By Wesley Harris
Claiborne Parish Library Historian
Facing two major environmental issues in the 20th century, Claiborne Parish became the unlikely battleground for fights against pollution and potential radioactive waste.
Corney Pollution
Water quality surveys in the mid-twentieth century repeatedly identified the heavily populated areas of the Northeast and Midwest as the “pollution belt.” In 1956 Congress strengthened the U.S. Public Health Service’s ability to intervene in interstate pollution, and one would think the first enforcement efforts would occur in the pollution belt. Instead, Corney Creek and Corney Bayou, relatively unknown waterways outside Claiborne Parish, served as the first battleground for federal action in 1957.
Corney Creek and the larger Corney Bayou drain a small watershed straddling the Louisiana- Arkansas state line. Concerns about water quality arose after crude oil production commenced in the basin’s upper reaches during the late 1930s. A decade later, both Louisiana and federal agencies had documented obvious pollution stemming from salt water discharges from oil wells into surface waters in Arkansas. Fishermen in Claiborne Parish complained of fish kills in the creeks and in Corney Lake. The federal lake, created in 1938 within the Kisatchie National Forest, attracted thousands of picnickers, campers, and fishermen each year.
The briny pollution was nothing new in the oil fields of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Yet, sportsmen’s complaints triggered the first federal interstate water pollution hearing. Later enforcement actions elsewhere required a public health issue to provoke action. Of all the instances of stream pollution in the 1950s, this is the case the feds took on.
The Corney pollution was approached differently than pollution in more populated Northern communities. Unlike Northeast and Midwest cases, the Corney pollution concerned natural resource protection, not drinking water and urban public health. Contrary to the typical interpretation that southern states tolerated pollution caused by new industries, citizens of the region vehemently opposed the environmental damage. Residents affected by pollution sought assistance from parish authorities, who turned directly to federal agencies rather than relying on state officials.
In January 1957, a public hearing was held by the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare to consider the pollution. It was the first ever hearing on interstate water pollution under the federal Water Pollution Control Program. By early February, the secretary of HEW had issued an order to south Arkansas oil well operators to clean up their act. In August, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries reported the pollution had stopped.
Uranium Plant
On June 9, 1989, Claiborne Parish residents gathered on the courthouse lawn among tables of free food and drink for a speech by U.S. Senator J. Bennett Johnston. The food was paid for by Louisiana Energy Services, a collection of public and private energy companies stretching from Louisiana to Minnesota to England and Germany.
Senator Johnston announced the parish had been selected as the site of a new $855 million facility for enriching uranium for use in nuclear power plants. Homer had experienced a couple of oil booms, but in the preceding decades had fallen on hard times. A new industrial facility was just what the parish needed, said Johnston.
News of the proposed plant location came out later. The 442-acre site was a few miles northeast of Homer, straddling a road connecting two African American communities, Center Springs and Forest Grove. The residents of the two neighborhoods became alarmed when they learned the road would be closed. Those in Homer and in retirement homes on nearby Lake Claiborne learned that the plant would be built next to a creek that drained into their lake, they became worried as well.
Some believed the Claiborne Parish site was chosen because residents would be unlikely to resist. But when residents learned the plant would generate a vast amount of dangerous radioactive waste that would remain essentially forever, that little or no tax money would come in for at least ten years, and that the jobs would be for highly sophisticated engineers and the like, they fought the proposal.
An objection to the plant was filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Citizens challenged the need for the plant (no new nuclear plant had been built in the United States for many years). They challenged the financing for the facility, which looked shaky. And they suggested the site selection process was a violation of an executive order issued by President Clinton that required federal agencies ensure their actions avoided unfairly impacting communities of color.
The NRC proceedings dragged on for months. Formal hearings were finally held in Shreveport in March 1995. The plant’s opponents—who had formed a biracial group called CANT, for Citizens Against Nuclear Trash—sent buses of Claiborne citizens each day to observe the weeklong hearings. They received support among the Congressional Black Caucus and 182 environmental organizations from 18 countries. Extensive news coverage ensued.
One witness at the hearings, Dr. Robert Bullard, demonstrated to the commissioners that the process used by the energy company to select a site for its plant amounted to institutional racism, which violated both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clinton executive order.
Eventually the NRC denied the application for the reasons alleged by CANT’s lawyers. For the first time, the NRC denied a license based on opposition from a citizen group, and it was the first time environmental injustice had been cited as a reason for such a ruling.
The outcome was celebrated in Center Springs, Forest Grove, and Homer, but it was just a beginning. Racial barriers in the town were breached. CANT people remained active, serving on the school board, the police jury, and the town council. Others were disappointed the expected jobs and tax revenue would never be.
The Corney pollution of the 1950s and the proposed uranium plant fight in the 1990s brought not only national but international attention to Claiborne Parish.