BURNSIDE — The red bauxite dust that has plagued parts of Ascension Parish for years has been stirred up again by recent winds, homeowners tell UWK.
“When it’s dry and windy, that’s when it, you know, it’s a perfect storm,” resident Kim Martinez Gautreau said Monday. She lives near the plant responsible for the red dust.
People who live near the LAlumina plant have been dealing with the otherworldly-tinted dust clouds since the plant shut down in 2020. The dust contains bauxite, a byproduct of alumina production.
Gautreau said she’s been dealing with it the three years she’s been in her house, discoloring much of what it touches.
“I was just about to get my house rewashed again last week, and I’m so happy I didn’t,” she said. “It was worse Friday and Saturday than ever, I think.”
The company left the bauxite behind and was supposed to make sure the “red mud lakes” with the bauxite was regularly dampened with sprinklers to prevent the dust clouds. That did not happen.
In recent years, the Ascension Parish government has gotten involved. In 2024, Ascension Parish approved an agreement with DEQ to handle some cleanup at the site. In April 2025, the parish began work on a four-acre test site at the old plant.
On Monday, parish spokespeople said they couldn’t answer questions about the status of their part of the project, but expect to say something more later in the week.
UWK did reach out to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, but they have not responded at the time of publication.
DEQ records show that an October 2025 inspection found that the work with Ascension Parish had made some progress. At that time, one of the dried up bauxite lakes had been about 25 percent covered with topsoil, which is intended to keep the contaminated dust from blowing off-site.
That inspection report noted that 64 “air quality incidents” had been recorded between Dec. 22, 2021, and Sept. 29, 2025. It did not specify whether all those reports were related to the bauxite dust.
At the time of the inspection, the facility had no electrical power, which prevented the sprinklers from being used to keep the bauxite dust from blowing around.
The company’s representative told DEQ “that the main electrical power line wiring to the facility had been stolen by vandals,” the report said.
The most recent bauxite dust complaint in the DEQ document management system was dated July 1, 2026.
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