ROSELAND, La. — For 11 days after an oil and lubricant factory blew up less than a mile from her home, Millie Simmons could not stand outside for more than 10 minutes at a time.
“I could hardly breathe,” the 58-year-old child care worker said outside her home on Sept. 4. Soot and an oily substance still speckled the outside of her house and her lawn chairs from the Aug. 22 explosion at Smitty’s Supply.
Now two weeks since the blast, her nose is still “stopped up,” she said. And 20 miles away in Loranger, where she works at the child care center, she said children are still not allowed to play outside because leaders are concerned about how safe it is for young ones to breathe in what was left behind in the fire’s aftermath.
“My administrator, still to this day, is afraid to let the kids come outside,” she said. “We just don’t know what is in the air.”
The explosion marked the South’s first mandatory evacuation of residents due to an industrial disaster this year. For Black communities across the region, they said Roseland has become one of the first tests of whether new federal and regional Environmental Protection Agency leaders can provide practical assistance in the wake of catastrophe.
An EPA report said its tests show “no imminent threat to public health.” Local residents, who are coughing as they are scrubbing away an unknown material, say they are not so sure. Across the majority-Black town of 1,200 people, an oily substance remains splattered across gravestones, etched into the dirt and creeks, and stuck on roofs and the side paneling of cars, homes, stores, and restaurants.
Regional EPA officials are telling people to wash the soot off any outside surfaces of their homes and to wash their hands if they come into contact with it, but there are still no definitive answers on what chemicals are contained in the black, oily sludge streaked across residents’ properties. It is not typically standard for residents to handle possibly hazardous debris entirely on their own after an explosion — especially when oil or chemical contamination is plausible. However, an EPA spokesperson said the fire did not warrant providing residents with federal cleanup support.
The EPA announced last week that toxic substances were found in soot in Roseland following the explosion, but the agency only sampled water sources and not the soil on residents’ properties. The analysis of water samples detected arsenic, barium, chromium, lead, and other hazardous materials like cancer-causing nitrobenzene. According to the Tangipahoa Parish government, more than 2 million gallons of oil and contaminated water have been collected and removed from the environment in Roseland.
Normally, the federal government instructs the public to err on the side of safety while larger cleanup operations are underway after an event like the explosion. These efforts, usually led by EPA and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers workers, may not reach every block in the first days, but the operations are designed to prevent citizens from unwittingly exposing themselves to dangerous chemicals and industrial pollutants.
In 2023, a similar warehouse fire rocked the town of Richmond, Indiana, which is 80% white. The EPA’s response involved rapid deployment of cleanup workers, extensive community air monitoring, and hazardous debris removal from over 300 properties. It also included sampling and collection of asbestos, lead, and other toxic materials at no cost to residents.
Richmond’s fire contained asbestos, an EPA spokesperson told Capital B, which triggered a larger response, but the agency’s “risk evaluation” of the Roseland fire at Smitty’s did not merit soil sampling nor cleanup support.
The agency’s “cleanup objective” was to “remove all recoverable runoff material from the Smitty’s Supply site, Tangipahoa River and nearby ponds and ditches,” the spokesperson said.
In Roseland, the response to the explosion left Black residents largely responsible for cleaning up chemical residue themselves.
“It is not fair, and some people are really hurting about all this,” said Jimmy Zander, a 42-year-old resident who once worked for Smitty’s Supply.
Van Showers, the mayor of Roseland, stood before residents at a town hall on Sept. 2 with little more clarity to offer his neighbors and constituents.
“As far as the type of chemicals that were released, we still don’t have all the answers to that,” he said. “I worry about what they tell us … we need to clean up and all that, but what about the elderly that can’t do that. What about the handicapped that can’t do that?”
Showers encouraged those who feel they have been physically impacted to go to the doctor, but the share of Roseland residents without health care coverage is almost double the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Despite still feeling “drained” and “sluggish,” Simmons has not seen a doctor herself.
“What is the doctor going to look for if they don’t know what was in the air?” she said.
Scott Smith, a nationally recognized soil contamination expert, traveled to Roseland immediately after the explosion because of potential risks he saw due to a lack of an EPA response.
“If you don’t look for chemicals like benzene, you can say you didn’t find it,” he explained during the first week after the disaster. On Sept. 9, he will hold a town hall in Roseland to share findings from soil sampling he conducted after the fire.
The disaster happened the same day that a national yearslong study was released. Researchers found that every year, 91,000 people die prematurely in the U.S. due to pollution events from the country’s oil and gas industry, like the explosion, but those deaths are not spread evenly.
Black and Asian people are most likely to experience these negative health outcomes from oil and gas. The study concluded that pollution from the industry causes 10,350 preterm births, 216,000 childhood cases of asthma, and 1,610 cancer cases every year. The study found the worst impacts are in Texas and Louisiana due to “downstream” oil and gas activities, which are when crude oil is refined into a range of petroleum products and then transported via pipelines, ships, trucks, and rail to other plants and retail outlets, like Smitty’s in Roseland.
Each year, thousands of emergencies in connection with oil spills or the release of hazardous substances are reported across the country. However, under the Trump administration, the safeguards protecting communities from the harmful impacts of these events are slowly being undone.
In March, the EPA launched efforts to dismantle the strengthened Risk Management Program rules designed to prevent and respond to chemical disasters. The rollback targets nearly 12,000 chemical facilities and strips away protections that require better disaster prevention, broader worker involvement, stronger community transparency, and planning for extreme weather risks. Experts warn this directly puts workers, first responders, and fenceline communities in greater danger. They also say it makes evacuations during incidents more likely, with increased risks of long-term health, housing, and economic harms.
Every 2.5 days on average, a fatal or life-threatening chemical incident occurs at a chemical facility, according to Earthjustice, one of the country’s largest environmental law firms.
“We’ve been here before, and the losers are always the families, workers, and first responders,” said Adam Kron, an Earthjustice attorney. “Chemical explosions force entire neighborhoods to evacuate. First responders have died rushing into disasters they weren’t warned about. Workers have suffered burns, lung damage, and worse, all because companies cut corners to save money.”
The agencies typically tasked with responding to and cleaning up in the aftermath of these disasters — the EPA and the Army Corps — are also now operating with smaller staffs because of budget cuts. Hundreds of workers trained in toxic clean up have also been let go from the EPA since the start of the new administration.
“The EPA should be implementing its chemical disaster safety, not rolling it back,” Kron said.
For Simmons and her neighbors, the lack of federal presence has been palpable. City officials and nonprofits have been handing out cleaning supplies at City Hall, but that is about it, she said.
“They pass out chemicals, and I guess that’s their way of helping,” she said. “But nobody has told us anything. We’re just out here doing it ourselves.”
What the aftermath of the Roseland explosion underscores is the unequal weight such events place on vulnerable communities. A largely Black, rural town with higher poverty, lower health care coverage, and limited funding is now left with little help from the federal government.
Some residents told Capital B they worry about speaking out, knowing jobs and family incomes are tied to the industry’s byproducts, which now blanket their yards. Others simply press on, like Simmons, uncertain if the shortness of breath she feels will linger or disappear with time.
Zander told Capital B that the unacknowledged labor of residents is a reminder that environmental injustice isn’t only about where pollution happens, but about who shoulders its cleanup, who gets answers, and who is left holding the rag.
“They got my wife’s grandma out here wiping down her own home,” he said. “What is going to happen to her?”
A class action lawsuit has been filed by Roseland residents seeking damages related to the mandatory evacuation ordered for people living near the plant.
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