The huge US toxic fire shrouded in secrecy: ‘I taste oil in my mouth’
Louisianans say a major accident at a sprawling Marathon refinery caused health issues. The company insists there were ‘no offsite impacts’
At 8.04am on 25 August last year, Darnell Alboudoor watched a plume of black smoke blanketing the sky and rolling in the direction of her family home.
A stench like burning oil filled the air on that piping hot summer morning, as Alboudoor, 54, looked in the direction of the sprawling petroleum refinery, which sat a few hundred feet from her back yard. She called 911.
“I’m just wondering what’s going on over there,” she told the operator. “Nobody tells us nothing.”
“They’re handling it,” the operator responded. “Nothing to worry about.” There was no need to evacuate, Alboudoor was told, as she expressed her concerns over the fumes.
“I just want to know why we weren’t aware of this,” Alboudoor said. “Why are we just finding out about it now?”
Unbeknown to Alboudoor and the thousands of other south-east Louisiana residents who lived next door, the facility had been leaking for more than 13 hours. A storage tank containing at least 26,000 barrels of the flammable hydrocarbon naphtha had been on fire for about an hour and a half.
Twenty-six minutes before Alboudoor’s 911 call, a state environment official had recorded an alarmingly high reading of toxic air pollutants at a location on the plant’s fence line.
But there had been no alert. No blaring sirens. No word from local emergency responders.
It was an example, residents and experts say, of the embedded culture of secrecy surrounding the hundreds of chemical plants and refineries that dominate the heavily polluted region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley”.
The facility, operated by the oil giant Marathon Petroleum, is the third largest refinery in the US, strategically situated near the Gulf of Mexico and along the banks of the Mississippi River. Its importance to the multibillion-dollar corporation, and purportedly to Louisiana’s economy, has largely overpowered the concerns of the communities that sit a stone’s throw from its stacks.
Residents of these lower-income, historically Black neighborhoods have been caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war. The Biden-Harris administration has sought tougher enforcement in the region, while the state, under the leadership of Donald Trump’s far-right allies, has pushed back in favor of industry – making the outcome of the 2024 presidential race all the more important to people who live in the Marathon fenceline communities of Garyville, Lions and Reserve.
Marathon and local government officials have maintained that “no offsite impacts” were detected during the entire four-day episode, citing company, state and third-party air monitoring.
But interviews and a review of an array of records by the Guardian in collaboration with the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture – including air-monitoring data, police reports, 911 calls, videos and photographs captured by residents, satellite imagery, 3D simulations, medical records and internal emails – have raised significant doubts about official and company claims. They also reveal how the petroleum giant may have minimized the episode in its reporting to both federal and state governments.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data indicates that the leak and the fire, which blazed over three days, produced one of the largest accidental releases of flammable chemicals since 1994, when the agency began monitoring such hazardous facility incidents across the US.
Eleven of the 17 residents interviewed in Garyville, Lions and Reserve told the Guardian they experienced symptoms associated with chemical exposure, including breathing problems, migraines, burning eyes and sore throats. Some sought medical attention and one later became critically ill, linking his symptoms to the fire.
The St John parish government did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Marathon did not respond to a series of detailed questions, but said in a statement that it operated its facilities “with the highest commitment to the safety and health of our workers and the community”. The company said this included working with and notifying “regulatory authorities and other stakeholders during and after an incident with integrity”.
Forty-five minutes after Alboudoor’s 911 call, a second storage tank containing 40,000 barrels of diesel would also be up in flames. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite captured images of the smoke cloud from space. Emergency-response officials continued to tell concerned residents that all was under control, according to a review of 175 emergency calls made during the fire and released under a public records request.
The principal at a nearby high school called in at 8.19am: “I’m trying to find out if it will affect our school in any way.”
“We’re not hearing anything about it being a threat to anyone,” the dispatcher replied.
A resident in Garyville called at 9.49am: “So the Marathon plant on fire is not a threat to nobody or what?”
“No, ma’am,” the operator responded.
Residents would not be instructed to evacuate until later that morning – 16 hours after the refinery first reported the leak.
Andrew Sterling, 74, remembered his childhood in Garyville, a few decades before the oil and chemical plants arrived. Then, the 3,500-acre plot on which Marathon currently stands was covered by sugar cane fields on the grounds of the old plantation named San Francisco. Sterling would go hunting and crawfishing with his father on the land.
The Marathon refinery came online in 1977. It later became one of the company’s most valuable assets, with a capacity to process more than half a million barrels of crude oil a day – a key contributor to Marathon’s status as the largest refiner in the country with a net income of $9.7bn last year alone. It was the last large petroleum refinery constructed in the US.
It has also left many residents concerned about the fumes and stench that emanate from across the fence line. The communities of Garyville and Lions are exposed to more toxic pollution, released by Marathon and the many other industrial plants in the area, than 99% of the US, according to a Guardian analysis of three decades of chemical-release data that the EPA requires industrial facilities to report.
Sterling, who worked as a contractor at the facility for more than a decade until 2004, was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, and he blames his illness on the toxins he was exposed to during his employment, and his lifelong status as a fenceline resident.
On the first day of the fire, he awoke at around 9am and walked out to his front porch.
“It was black,” he said of the sky. “Everything was black.”
He retreated inside, but within a few hours the smell of burning oil had made its way into his home, via the air conditioning that was turned on out of necessity. By 10am the outside temperature had already reached 92F (33C) – it was a summer of record-breaking heat and wildfires throughout Louisiana. His eyes began to burn, he recalled. He started coughing.
Still, no instructions from local authorities or the parish president, who, under the parish’s emergency operations plan – which was released to the Guardian under a public records request – holds “overall responsibility for the protection of the health, safety and welfare of residents” during an emergency.
Two blocks east, Sterling’s longtime friend Warren Glass Jr, 73, who has emphysema, recalled taking puffs on his inhaler and a portable oxygen machine he kept indoors. He started coughing and described a greasy feeling on his skin. The fire reminded him of his military service. “I thought I was back in Vietnam, in the combat zone,” he said. “The smell. The sky, lighting up.”
At 10.30am, the parish had finally announced a two-mile evacuation order as the fire blazed. “We are being assured that all of the impacts are contained to the Marathon site at this time,” said the St John parish president, Jaclyn Hotard, addressing reporters at a news conference. She described the move as “a precautionary measure”.
The parish had opened two evacuation centers at nearby schools, and provided a number for residents to call for transportation.
But the message did not filter down to many of the roughly 2,100 residents in the evacuation zone.
At 10.57am, one of Sterling’s neighbors, Rhonda Ray, was driving home from work at a nearby restaurant. Her eyes had begun to itch and she felt a growing panic as she thought about what might happen next.
Ray did not have the money to put more fuel in her car so she could evacuate. Glass owned no car at all. Both felt they had no option but to stay put. Ray shut herself indoors and drew the blinds, watching updates on the local news. Fumes began to creep into her home.
“I’m a pretty strong person,” she recalled. “I probably just tried not to think about them.”
News of the order did not reach other residents in Garyville for about another hour, when police trucks rolled down the street blaring orders to evacuate.
Sterling and his wife, Annette, left after hearing them, just before noon. His migraines grew more intense and he continued coughing, he said.
At 11.44am, around the time the couple evacuated, a 911 caller across the river in the town of Edgard – outside the evacuation zone – also reported problems.
“I’m having trouble with breathing,” she told the dispatcher as she coughed into the phone and experienced nausea. “I taste oil in my mouth.” An ambulance was dispatched.
A 3D simulation of the fire’s smoke plume – created by Forensic Architecture in collaboration with mechanical engineering experts at Imperial College London – used computational fluid dynamics, a digital model of fluid movement, along with data from a local weather station and images shot by local media and citizens, to show the plume’s growth and movement. The model suggests the plume from the Marathon fire grew to over a mile high (2km tall) and drifted in different directions throughout the first day.
At around the time the 911 caller in Edgard reported the taste of oil, the plume had begun a full 360-degree rotation, extending over the river and towards the town.
Sterling would also seek medical help the following day as his symptoms persisted, records show.
The parish hospital where both Sterling and the 911 caller in Edgard received treatment saw 18 patients in relation to the fire. All were discharged, a spokesperson said. Another area hospital run by Ochsner, the state’s largest medical provider, treated 11 patients. A spokesperson could provide no further details, citing patient privacy. A spokesperson for the Acadian ambulance service said several firefighters were treated on site for “heat-related issues”.
Nonetheless, Marathon and local government officials maintained that all impacts from the fire were contained within the refinery’s perimeter. In an accident report to the EPA, the company declared the event led to evacuations of 2,800 people but no known hospitalizations or medical treatments.
Sterling continued to worry about what he had inhaled and what he had seen. He believed it was the largest accident he had ever witnessed at the petroleum refinery nextdoor but there was no immediate way to know.
“They treat us Black folks like shit,” he said. “They don’t hire us, but we have to inhale all their shit.”
Despite the scale of the fire, the evacuation order issued by local officials lasted less than four hours.
Two schools that later evacuated had been allowed to start their classes as the chemical fire raged. A veterans home about one mile west had begun emptying its residents, but emails show the effort was halted at about 1.37pm and residents were rerouted home.
By 2.15pm on 25 August, emails show, Marathon had briefed the state’s emergency response coordinator that one tank fire had been fully extinguished and they expected the second “very small fire” to be extinguished within 30 minutes.
“All clear,” the official wrote to the Louisiana’s office of homeland security – based on Marathon’s briefing.
Ovidio Martinez and his partner, Annette Chelette, returned to their home at around 4pm – surprised to see a towering fire with a thick black plume still raging about 1,000ft from their back yard.
The couple live in Lions, a once-thriving township that has dwindled to a sliver of land hemmed in between Marathon to the west and a large grain elevator operated by the global food giant Cargill to the east.
The community diminished to just four households around 2010, after Marathon completed a $3.9bn expansion plan that almost doubled the refinery’s capacity. The oil giant has gradually bought residents out of their land as the facility expanded.
Martinez, who has proudly lived in Lions since 1974 and refused to take a buyout, had evacuated with his partner and their four-month-old great-granddaughter early in the morning, but said they were told by authorities it was safe to return.
“I didn’t feel safe,” Martinez recalled. “We took a chance coming back.”
By that afternoon, local and refinery firefighters had already used thousands of gallons of C6 suppressant foam, according to a state police report. The foam contains PFAS “forever chemicals” and is being phased out in states like California due to long-term health and contamination concerns.
Martinez photographed the plume at 6.44pm, about 12 hours after it ignited, capturing thick black smoke silhouetted against a setting afternoon sun. The naphtha fire continued to burn throughout the evening “with occasional big flare-ups”, according to the state police report.
More members of the surrounding community called 911.
“It’s billowing out smoke again,” said one caller at 7.02pm.
“You’re going to have to call Marathon because they have not contacted us yet,” said the operator.
“That’s the problem,” said the caller.
Marathon had set up its own call center to address residents’ concerns that evening. But documents obtained through a public records request show the refinery’s human resources manager, Justin Lawrence, emailed parish officials requesting they not share information about the call center too widely.
“I am really not looking to open the floodgates,” Lawrence wrote, “and hoping not to post this broadly.”
Dr Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert, said the email exchanges and 911 calls obtained by the Guardian indicated the local government’s lack of training and capability to manage such a large emergency episode.
“The parish clearly did not have the capacity to be leading the type of response the community deserved in this kind of incident,” Montano said, adding that the documents suggested that local officials, mandated to protect citizens during industrial emergencies, had in effect ceded partial control to Marathon.
“There are two sides to that. In a sense these companies are the experts in what chemicals they’re using and what their facilities are like. But because they have all the expertise and information about what is unfolding, they hold a lot of the power,” Montano said.
As residents such as Alboudoor, who had returned after evacuating, tried sleeping that first night of the fire, they described continuing fumes in their homes. Alboudoor turned off her air conditioning and wrapped blankets around the units. She lay awake in her sweltering bedroom.
Her migraines and burning throat continued for two days, she said. She sucked on lozenges and took Tylenol but didn’t seek medical help.
“What are you supposed to do in a situation like this?” she said. “I don’t have the money, so I’m not going to get a hotel room.”
By the early morning of 26 August, now into the second day of the blaze, the flames jumped to a third tank containing nearly 10,000 barrels of highly flammable gas oil, according to a state police report. And as the sun rose, more than 15 hours after authorities had told residents it was safe to return, 911 calls show Marathon advised the re-evacuation of Lions due to flare-ups.
“Tell them to get the hell out,” a deputy called in to say at 9.35am, laughing nervously.
Ten minutes later another deputy called in to clarify amid confusion.
“The entire street, you said?”
“Yep,” the dispatcher replied.
A press update sent out by the parish president’s office about eight hours after the third tank caught fire made no mention of a re-evacuation or the third tank.
Martinez was never told about the re-evacuation and remained at home as the flare-ups continued.
“Why didn’t anyone from Marathon come and tell us that?” he said. “I just don’t trust them.”
During the sampling period that covered the leak and fire, two EPA air monitors in the community of Lions recorded elevated levels of benzene, a known carcinogen. The spikes did not trigger a violation, which is based on annual averages rather than single readings, but records indicate they were the second highest concentrations of benzene Marathon has reported to the EPA since the agency began its monitoring system.
A spokesperson for Marathon later said the company had “not definitely linked the elevated readings … to a specific cause” and added that the refinery’s benzene readings had never exceeded the EPA’s annual action levels.
According to Forensic Architecture modeling, benzene concentrations in Lions exceeded acute risk levels set by the EPA well after residents were told it was safe to return.
Throughout the episode, Marathon repeatedly assured residents that its monitoring within the community continued to show “non-detectable air quality impacts”.
But shortly after the fire began on the morning of 25 August, the Louisiana department of environmental quality (LDEQ) commenced monitoring operations and noted an extremely large reading of “volatile organic compounds” – a catch-all group of gases that includes chemicals like benzene.
According to handwritten notes, a reading at a junction near Garyville recorded 250 parts per million of these chemicals.
The measurements dropped shortly after this time, as the state inspector moved farther away from the refinery. But a third-party monitoring group, CTEH, recorded unhealthy levels of PM2.5, the fine inhalable particles that can travel deep into the respiratory tract, throughout the entire episode, including a peak reading considered hazardous by the EPA. The company and the local government attributed the high reading to wildfires throughout the state, emails and reports show.
Dr Kim Terrell, a research scientist and director of community engagement at Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, questioned the dismissal of such findings, noting that even subtracting PM2.5 readings attributable to wildfires, taken at the nearest LDEQ monitor, the levels would still be hazardous.
“This is a tactic we see all too often in Louisiana – environmental regulators seize upon a convenient explanation, even when it’s contradicted by scientific data,” Terrell said, also cautioning that the handheld monitoring equipment used by the company and environmental regulators were not necessarily sensitive enough to pick up dangerous levels of other pollutants.
By early afternoon on the second day of the fire – a few hours after Marathon had called for the re-evacuation of Lions – Wayne James had been holed up at his home in the community of Reserve for about 24 hours. His coughing fits had become more intense since he drove past the plant on the fire’s first day.
The 63-year-old had lost his house during Hurricane Ida in 2021 and was living in a small Fema trailer ever since the disaster. James is a cancer survivor and lives with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He attributes both conditions to the heavy air pollution in his community, which is flanked to the east by the Denka petrochemical plant that emits the likely human carcinogen chloroprene at consistently unsafe levels. The Marathon refinery sits to the west.
As he lay in bed, his symptoms worsened and he was eventually rushed to the hospital by ambulance at 3.42pm.
Medical records show James’s blood oxygen saturation was dangerously low at the time the ambulance arrived – just 82%. He was diagnosed with hypoxia and acute respiratory distress. He drifted in and out of consciousness, he recalled, as doctors struggled to stabilize him. He was transferred to intensive care and eventually sedated and intubated for three days until he recovered.
Doctors noted that the “precipitating trigger remains unclear” – suggesting an underlying infection and potential exposure to dust during car repair work may have contributed to his critical condition. James, who has worked as a mechanic all his working life, did not realize the scale of the accident at the Marathon plant until after he was discharged. Now he is convinced his episode was triggered by the pollution from the fires at the refinery.
“I feel like a caged animal living around here,” he said. Oil and chemical plants “are killing us and there’s nothing anybody can do about it”.
Since 2021, the Biden-Harris administration has announced a number of measures aimed at improving air quality in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, including compelling facilities to plan for events like hurricanes, heatwaves and other extreme weather risks.
This federal action has been opposed by Louisiana’s newly elected Republican governor, Jeff Landry – a climate change denier who has successfully countersued the EPA to block federal civil rights investigations into whether state agencies’ industrial permitting practices have harmed Cancer Ally residents. The Republican-dominated state legislature has examined legislation to limit the use of community air monitoring in polluted neighborhoods – potentially a huge blow to measuring the health impacts of industrial accidents.
This pushback, continued industry proliferation and the perceived inaction by the local government during the Marathon incident have led some in the communities around the refinery to take matters into their own hands.
Mary Hampton, a Reserve resident and one of the key community leaders working to curb emissions at the Denka chemical plant to the east, has begun recruiting neighborhood watch captains in an effort to independently alert residents to significant events at surrounding facilities. The move was triggered by the fire at Marathon.
“It scares me when something like this happens because you don’t know where to go, how to get out,” said Hampton, who is Wayne James’s older sister. “It doesn’t have to be a fire, it can be anything – a storm, a flood. Anything.”
Experts believe that such accidents will probably become more common as the climate crisis intensifies.
“The two main factors that contributed to this emergency – a hot day and a leak of a substance with a low flash point – are situations that we should be prepared for in south Louisiana,” Terrell said. “As heatwaves become more frequent and extreme, the likelihood of such emergencies will only increase.”
By the morning of 27 August, three days after the leak was first discovered, fenceline residents in Garyville reported a drop-off in smells. But private firefighters continued to battle flare-ups until the afternoon, records show.
The last 911 call that day came in at 2.18pm that afternoon.
“Since it happened, I’ve been sitting outside and I’ve been having problems breathing,” the caller said. “I don’t want to go to the hospital … I just want to put it on record that I did report it … so that if I go to bed tonight and I die in my bed, it’s all right.”
By the morning of 28 August, after the fire had burned for three days, officials expressed confidence the ordeal was over.
In the aftermath, Marathon has continued to diminish the severity of the accident.
The company did not report an estimated quantity of emissions to the state government until almost four months after the event, on 20 December, filings show.
It has self-reported the release of more than 22,000 barrels (roughly 6m lb) of naphtha during the accident, resulting in an array of toxic emissions including 1,433 lb of benzene – 143 times over the state’s daily limit.
But the company has claimed in letters to the state environment agency that no chemicals at all escaped from the second tank, which contained about 40,000 barrels of diesel. Visual evidence, including drone footage shot during the fire, clearly depicted both structures partly melted and engulfed in flames.
Separately, the company has also reported an additional 2.3m lb of “flammable mixture” from the third tank, which later caught fire, to the EPA, information not included in its filings to state regulators.
Marathon declined to answer specific questions about the discrepancies between what it told state and federal agencies.
“The investigation into the tank fire last August is ongoing, and we will report additional findings to the appropriate agencies,” a spokesperson said earlier this year.
The LDEQ did not respond to detailed questions.
The company has still not provided a cause of the fire or details of a plan to prevent a recurrence, citing an ongoing investigation to state regulators. But an EPA inspection report published last month noted “speculation is that the ignition source was a live electrical wiring” located underneath the leaking tank. The report noted company deficiencies in failing to properly inspect the tank or to repair cracks in its floor. A small entry in a state police record also indicated that plant officials believed at the time the high heat and dry grass may have also contributed to ignition.
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental advocacy group, described the ongoing delay in the company’s investigation as “excessive, even in Louisiana, a state where reporting is consistently very poor”.
Rolfes’ organization had monitored accidents at the state’s 17 oil refineries for a decade in a labor-intensive initiative that stopped in 2015.
In the absence of advocacy efforts, records suggest the state is not keeping close track either.
A public records request by the Guardian revealed that Louisiana’s own internal database of incidents for the same refineries between 2014 and 2023 was difficult to analyze. The database had initial details from incidents but was not always updated after investigations determined with greater specificity what chemicals were released.
The database showed that the number of incidents reported by these facilities declined over that period, largely in line with national trends. But the Garyville refinery reported an uptick of accidents in recent years, with more than a dozen reported to state authorities in 2022. This included an explosion in 2022, which injured six workers and shook the ground around the facility.
A Guardian review of EPA accident data at thousands of hazardous facilities across the country, released under the Freedom of Information Act (Foia) to the Data Liberation Project, indicated the accident was the second largest release of flammable chemicals in the EPA’s record across three decades.
Louisiana has the highest rate of facility accidents in the country, according to the accident database, with about 12 per 100,000 people.
The trauma of this quiet disaster has lingered among the community.
Darnell Alboudoor, who no longer felt safe after the fire, tried to negotiate with Marathon to buy out her family home, which has been passed down over seven generations. But a representative for the company would not match her valuation, she said.
“It was like a slap in my face,” she recalled. “That’s a big oil company. They’re not hurting for nothing. Just get me out of here.”
Andrew Sterling requested expense reimbursement from Marathon as a result of the evacuation, for $276 worth of bills including fuel costs and his medical co-pay, documents show. Marathon has not responded to his request, he said.
Ovidio Martinez and Annette Chelette, along with others in Garyville, received a $165 discount off their electricity bills from Marathon, but continued to worry about what chemicals their great-granddaughter may have been exposed to.
In its statement, the company said it had treated “any incident” at the huge refinery – as well as “the associated assessment of potential community impacts” – with “utmost concern and care”.
On 9 November 2023, the oil giant held a community meeting required by EPA rules after a significant accident. The event was sparsely attended, according to a source with knowledge of the proceedings. The gathering lasted just over 40 minutes and pivoted to a question-and-answer session at the end.
With hardly any community present, no questions were asked, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the Guardian.
Throughout the meeting, Jeremy Beasley, the refinery’s safety and security manager, and other spokespeople continued to assure those in attendance there was nothing to fear.
“Despite the fact that we had a very unfortunate incident,” Beasley said, “the overall impact from the short-term or long-term impact to you guys … there was no impact.”
Cover photo: In 2023, a huge fire broke out at a Louisiana refinery – right next to the cemetery where Andrew Sterling’s ancestors are buried. Composite: Forensic Architecture, Kathleen Flynn
