ROSELAND, Louisiana — As a young boy in the 1960s, almost every weekend Elbert McGee walked a half-mile with his father through the wooded streets of Roseland to the Tangipahoa River. There, he learned to swim and fish for bass, crappie, and the occasional catfish.
“We had a good, good life as children,” McGee said, unloading fishing gear from his truck. “We grew up healthy and in community.”
Today, McGee still lives in the home where he was raised. But he no longer makes the 10-minute walk to the river to fish. Instead, he drives three hours to Grand Isle, Louisiana.
That change only came after Aug. 22, 2025, when Smitty’s Supply, an oil facility in the majority-Black town, exploded. The disaster released an estimated 12 million gallons of oily liquid and chemical waste into the river, and painted hundreds of homes, churches, schools, and playgrounds with black oily streaks.
Within weeks, McGee’s then-15-year-old son, Markel, began having nosebleeds severe enough to make him miss school. A friend who is battling cancer developed a respiratory illness. Neither family has received a definitive answer as to whether those conditions are linked to the blast.
For McGee, who has a combined eight children and grandchildren, and other Roseland parents, the loss of the river has been surpassed by a much more pressing question: What does it mean to be a parent when you cannot stop harm from reaching your children?
Across Roseland and communities like it, protecting a child from refineries, railyards, and contaminated water becomes a never-ending, intimate form of vigilance — one Black parents shoulder disproportionately. Research shows Black children experience higher exposure to environmental toxins like lead, air pollution, and pesticides than children of any other race in the U.S., turning everyday parenting into an act of defense against threats they never chose and often cannot see.
“This is my home,” McGee said. “I have no other realistic option to leave.”
McGee, 63, has begun to sit with the devastating thought that he may have failed to protect his children by raising them here.“They’re not gonna be healthy here, especially doing anything in the dirt or the river,” he said.
“We can’t control the government or these companies,” he added. “We can pray on it. But you want the best for your children, and it hurts not to be able to give it to them.”
The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality did not respond to Capital B’s requests for comment. In a statement, Smitty’s Supply said: “Smitty’s has completed all of the remediation requirements under the existing CERCLA Consent Order with EPA and has submitted its final report to EPA for its concurrence.”
A toxic cocktail for children
McGee’s fears are rooted in more than parental instinct. After toxic events, children can absorb a larger dose of contamination than adults because they breathe, eat, and drink more relative to their body size, and because they often spend more time outdoors and closer to contaminated dust and soil. Their developing lungs, brains, and immune systems can be especially vulnerable.
Markel, a football player, was back in the dirt, running and breathing hard, just days after the explosion. McGee wonders if he should’ve pulled him from the sport, but it is one of the teenager’s main joys. And at the time, McGee said, he had been told Roseland was safe.
McGee now joins the Black mothers trained to keep the windows shut on a day the air smells metallic in Philadelphia, even as the house grows hot without air conditioning. The fathers, like John Ishmael Taylor in Flint, notice rashes developing on their children and begin buying bottled water they cannot comfortably afford. And the parents in Houston forced to decide whether their child’s cough is another cold or the result of pollution from the trucks idling outside.
When Markel first developed nosebleeds after the explosion, McGee immediately took him to the doctor, only to be dismissed. “They didn’t even examine him,” McGee said, “they said it was normal, but this had never happened before Smitty’s [exploded].”
All the while, across local farms and along the riverbanks, dozens of animals have died.
One year since the disaster, both the federal and state governments have publicly maintained that the toxic cocktail of chemicals that spread over Roseland posed “no imminent threat to public health.” But the government’s assessment did not answer the questions parents said governed their daily decisions. They are still unsure if the soil on their property is safe or if children can play outside. And increasingly: What symptoms should prompt medical care?
For parents, the lack of clear answers has meant becoming informal toxicologists and medical advocates while still getting children to school, holding down jobs, and paying rent or mortgages.
“I just want to make it to 70 [years old],” McGee said. “I don’t think I can make it here this long and I’m doing all of this while trying to take care of the children in my house.”
He estimates he has spent more than $20,000 on his property since the disaster. He has replaced his roof and exterior siding and continues to excavate soil around his home.
LEFT: McGee is currently replacing the external paneling of his home, which was damaged after the explosion. RIGHT: McGee is still attempting to rid the soil under his home of the oily substance. (Adam Mahoney/Capital B)
Parents had raised alarms for months
In Roseland, where the average person makes just over $17,000 annually, many households have largely been left to fend for themselves since the explosion. Capital B has spoken with dozens of residents who said they have received no compensation or support as they have tried to clean their properties, rid their yards of contamination, and, in some cases, replace the exteriors of their homes.
Since the August explosion, the town has also experienced a chemical spill from a processing facility related to Smitty’s that infiltrated the drinking water supply.
Earlier this year, Pam Bean, who has two granddaughters who attend Roseland Elementary, said the lack of support has been “insulting.”
“You always hear about politicians talking about rural America for votes. This is rural America, and look at how they really treat us,” she said.
The absence of help is not only a burden adults carry.
Young people who grow up learning not to trust their drinking water or not to play outside when the refinery is flaring are learning that home is a place of potential danger. They notice whether a spill is cleaned quickly, officials answer questions, or a school is treated as worth protecting. When those signals are absent, children can learn that the institutions meant to safeguard them will not, research shows.
The consequences can compound when exposure contributes to asthma attacks, sleep disruption, lead-related developmental risks, or repeated school absences. Parents may keep them inside, miss work to take them to appointments, or pull them from class when symptoms emerge.
At a protest in April, Candice Hart held her daughter’s hand as she described what the contamination has meant for her family. Her daughter has had respiratory problems since the explosion, Hart said, and she has emails and letters showing that she and other parents had raised alarms for months, despite school officials’ claims otherwise.
“No parent should have to choose between their child’s education and their child’s health,” she said.
Markel, now a junior in high school, wants to leave Roseland, and perhaps Louisiana, after graduation. The explosion has changed his relationship to the place where his father learned to fish and swim.
His desire to leave is not simply teenage restlessness, McGee admitted. It is one consequence of growing up in a place that has taught him home can be hazardous.
LEFT: The explosion at Smitty’s Supply on Aug. 22, 2025. RIGHT: Oil and chemical slicks in the the Tangipahoa River, pictured last fall. (Courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency)
“I’m killing myself for a job”
Standing outside of his tarped home about half a mile from Smitty’s, McGee said the lack of an urgent response is inseparable from who lives in Roseland.
He grew up with Ed Smith, the white owner of Smitty’s Supply, and graduated high school with him. “But [today,] he’d walk right past me like he never knew me,” McGee said.
Smith has not made a public appearance about the disaster in the year since the explosion. Smith and his family live in a town 25 miles away from Roseland.
“I think Smitty’s hasn’t done nothing for this community because of who lives here, knowing him,” McGee said, referring to the town’s racial and economic makeup.
In Louisiana, Black communities home to industrial plants are exposed to seven to 21 times more toxic pollution than similar communities with more white residents. And historically, Black communities have received less recovery aid than white areas with comparable damage during environmental disasters.
But in Louisiana, the Black families living with the costs of industrial pollution are often also tied to the industries that create it. Industrial work remains one of the few accessible paths to a stable, middle-class income.
McGee lives inside that contradiction.
Like 30% of Louisiana’s workers, he has an industrial job, driving more than an hour to shifts at a chemical facility in the region commonly known as Cancer Alley, a disproportionately Black area with some of the nation’s highest rates of cancer.
He knows the risks of the work, he said, but sees few alternatives that would allow him to provide for his family.
Dominic Kruger, a father in Cancer Alley, took his first job at a petrochemical plant shortly before his 18th birthday. It was the only way to survive in his home state, he said, “unless you want to work at McDonald’s.”
For McGee, it felt much the same.
“I just want to feed and clothe my children,” he said. “I know I’m killing myself for a job, breathing in benzene and chemicals every day, but I didn’t want my children exposed, too.”
His home doesn’t feel like a place he can offer his children and grandchildren anymore. In his backyard, where a patch of dead grass has sat since the oily rain, McGee’s father grew “everything” and had hens.
“It is hard to give up generations, but we may have no choice.”
Last month, Capital B received a Green Eyeshade award for best public service journalism across the South for our continued coverage of Roseland. You can support our impactful coverage in the South by donating here.
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