“Toxic Gumbo” by Michael Stahl

A little more than a century ago, down a winding, serviceable waterway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, there was an abundance of green along its shores. Sugarcane stalks matured ten-feet high, and glistening men freely harvested their livelihoods here. When the yellow sun peaked and their arms tired, they’d cut open a stem and suck the clear, energizing nectar. Beyond them, the Mississippi River stretched a mile wide, appearing any number of colors depending on the tide and the time of day. Rickety boats glided past the farmers, puffing white clouds of nothing but hot water that dissipated after a brief stint in the air.

What those fieldworkers likely didn’t know was that thousands of feet underneath them and in the depths of a sprawling gulf a few hundred miles south were countless salt domes storing immeasurable amounts of black oil about to be discovered.

A chemical fog hangs in the horizon and the nearby fields of River Road in Port Allen.

By 1906 the Louisiana legislature passed the state’s first oil and gas conservation law. The state’s inaugural natural gas pipeline was laid two years later, and shortly thereafter Standard Oil built a refinery in Baton Rouge.

The ExxonMobil company occupies that plant today, and with an approximate daily input capacity of 500,000 barrels of petroleum, it is currently the second largest such construct in the United States. The site is also the de facto starting point of what is often called “Cancer Alley,” a roughly hundred-mile portion of the Mississippi River between the state capital and New Orleans whose landscape has been vastly transformed over the past century. Its banks are littered with more than 140 industrial plants, and nearly one quarter of the world’s petrochemical production takes place there.

A multi-pipe “overpass” is diverted above a public access road that cuts through an oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“You drive down these public access roads right through this labyrinth of rusting pipes,” said photographer Giles Clarke, who visited the ExxonMobil plant and the outlying area in October of 2013. “These are huge, huge complexes…”

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Originally published at narrative.ly. Click the link to read the complete story.