last year, which neither residents nor local officials were fully aware of at the time. Those discharges involved an industrial “red mud” byproduct of the alumina refining process that contained poisonous heavy metals and caustic chemicals that eroded through giant levees surrounding the facility’s waste containment lakes and spilled onto public property.
The toxic waste killed vegetation and contaminated the land along its path to a public drainage system that flows to the Blind River Swamp of Lake Maurepas, according to a 606-page LDEQ inspection report finalized in March. Lab analysis of water samples collected from that public ditch contained arsenic at a concentration nearly 1,400% higher than the maximum safety threshold set by the EPA.
During their May 29 inspection, LDEQ officials cited Atalco again for failing to maintain its levees, allowing high grass to obscure the lakes and allowing chemical waste to overflow the embankments.
“Multiple discharges from Red Mud Lake 3 into Outfall 003,” the LDEQ inspector wrote in his field report. Outfall 003 refers to a drainage system designed to collect rain and surface water runoff from some of the levees.
Atalco’s failure to maintain its system of 50-foot-high containment levees was the primary cause of the levee breaks and toxic waste discharges that occurred last summer and continued through the remainder of the year, according to the state and federal inspectors who documented the incident.
Additionally, during their most recent visit to the facility, the LDEQ inspectors discovered a diesel tank leaking into a separate outfall that drains into the Mississippi River. That same ditch also contained a red-orange colored liquid with a petrochemical rainbow sheen on the surface and a noticeable “diesel odor present,” according to the records.
State inspectors found a similar rust-colored liquid in a separate drainage pipe and discovered diesel leaking from a pump near a third drainage system, Outfall 004. The records show they took pH readings from multiple drains and detected levels in excess of 9, which indicates the likely presence of a caustic chemical.
LDEQ’s investigation into the facility, which began last summer following the levee breaches, remains ongoing. So far, no enforcement penalties have been levied against the company.
“The company has been cooperating with our staff through the investigation and is actively working toward compliance,” LDEQ spokesman Matthew Day said in an email.
Atalco’s refinery occupies roughly 3 square miles of land where St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes meet on the Mississippi River’s east bank. Atalco sells refined alumina to metal smelters that make finished aluminum. Opened in 1958 as Kaiser Aluminum, the Gramercy facility is the only remaining bauxite refinery in the United States and therefore the nation’s only domestic source of a critical metal feedstock.
Atalco produced 669,261 metric tons of aluminum oxide last year, state records show. For every ton of aluminum produced from Atalco’s work, bauxite refining generates an estimated 2.5 tons of waste byproduct, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
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