The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working people is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are diving back into our ongoing coverage of the corporate and government pollution that is harming our bodies, disrupting our livelihoods, and turning more and more of our homes into so- called sacrifice zones, where poor and working people are being abandoned to live in conditions that threaten life itself. And as we’ve done in East Palestine, Ohio, here in South Baltimore, Conyers, Georgia, and Granbury, Texas, we’re going to take you straight to the front lines and speak directly with the people who are living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones.

And today, we are going to Roseland, Louisiana, a small town in Tangipahoa Parish with a population just shy of a thousand people. You may recall hearing about Roseland back in August of last year when a horrifying explosion at the Smitty Supply facility and a fire that burned for days sent black smoke into the air and oil and chemicals into the nearby land and waterways. As Leslie Mueller reported in October for the Louisiana Illuminator, “Large amounts of petrochemicals still blanket nearby bodies of water six weeks after an industrial facility fire and explosion in Tangipahoa Parish, where some affected residents believe the federal and state government have failed in their response and aren’t telling the truth about the health and environmental risks.” Residents across Tangipahoa Parish have reported property damage after the August 22nd chemical fire at Smitty’s supply. The incident sent smoke, soot, and oily residue into the air and onto nearby homes, businesses, and an elementary school.

Petroleum products from the plant also spilled into area waterways, including several adjacent ponds and the Tangipahoa River itself. Oily materials have traveled nearly 40 miles down the waterway that leads to Lake Ponchatrain. Within days of the explosion, the EPA received an inventory list of the chemicals at the Smitty’s plant at the time of the incident, but the agency withheld the information from the public for five weeks. The EPA finally disclosed it to the Illuminator last week only after the agency got permission from Smitty’s supply executives to release it. Detailed on a 305-page spreadsheet, the inventory list included a variety of flammable and otherwise hazardous products. Rough estimates indicate Smitty Supply stored several million gallons of motor oils, lubricants, and various automotive fluids, hydraulic fluids, gas mixtures, methanol, drilling oils, solvents, acids, bases, and other petrochemical products were also part of its inventory on hand. Now, of course, you guys are probably hearing the same eerie similarities that I’m hearing between the Smitty’s plant explosion and the other industrial disasters and mass poisoning events that we’ve covered here on the show.

And you wouldn’t be the only one hearing those similarities. As Whitney Miller reports for WWL Louisiana, “The EPA says response crews recovered more than 11.7 million gallons of contaminated liquid, including eight million gallons from the river and nearby ponds, which were removed and transported offsite for disposal.” According to the agency, its response included airborne chemical screening flights, community air monitors and perimeter air monitoring devices to track volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and benzene. The EPA says none of that monitoring detected sustained chemical levels associated with health effects. However, independent testing experts, Scott Smith, says his offsite testing of soil, water, and soot paints a different picture. We found mixtures of chemicals, and that’s important because there are no safety standards for mixtures, Smith said. Smith says those mixtures appeared not only near the facility, including downstream in the Tangipahoa River and near Lake Ponchatrain. He says some of the compounds he identified can persist in the environment and accumulate in the body over time.

Smith also disputes the EPA’s early assurances that the area was safe, pointing out that some samplings relied on testing performed by a contractor hired by Smitty Supply. So again, the similarities here are way too ominous and eerie to ignore, and we’re going to dig into this story today, and I couldn’t be more grateful to be joined on the show by Arlene Bankston, a resident of Roselyn, Louisiana and Allie Ponvelle, a resident of Amit, which is the town right next to Roseland, both of whom are living very close to the Smitty Supply facility. Arlene, Allie, thank you both so much for joining me today, especially with everything you’ve got going on over there. I really, really appreciate it. And I want to just turn the floor over to y’all and ask if you could walk our listeners through first, what it was like to live through this horrific fire and explosion at the Smitty Supply facility in your backyard.

Could you just tell us what it was like in your life and what was going through your mind as you were responding to this industrial disaster?

Arlene Bankston:

Hi, Max. Thank you so much for taking the time to let us have a voice because that’s been hard. It’s been hard to feel like we’re unheard. On the day of the explosion, I was mowing my grass. I had my headphones going and I knew it was supposed to rain that afternoon. So I started hearing what I thought was thunder in the distance. And I thought, “Oh, well, it’s going to rain earlier. I’m not going to get to weed eat. Let me hurry up.” And I ended up getting just about the time I’m finishing mowing, going to go get my weed eater. I get a text from a friend whose child goes to the elementary school in Roseland. He screenshotted me the message that he had gotten from the school that there was an explosion at the Smitty’s plant. They were evacuating the school. And then I realized that’s what I’ve been hearing.

Instead of thunder, I’ve been hearing that. Like I said, I’d had my headphones on, listening to music. And so I immediately text my husband, he called me and I said they’ve evacuated a one mile zone. We’re four miles from the plant. The house is four miles. We have close to 60 acres. So we’re between three and four miles if you look at all of our property. And so he said, “Finish, put up the mower and everything, go feed the cows, and then go in, shower, pack a go bag just in case.” So I did all that, still hearing the explosions, I have video, you could see the smoke plume, just kind of paying attention, are they going to evacuate further or anything like that, which they didn’t. Well, we have cows. We have about, at the time we had close to 50 head of cattle on the place.

And when my husband came home, we were at that point debating, “What are we going to do? Will it affect us or whatever?” Well, then it starts raining. And we said, “Well, we have several watering troughs. All but one of them are under covering.” So he said, “Well, we need to go out and empty that watering prof because it’s raining. It has started raining when he came in. ” And he said, “It’s raining and if there’s anything in the rain because the rain was black.” So we went out by this time it’s a good steady rain and it literally, we have a side by side, a Polaris Ranger and it literally looked like oil dripping from the bike. And so we went and emptied that water and trough, so at least they’re not drinking that. So at this point, we don’t know what to do.

So we’re contacting. We’ve got a friend that we work our cows together. They have cattle across town and they meet and we’re talking about what to do. My husband worked at Smitty’s 14 years ago or so for a very short time. It wasn’t a great experience. And that’s when he left there, he ended up going business for himself. So he knew a lot about the chemicals that were there. He knew it wasn’t just oil, as we’ve had some people argue and say, “Oh, it’s just oil.” No, it’s a whole lot more than oil. And so knowing that and knowing that all these things are mixed together and now raining on our property, we don’t know anything about long-term effects at this point, but we know that it can’t be good, or at least there’s a potential for it to not be good. Sure, you know the price of beef is very expensive.

So the first concern was what to do with the cattle. So the next morning, our friend that I said helps us with the cows and we help them with ours, whatever, he called and he said that there’s a guy that he does work for that has 200 acres in a neighboring parish and wasn’t using it at the time. He had sold all of his cattle a couple years ago during the drought in 2023. So he’d only gotten a few back and he had 200 acres that wasn’t being used. So he called the guy and he said, “Hey, how’s your cattle?” He said, “Were you affected by the explosion?” And he said, “Well, not me, but my buddy.” He said, “Well, look, don’t sell your cattle, don’t lose your cattle. Bring them over here. I got 200 acres, beautiful grass not being used, just bring them.” So we set that up for Saturday, the day after the explosion, and we moved all the cattle.

I mean, we worked out the details later, we’ll work out the details of payment and how we’re going to feed them and all that later. So I don’t know how much you know about cattle, but in the summer, they don’t really have to be fed every day. They eat grass. You give them a mineral tank and grass and they’re good. So they don’t have to be fed. Our cows, we feed them every day because we can handle them that way. We get to our eyes on them every day. Well, of course we couldn’t do that. But the people over there, one of the guys, workers, we go check on them every couple days. But when it got to be winter, started getting cold, the grass died, we’re having to bring hay every so often. But then it got to where bringing hay every three days, that literally is a half a day of work for my husband every time.

And because his friend has the connection with the guy, he’s going with him. And so it’s like every three days they’re going to bring, “Hey, let me back up and say that I started doing research trying to find out how to remediate after chemical exposure because there’s black, all of my grass and trees and everything is black. So I don’t want the cows eating that. ” So I’m like, “Okay, there’s got to be a way to, something you can put out, let me see what there is, how much it costs.” I can’t find any information on that, which was, to me, that was mind blowing. I don’t know, a few weeks, a month or so in, the EPA had this, what they call office hours at different locations. You could go stop by and talk to somebody. So we stopped by one day and there’s two EPA officers there, and this was what I said to her, to one of the ladies or both of them.

I said, “As many chemical disasters as there’s been in this country,” because I’m thinking as old as I am, I’m thinking back to Love Canal, because I remember watching a movie about that when I was a kid, or at least a young adult. And so I thought as many chemical disasters as there’s been in this country, why is there not a checklist of something of sorts of what to do, what not to do, how to clean, what to clean with, how to remediate your soil, those kind of things. And I asked the EPA lady this, and she hadn’t been with the EPA long. She had just gone to work for the EPA. She used to work for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, we’ll call DEQ for short. And so she said, “I’m sure there probably is. I can’t put my hands on that right now, but I’ll do some research, took my information, email address, phone number, and I’ll get back with you.

” We talked for a good little bit. And the other thing I asked her was, “This is what I don’t understand.” In Louisiana, probably anywhere else, you have a department of health. If they go into a restaurant and that restaurant is not following guidelines, they get a fine and they say, “You have X amount of days to fix this, or you shut down.” And they shut them down if they don’t fix the problems because they’ll make 50, 100 people sick possibly, right? So if these chemical plants aren’t following protocol, and I know Smitty’s wasn’t … Again, first of all, my husband worked there. Second of all, the week of the explosion, the local news interviewed a lady who said everybody that works there knows they don’t follow a lot of safety protocols. You could talk to employee after employee that worked there and they could tell you stories about how they didn’t follow a lot of safety protocol, cut corners here and there.

So if you’ve got a restaurant that could make potentially 50, 100 people sick because they’re not following certain safety standards, they’re shut down, why are these chemical plants not shut down after so much time of not meeting regulations? Her response to me was, “That’s a really good question.” And to be perfectly honest, in Louisiana, there’s actually statutes that if the industry, the company in question can prove that paying such fine would be detrimental to their business, they can get out of paying the fine. Not only do they not get shut down, they can get out of paying the fund. I get industry brings money to the state. I get that. But at what cost? There has to be a balance. They’re just allowed to do what they want to do because they bring money. Now, I’m sorry, that’s a big problem. So that was a big red flag to me.

And I thought, “You know what? I wonder if I could rally or somehow figure out how to get those things changed.” At this point, I haven’t met any of the group that I now work with. I will say this, in the first week, when I saw the news article that said there was an independent tester coming to town, I thought, “Oh, I need to get in touch with him.” And I immediately started trying to figure out how to reach out to him. So I posted on the news article, how do we reach them? And somebody from East Palestine, Ohio, Christina Seisloff, actually reached out to me and messaged me his phone number, Scott’s number. And so that’s when I started talking with Christina a little bit. It took a little bit for me to get with Scott. I learned how busy he is, but at that point I said, “Well, I’m not getting any answers from the government, so let me start doing my own homework.” Well, it took a little while, but we finally got with Scott and then connected with other people from East Palestine.

He put us in touch with, tried to help us get together. Like I said, I had spoken with Christina already. We had a town hall, the first town hall that Scott and Mindy and them had was very eye-opening. I told my husband, I said, “I’m thinking about starting a Facebook page maybe with the farm name, because I already have a Facebook. He does not do Facebook. This town hall and things like that, maybe there’s a lot of people that won’t know. ” And he said, “Absolutely not. I don’t want anything on social media that would connect us to this place.” I said, “Okay.” It’s the mentality of he was raised here. We moved here three and a half years ago after my father-in-law passed away. I mean, I’ve been here a lot because this was a dairy farm originally, but he was raised here. He understands the mentality and there’s a lot of, I’ll say fear.

It’s fear of retaliation when you speak out against someone in the community that is well-known, well-liked, or has a lot of money, like the people who own Smitty’s. I knew the original owners from going in what used to be just a parts house. They were very, very nice people, but sometimes people raised with money end up having … Bad attitudes, I’m just going to put it that way. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m going to say- That’s a delightfully Southern way to put it, right?

Arlene Bankston:

I’m still cautious. I’m not fearful, but I am still cautious. I don’t like to publicly say people’s names, but I’ll just say that the person who runs the show there, the son that runs the show is nothing like his parents and sometimes having a lot of money, I guess, ruins people. And so my husband was very, very leery about me speaking out, but the more this went on, the more time that went on and then speaking with Scott and learning different things through with Scott and the town halls, we met other people. We met other people that were speaking out and that were not fearful. And it allowed my husband to feel a little more comfortable with us sharing. We went to a town hall and General Russell Honore said, “Start a Facebook page to share information.” And so at that point we did. And so I met other people and I thought, and this is what I’ve told my husband time and time again, there’s too many of us fighting for them to come after all of us.

We have had people on our team that have been followed by law enforcement, have had sat at the end of their road every day for a period of time that have had supposed complaints to their councilmen, hadn’t had complaints before. But after a couple weeks, that kind of died down. I don’t know if they realized that it wasn’t going to shut them up or what, but since then, I don’t know, we haven’t had a whole lot of that, but my husband’s still concerned about that. But that’s the kind of thing that goes on here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, and it’s so infuriating and horrifying to hear. I tell folks all the time that I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of reporting where I’m going to working communities around the country, talking to folks like yourselves who have been just devastatingly impacted by these industrial disasters and all this pollution and so on and so forth. But I tell people, I feel like I’m investigating a serial murderer because I hear different versions of the same story coming from people who have never met before, but they’re living near an industrial plant or a battery plant or a train derailed in their backyard. And the dynamics you described, Arlene, are something that I’ve heard folks in East Palestine say, like the social pressure cooker in town with some people at each other’s throats. And I mean, I was doing an interview in East Palestine about two blocks from the derailment site and one cop car, I think it was a sheriff’s car, like passed by us like five times.

And the resident I was interviewing, Lori Harmon said, “Oh yeah, they’re probably going to pull you over on your way out of here.”

Arlene Bankston:

They’re just trying to be intimidated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And to say nothing of like the Norfolk Southern and their contractors who tried to intimidate people like Scott Smith from doing his independent testing.

Arlene Bankston:

Yeah, things like that. I will say that having the team that I’m working with has given me more courage to speak up. But the thing is, a lot of people say it happened, it was an accident. First of all, it was an accident that I’m 99% certain was preventable because of all the safety things they don’t use. I won’t speak publicly about what I’ve heard because it is hearsay, but I’m sure there was some type of safety, something not followed to cause that, just knowing what I know about what goes on at that plant. But you know what? These people that say it was an accident, move on, they don’t have to worry about what the contamination is going to do to their health long term. They don’t have to worry about the fact that I still have to live in this house and it’s not just me and my husband choosing to live here.

I can’t afford to just go move. They’re like, sell it. Oh, sell it to somebody else, some unknowing person that doesn’t know that they’re going to live in a place that’s contaminated and could possibly kill them. I don’t know the long-term effects. I’m not selling that to someone else. I can’t afford to just walk away. I’ve got too much invested. I’ve got a mortgage. I can’t just walk away and start over. But it’s not just me and my husband. I have a 16-year-old at home and I think, what am I subjecting her to? But then what choice do I have? All I can do is pray and hope for the best for probably six months at least. I didn’t allow my grandchildren when they came over. They weren’t allowed to play outside because every time I mowed grass, I’d get chemical burns on me. So I wasn’t letting them play in the grass.

It’s life altering. And like I said, a lot of people don’t understand why I’m still speaking up because you know what? If people don’t speak up, nothing changes. The most disappointing thing to me in all of this has been, and don’t get me wrong, I’m not so naive that I believe that the government is all roses and whatever, but I did not know how bad it was. I truly didn’t know. And I can’t express enough how disappointing that has been, that I can’t believe in any government official, anywhere in this country to do what’s right for the people.

I’ve learned about Times Beach, Missouri. Marilyn Leister was the mayor there. And when they realized that her town was not safe to live in, she fought for her people. She fought for that town to be bought out. Who’s going to fight for us? Because so far I see nothing but lies or people being quiet because I don’t know, they’re scared of their political career. I really don’t know what the reason is. I understand that an investigation takes time. I understand that. But we’ve had reporters and other people that have come out that worked for the EPA that have brought forth proof that the EPA covered up and lied about how safe it was or was not here. We’ve got proof of it, but what’s happening? No one’s paying for the lies and the deception. There’s been proof in other chemical disasters, but no one pays for it.

No one’s held accountable and nothing changes. And that is so frustrating. I email a representative and I get back a little blanket email. “Yes, I visited the site and we’re trying to do what we can do, basic email, but you’ve done nothing. You’ve done nothing and we can only assume it’s because they want the company open, they want it to make money.

We’re here for each other because the government has failed us. They’ve done nothing to help us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

“Well, and I really appreciate you speaking publicly and being so open and honest about this. And I cannot begin to express to you both how sorry I am that this is the world we live in, the country we live in. And I can only assure you that you’re going to be heard on this show by people who have come to that same dismal realization and that we are on our own, that things are this bad, that the coverup will happen and people are going to forget as the news cycle just keeps going on and on and on. But people like you speaking up and people who are listening to this, sharing your stories is like one of the most essential ways we can make sure that these crimes don’t go unpunished and these horrors don’t go forgotten. And I do want to talk to you both about where things stand now and the connections you’ve made with other chemically impacted communities.

But before we do that, Allie, I wanted to bring you in here and ask if, just building on what Arlene described, if you could give us your point of view, what it was like for you in the next town over to experience this explosion and what it’s been like for you and your neighbors in the weeks and months after it.

Allie Ponvelle:

Hi, thank you so much for having me. I was sitting here trying to think back of what it was that day and how it went. So my kids do virtual schooling. So my youngest, I bring him to ABA therapy. So I bring him every morning and I come back and I was doing my mining chores around the house and taking care of things and they’re doing their schoolwork. And I forgot what time it was that I was looking and I saw that there was a fire at Smitty’s and it was an explosion. I was like, okay, that’s kind of crazy. And I stepped out and I looked and I could see it. I’m 10.5 miles away from Smitty’s and I just looked out and I could see the big plume and everything. And I was like, okay, I have to leave eventually to go get my son and come back.That is massive.

That is huge. I went about my day usually, because I’ve never dealt with that, never seen it. I mean, I moved here, it’d be 11 years in October. I grew up south. Life is totally different from here than down there. So we went to go get him. I told the kids about what happened. They go, “Really? When he did catch on fire, there was an explosion.” I was like, “Yeah.” Got home and they saw it and they were like, “Oh, wow.” They went in and did all their chores. And I was like, “Okay, we need to keep your brother in because he’s nonverbal, autistic, he’s like five years old, he doesn’t understand.” And so we kept him in the house and I forgot when it was when it started raining and their dad was on his way home from work down in Homa, which is about two hours south from here.

And I told him what happened with the explosion and the fire. And he said, “Well, I’m driving through the rain. I’m driving through rain coming home and it was already raining here.” And he was coming up on 55. And when he got home, the front of his truck, he had a white work truck. And if you know a lot of these companies, they use white work trucks. It was covered. You can see it. And he was in his truck driving that home. He came in, took all his shoes and everything off and all that. And that night, basically, we all went to bed and the next morning got up … Well, let’s go back, basically the night it happened, I think the news and stuff we started talking about it and everybody was sending pictures in of all their vehicles covered in the black rain, their yard and everything.

I took a picture and I sent it into the news channel and they ended up posting it. I forgot which one it was, but it is crazy. That truck was still stained for the longest from all the black rain that fell on it. But the next day, I brought my son to school and stuff, and I was a fool. I didn’t know what was in the chemicals, nothing. The black rain didn’t know. I took my hand and I wiped it across the hood of my car and I looked at it and I was like, “Oh, wow.” My hand was black just from wiping it on my car and I just brushed it off on my clothes and stuff. And

I went around my yard and I started taking pictures of all our fruit trees. We have figs, peaches, pears, olive. We have all these different fruit trees that aren’t in our yard. We have blueberry bushes, blackberry, muskedine vines. We have several garden And two gardens and a flower bed. And we always plant every spring in these for us and for our kids so they can have natural food to eat and not stuff from out the store. And I started going around and I saw all our plants. Everything had black soot on them. You can see it. Not just that, it was on our truck. It was on the camper all over the ground. We have a Starlink and that Starlink was sitting in front of the camper. It was covered. You can see all the black spots. If I opened it up, the case right now, it’s still stained on top of the star link of all the black soot.

I had mentioned about my son being nonverbal and autistic. So for several months, I did not let him outside. He has a pool after the explosion with Smitty’s. My dad got them a swimming pool about two years ago and that swimming pool has not been touched since because it rained in it and created a ring around the pool. His swing said he has not played on. The trampoline he got has not been played on because I don’t know how it’s going to affect him. He’s nonverbal. He’s autistic. He cannot tell me if anything is wrong. Even going out in the yard, we wear tennis shoes and stuff and we’re what, seven, eight months out? And I’m still scared to have my kids go play in our own yard that is 10 and a half miles away from Smitty’s because we don’t know exactly how toxic our ground is.

Our gardens, we didn’t even plant anything in them this year because if anything grows in it, we’re going to get sick from it. To know there’s no help and that our government officials are not trying to help us in any way, shape or form. It’s happening. It really is. And to want to be heard, it’s real scary to speak up because you don’t want people to judge you. That is the biggest thing. People will sit there and look at you and judge you for what you’re saying, but you’re standing up for what’s right for you, your family, and your community. Because if we don’t, then who will? Who will speak for us? Who will speak for our kids? I spoke about my little boy being nonverbal and I want to put him in a school system. I do. I want to put him somewhere because he goes to ABA therapy.

He needs to learn to be with other kids. And I don’t know if you saw, I started a petition to close the Rosen Montessori school. And I started that because a friend of mine, her little boys, two of her boys went to that school. They went home daily and they would have black soot on their shoes from the school.

Their water bottle was covered. Not just that. They just basically washed the school down. They pressure washed it and washed everything down the drains. The school board and the principal, they said it was fine for all these kids to come back and it was safe and it’s okay. And to be honest, that did not sit well with me. Rosalind Montessori was one of the schools that I was considering putting my son in because her two kids were doing wonderful there. And after all this happened, I took a step back and I looked and I was like, “I’m not going to risk that. I’m not going to risk putting my child in an environment where he can get sick and he cannot tell me what’s wrong.” And there’s kids right now that go there that have had nosebleeds, dealt with strep throat multiple times, headaches, the whole nine.

And they’re saying it’s safe and it’s not okay. It’s not.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I wanted to ask about that because like I’ve told residents of East Palestine, Ohio, Conyers, Georgia, and other areas where folks have gone through these types of horrific disasters and experienced the kind of nightmare that you all are describing in Roseland. I never want to reduce you and your town to the worst thing that happened to them. And I want to, for people listening who have never been to Roseland, maybe never even been to Louisiana, I want people to understand that you all are just working people like them and we’re all just living our lives, trying to try to make a good life for ourselves and our families. So I wanted to ask if you could just both describe a little bit like, what is this area like? What was your life like before the explosion and how has this all changed the life that you had before August of last year?

Allie Ponvelle:

For us, we spent a lot of time outside. We like fires, picking things out of our garden, eating vegetables, eating the fruit, playing in waterways, going fishing, things like that. We have a pond across from us that we usually go fishing. I have not touched it, have not gone near it because I don’t know how toxic it is. Even just going to town, I’m going to be honest, I try not to go to a meet the actual city limits because it is so close because we don’t know how bad it is there. We basically say to ourselves or we go all the way to Covington to go do our grocery shopping. The fear of stepping into town and being closer to the vicinity, I do not like. So I will say we spend a lot of times indoors. Our life has kind of changed a bit.

Instead of being outside, enjoying our family time outside, we’re in our homes and being cooped up in your home mentally, it will start messing with you. It does because you don’t have the life that you had before and it’s totally changed.

Arlene Bankston:

Okay. So for us, this was the land that my husband grew up on. We bought the family home after his dad passed away. I had just retired, his dad passed away, and so this was our retirement plan. My husband’s still working. I mean, I worked for the state, so I could retire at 30 years, but he’s always wanted to have cattle. So that was his retirement plan, not a 401k or anything like that. The cattle would be the secondary income. That’s just always been his dream. And when we moved out here, at first he said, because I’m trying to do everything that I can do while he’s at work. And he was like, “But this was my dream.” I said, “We’re in this together and I’ve never been happier.

I can’t explain it. All the jobs that I’ve done in my life, this is my favorite.” So I was learning to garden. I’m like, “Allie, I had a vegetable garden, couldn’t eat any of those vegetables because they’re covered with black stuff and I don’t want to plant anything in the ground because I don’t know what the long-term effects are, what that would be. So I’m not planting a garden this year, but that was me. I wanted to live off my land as much as I could.” So that’s changed because I can’t do that. I mean, I have some raised beds, so yeah, I can go dig all the dirt out of there. And instead of getting fertilized dirt from in my pasture, from where the cows fertilize it, I have to go buy dirt for my raised beds. That’s not exactly living off your land.

There’s a lot more cost factor in that going outside. I mean, it is what it is. I have to go outside sometimes. There’s work I have to do, but the fear with my grandkids. For instance, we have found out that our well water is quite contaminated, so we don’t drink that. We don’t brush our teeth with it. And so one day when I finally let the kids play outside a little bit, we’re playing in the driveway, basically, the gravel and they’re just running around. They’ve got the rubber boots. We had let them feed the cows because we did bring the cows back. We had to, after a time, we had bush hogged and let the old grass settle and kind of hope for the best because we had not learned about what to do to remediate. We’ve since put out ammonium nitrate because that’s supposed to help, but who knows?

It’s just a chance we had to take. But anyway, we had let the kids play in the driveway and they were playing in mud puddles and then they’re splashing, they’re boys, they’re splashing. And I had to stop myself from completely freaking out because you want to stay calm with your kids. And I realized they’ve got this water all over them. I don’t know what’s in the dirt that’s made the mud that’s in the puddle. And I’m like, “We got to go inside, take a bath.” I get them inside. I’m like, “We got to take a bath. I’ve got this stuff all over you and I’m just breaking out. ” Because I’m so worried that my grandkids are going to get sick with something that I exposed them to. I don’t want to keep my kids away all the time. So anyway, I’m freaking out, we’re taking a bath and I’m always telling them, “Don’t drink the water, whatever.” And so they’re in the bathtub playing and one of them goes to sip water out the faucet and I was like, “You can’t drink the water.” And my grandson, being the very overthinking, intelligent kid that he is, says, “Gigi, if the water’s that bad, why aren’t we bathing in it?

” I literally almost fell apart at that point because he’s not wrong, but we don’t have a choice and that’s all I could tell him. So I don’t let fear control me, but it’s always in the back of my mind. We don’t know the long-term effects. We both had some health issues and people will say, “Oh, well, you could have had that. ” Yeah, I could have. I could have. It’s very possible. So yeah, it’s hard to prove that it’s from that. But when you start having a lot of things that you didn’t have before, I saw somebody yesterday that I haven’t seen in over a year and I had walked up to, I went to my former workplace for an event and I had walked up to one of my former coworkers and she was faced the other direction in our office and she goes, “Oh my gosh, I didn’t recognize your voice.

You sound so different.” I knew my voice had changed. I felt like it had because my voice is, my throat is chronically scratchy and I felt like my voice had become a little more raspy, but people that see me every day or hear me every day don’t realize it. But hearing that from someone, it was like, “Well, there’s a little confirmation.” So yeah, life is now just kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is a very rural area, so a lot of country people, it’s been hard to get the whole community together because there are some people fearful of losing their jobs. There are some people just not really sure because they’re not technology savvy, so they don’t see what’s going on. And so that’s what it’s like here, is kind of pulling teeth to get people to be involved. We met a pastor, a local pastor.

The churches here are pretty, by choice, pretty segregated. It’s not that we don’t … We’re like backwoods, the black people can’t go to church with us. They do go to church. We go to church together, but for the most part, there’s a lot of churches that are predominantly black. And I noticed when someone had a rally to have the roads open back when the roads were still hosed in front of Smitty’s, this pastor, Reverend Vernon, had a rally at the store there to open the roads. And I noticed myself that it was like the white people’s over here and the black peoples over here. I’m not like that. I’m going to go talk to everybody. And we finally, with Reverend’s help, I think that we’re finally getting everybody to work together and realize that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to work together, everybody, bring everybody together.

It’s not a you problem or a you problem, it’s an us problem and we’re not going to get anywhere until we stand together. And so like a lot of people with the protests, we’ve had people accuse us of, “Oh, that was a paid protest.” Well, paid protesters, those usually end up in riots and fights. So no, there was no paid protesters. We weren’t paid to be there. I don’t think anybody in Roseland besides the owners of Smitty’s had the kind of money to pay protestors.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, this is always the part that blows me away as someone who covers protests a lot. I’m on the ground filming protests here in Baltimore, in DC. I’m speaking with folks in small rural communities like yours where people are doing protests, whether it’s because a plan exploded in your backyard or there’s a small no kings thing happening. I go to all these types of protests and I have so many people online saying, “Oh, those are paid protesters.”

Arlene Bankston:

This is the world we’re in now, right?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And I’m like, “Bro, do you know how bad the economy is? Do you know how much everyone is strapped for cash?” If someone was paying people to go protest, don’t you think they’d be a lot bigger than what you’re seeing in my coverage? Yeah. I’d be like, “Where do I get my check?”

Arlene Bankston:

If it was paid protestors, I’m quite sure there’d be a whole lot more people need money.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. It makes no sense, but we can save that for another day. It’s a whole

Arlene Bankston:

Nother show.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s a whole other show. And I want to stress to you both and to our listeners, this is not a one and done interview. We’re going to stay on this. I would love to talk with you more. I’d love to talk with more of your neighbors and for us to also play any kind of role in hosting panels with folks from different sacrifice zones that you’ve connected with. So I’m really grateful to meet you both and to know you both now. And I, as always, just wish that we were meeting under less horrifying circumstances, but there can be some light that comes out of this darkness and anything that we can do to lift up the light that you all are bringing in talking to people, refusing to stay silent, refusing to go away, demanding answers about what you were exposed to, demanding accountability from Smitty’s and the EPA, that’s the real work.

And we’re here to make sure that people know about it. So I say that all to say that I know we got to wrap up in a couple minutes here, but we are going to have Arlene and Allie back. We’re going to stay on this story. And I wanted to just sort of round things out by asking if y’all could keep talking about where things stand now, like with Smitty’s, with the government, but also with these grassroots efforts that you’re a part of to bring your community and other chemically impacted communities together. So could you just tell us a little more about where things stand now and what folks out there listening to this can do to support y’all?

Arlene Bankston:

I was asked to be a board member on a nonprofit that was started in East Palestine by Jamie Wallace and Christina Seisloff. It’s called Chemically Impacted Communities Coalition. It’s a nonprofit that tries to get information out there to other chemically impacted communities, helpful information. This is what you’re going through. You’re not alone. This is what you need to do. This is a detox bath, something simple as detox baths. Something simple as sharing symptoms to say there are people that are having symptoms and they don’t know it could be related to what they’ve been exposed to. So sharing the information and just giving support, that’s what CICC does. And so I’ve joined that group. We’ll be having some fundraisers. We’ve had some panel discussions and some fundraisers and because what those funds are used for is to go share information and help other communities. Jamie of her own dime came down here.

Her and her friend, Tamara, came down here basically to share information with people here about health effects and things like that when we had a town hall. So that is one of the grassroots efforts that’s happening. We have another nonprofit that we’re working with in our group here called North Shore River Watch. It’s run by Matthew Allen. He’s been doing this for 19 years. We met him through this because what he does is he fights for our safe waterways. I’m just going to basically put it that way. It’s a lot involved, but he has helped us with so much information and learning how to dig through files with DEQ and how to fight for certain laws and things like that. So we’re looking at legislation going forward in the future to try to possibly stop this pollution because right now Smitty’s is still dumping into the gravel pit ponds legally and illegally dumping.

We have drone flyers that fly near Smitty’s and get a lot of this on drone footage because we have the last pond that is connected to the Tangbo River. So even if that pond is owned by someone else, we can fly over that because it’s Tangible River. It’s public property and we see oil sheens on it all the time. And so we’re just trying to bring attention so that the government will pay attention. If you can help us by sharing our post, the more attention we get, the more the government can’t just be quiet because if there’s enough attention, then it’s going to have a negative impact on them when they don’t do anything for this. Fishing and hunting and all that is big here, and you’re talking about affecting the river and the wildlife. So people need to pay attention and help share the information and help fight for our river.

Allie Ponvelle:

As I mentioned, I started a petition to close down Roselyn Montessori School. It is still up. Virtually, we have 231 signatures when we did the protest. I did go live. I do a lot of our … When we do our town hall meetings, I do go live and share that out for our community because we have a lot of people who cannot make that, make the events or be there. So they like to watch. But on there, we do talk about the petition and what you can sign. In person, I had about 70 signatures in person, so we’re well over 300. We’re working our way up trying to figure out how many we need. So if you would like the link for the petition, I can give that to you so you can pass that out to everyone so we can get it signed. Also, all my lives, you can see all our information.

You can go back and watch and see all our test results that Scott has given us. And that way people can … Well, you can see it and others can too.

Arlene Bankston:

Contact us on Facebook. I’m listed as Arlene Hodges Bankston. If you have concerns for your area or want to help in any way, we’ve gotten truckloads of water because we have water issues here, we’ve gotten truckloads of water delivered from people from Keep Waverly moving in Iowa. Thank you, Matthew Schneider. You can also join the Blue Shirt Justice League. We have shirts for sale and dog bandanas for sale. That helps support the Blue Shirt Justice League, which helps Scott Smith do some of his testing because all that costs money. He flies all over the country to help us. And so that’s some ways that people can help as well. Thank y’all for the time.

Allie Ponvelle:

Also, if you want to find me, my name is Allie. On Facebook, it’ll be Allie Biscuits Pondville. Long story on the biscuits is a nickname, but if you want to go and watch the lives, you can. You can follow me, sign the position. It’d be a great way to help us out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Arlene Bankston, a resident of Roseland, Louisiana and Ally Ponville, who lives in Ameet, the town right next to Roseland. Both of them live right by the Smitty Supply Plant where the massive, horrifying explosion and chemical fire happened in August of last year. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to the realnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Solidarity forever.