From a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, Russia, an army of well-paid “trolls” has tried to wreak havoc all around the Internet—and in real-life American communities, including St. Mary Parish.
The New York Times reports it was around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year when Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message.
“Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road.
“A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted.
The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance. Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster.
Arthur quickly made a few calls and found that none of his employees had sent the alert. He called Columbian Chemicals, which reported no problems at the plant. Roughly two hours after the first text message was sent, the company put out a news release, explaining that reports of an explosion were false.
When The New York Times called Arthur a few months later, he dismissed the incident as a tasteless prank, timed to the anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Personally I think it’s just a real sad, sick sense of humor,” he says. “It was just someone who just liked scaring the daylights out of people.”
Authorities, he says, have tried to trace the numbers that the text messages had come from, but with no luck. The FBI, however, says the investigation is still open. The hoax was just one in a wave of similar attacks during the second half of last year. It turns out the Russian trolls had created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers, as well as a Wikipedia page for the supposed disaster.
