LSU President F. King Alexander says LSU will try to fight a barge cleaning facility proposed for a 33-acre site on the Mississippi River near the university’s intramural fields and new tennis center, as well as BREC’s Farr Park Equestrian Center.
“It puzzles me why they have to have this facility right here, right across from a neighborhood (Riverbend) that has hundreds of our faculty and staff, and a stone’s throw from thousands of students that play intramurals at night and will be downwind from these toxic releases,” Alexander tells Daily Report. “We’re talking serious health threats to our students and our faculty and their families.”
Alexander is the latest of several community leaders to add his name to the growing list of those speaking out against the proposed facility, which came to public attention in February when a Riverbend homeowners’ association was notified that DEQ was conducting a permit review of the project. Mayor Kip Holden sent a letter Wednesday to Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Secretary Peggy Hatch asking her to delay for at least 30 days a public hearing scheduled to take place on Tuesday next week.
“The number of entities and people that could be impacted both health wise and economically is astronomical,” Holden says in the letter. “Granting a permit to this company has dire consequences, many of them not known at this time.”
The barge cleaning facility is being proposed by Port Arthur, Texas-based Tubal-Cain Marine Services and would include a dockside mooring area, two working deck barges with 10 mounted 15,000-gallon storage tanks, as well as a steam boiler, transfer pumps and piping, a truck loading station and enclosed flare. According to the company’s permit application, barges will be emptied at the facility and cleaned, and residual liquids in the barges will be pumped into storage tanks and, eventually, flared.
Environmental groups held a community information session earlier this week to provide concerned residents with as much information as possible about the proposed facility. But Holden says there are still too many unanswered questions to move forward with a permit hearing next week.
Alexander says he supports Holden’s request to delay the hearing and in the meantime is beginning to mount an effort to oppose the facility.
“We’re working on it,” he says. “We have people making calls and trying to get to the person who matters the most so we can find out why this [project] needs to be in this spot.”
A spokesman for LDEQ says department officials will meet later today to discuss delaying the hearing.
“It could go either way,” says LDEQ Spokesman Greg Langley.
As of now, the hearing is scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Oliver Pollock room of the Galvez Building, 602 N. 5th St. Read Holden’s complete letter.
—Stephanie Riegel
