The contrast couldn’t be more stark: Only a chain-link fence, camouflaged by thick bushes and mighty oak trees, separates residents from a Shell chemical plant and the Motiva oil refinery. On one side is a verdant park, with a gazebo and a children’s slide, surrounded by a handful of small, tidy clapboard homes with well-tended lawns. On the other side is a huge industrial zone: low-slung concrete and corrugated buildings, and vast storage tanks connected by a maze of thick pipes. Smokestacks spew clouds of noxious chemicals.
This is the Diamond district of Norco, a Mississippi Delta hamlet about 25 miles west of New Orleans. It’s like a ghost town now — empty and quiet, even at midday. Tall grasses have overtaken open fields where homes once stood. This used to be a thriving African-American neighborhood of 1,500 with roots that go back more than 200 years. Today, it’s home only to a couple of dozen families.
Ever since Shell built the plant in the 1950s, locals who lived near the fence line complained of the acrid rotten-egg smell that permeated the neighborhood, and of the toll they believed toxic exposures took on their health — alarmingly high rates of asthma, uncommon cancers, rare autoimmune disorders and respiratory illnesses. There were frequent accidents and two fatal explosions, including one in 1988 that killed seven workers, injured 48 others and forced more than 4,000 area residents to evacuate.
Yet since the mid-1970s, Shell Oil had rebuffed residents’ demands to be relocated from the contaminated properties, and they even lost a 1997 lawsuit because they couldn’t convince a jury that plant emissions posed a health risk.
