Red, toxic mud and dust have long bothered this Louisiana community. A fix is in the works.

Mar. 13—For years, toxic and slightly radioactive red mud and dust from the waste ponds of a shuttered alumina plant have bothered neighborhoods near Gonzales.

But local leaders are working on a solution to the problem that the plant's owner hasn't yet solved despite past commitments to state regulators to fully finance the operation's complete closure.

The hundreds of acres of waste could be permanently capped with dirt under a plan developing between the state, Ascension Parish government and the site's owner. But officials warned that the plan for the LAlumina red mud ponds off La. 44 in Burnside could take time to flesh out and design properly.

Parish President Clint Cointment and new state Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Aurelia Giacometto visited the site Friday along with LAlumina officials. Cointment said the parish has hired Elos Environmental to design the closure plans and expects the parish will provide dirt, possibly some manpower and also contract out for a firm to cover the huge project.

"But this is a long journey. And I don't want to say that this is ... will be solved in a few months because it won't," Cointment said in parish government-recorded comments during the tour of the site Friday. "What we're going to do is try to tackle some of the trouble spots first and start to minimize the red dirt issue."

LAlumina has a closure trust fund that could be tapped for at least some of the work, a company official said.

Aaron Templet, LAlumina's plant superintendent and its sole employee at the site, estimated on Wednesday that the site contains 15 million tons of red mud waste.

LAlumina's operations have been shuttered since layoffs of 300 workers in August and September 2020. The company has been trying to sell its aging processing plant as the economics of the business have faltered.

The company, which is affiliated with Arthur Metals, a startup founded a few years ago by alumina traders, enacted the layoffs less than a year after it bought the operation and after receiving a $7.2 million Paycheck Protection Program loan to keep people employed. The shutdown also triggered lawsuits from contractors and complaints from union members who say they were owed money or benefits.

The red mud pond closures would mean another factor weighing against any restart of production of alumina at the plant.

The facility, which opened in the late 1950s and has been called Ormet, Almatis, and LAlumina, was among the first major industrial operations in Ascension Parish. It created alumina, which is a precursor of aluminum, but produced the red mud waste as an unavoidable byproduct.

When Ormet first opened in the area, it was surrounded by agricultural fields and open land. Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the parish government authorized new neighborhood construction near the red mud impoundments, including several large, higher-end developments like Pelican Point and Pelican Crossing, which abuts the surrounding levee of the one of the impoundments.

Conflicts soon emerged as wind would pick up the red mud during dry spells. Residents have reported red dust devils and cars and homes repeatedly covered with the red dust, especially after LAlumina shut operations.

Last summer's drought sparked a new round of problems. An improved sprinkler system designed to wet the red mud and keep it from becoming airborne ran into problems because of low water pressure in old and clogged pipes surrounding the impoundments, company officials said.

Giacometto, the DEQ secretary, authorized using a surveillance drone at LAlumina to survey the five different red mud impoundments sprawled across more the 400 acres, parish officials said. The review "will play a crucial role in identifying the extent of the issue, informing cost estimates, and determining the necessary next steps."

Giacometto also cautioned the impoundments' neighbors to have patience, saying the drone flights would be part an effort to ensure that DEQ and other entities "measure twice and cut once" for the planned closures.

"So, that means that we're taking a measured approach so that we can alleviate without having to have mistakes that can arise during this process," she said.

The red mud ponds in Burnside are among several legacy industrial dumping sites in the Mississippi River region between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Operations in Geismar, Convent, Gramercy and western St. James use mined rock to make alumina or to make agricultural fertilizers and then dump either red mud or gypsum tailings in large piles and impoundments. Both wastes are toxic and slightly radioactive, with limited reuse options.

One of the those companies, Mosaic Fertilizer, is currently seeking a major expansion of its phosphogypsum pile near its Uncle Sam plant in Convent. It has set aside a few hundred million dollars to cap the pile, which could wind being 300 feet tall once production ends.

Through the years, when LAlumina and its precessors sought permits to continue dumping red mud in the impoundments, those officials had to provide long-term closure plans and make signed commitments to set aside the money in a trust fund to fulfill those plans, records show.

Several years ago, DEQ officials told LAlumina and its predecessor that the fund was short of the necessary cash, but Templet, the LAlumina official, said his company has pumped in more money since then.

He said the fund has about $4.5 million to $5 million currently and that amount likely would be enough to cap two of the five impoundments. Those two impoundments, which contain red mud dumped in a drier condition, are believed to be the major source of flying red dust.

"DEQ wants to make sure that the funds that we have in there will be enough to close the problematic areas, right, and I believe we have enough to do that," Templet said.

He said drone flights were conducted Monday that will be used to engineer the closure plan and to refine the cost.

The other three impoundments have an upper layer of water that covers the waste dirt and keeps it from becoming airborne, though Templet said all five impoundments would eventually have to be covered with dirt.

He said the parish's offer to provide dirt from drainage and other projects to cap the impoundments could mean significant cost savings for any closure plan.

Templet said he had asked for the parish's assistance because he said, as the operation's sole current employee, the closure task isn't something he can handle by himself.

"They have all the people that are able to do all this stuff that I can't do on my own," he said.

Because LAlumina's process refined raw bauxite ore mined from underground, the remaining red mud tailings are laced with naturally occurring heavy metals and radioactive particles.

While deemed safe for the public stacked in the impoundments, the mud has slight radioactive emissions that have inhibited past attempts to reuse the mud for other purposes.

In March 2023, LAlumina signed an agreement with ElementUS Minerals to allow the company to extract heavy metals and other elements from the red mud for reuse, including critical rare earth elements.

Templet said the company is still exploring that plan and the use of the waste for road base, once the metals and other elements are extracted.

Templet said the company has a pilot facility on LAlumina's site and believes it could dig out sections of the red mud for processing even after it is capped.

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