It’s been a year since I went up Texas’ coast to Freeport, then to Cameron Parish, Louisiana, to try answering what cities look like after they get a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant. Not specifically how they look in a physical sense, even though I got to see that, too. I mean how these facilities change how a place feels, whether it can ever really be like it was before.
I had no baseline besides a coastal Laguna Madre upbringing which, contrary to what those who grew up landlocked assume, doesn’t give me a birthright understanding of places like it. I felt confident only in knowing that these places are best left as close to how the wind and gulf created them. Any straying from this was a betrayal against all that lived there, whether it was self-inflicted or imposed upon them.
I went to these places because they’ve had LNG export facilities longer than anywhere else on the gulf coast. I went to Freeport first, the coastal edge of Brazoria County and a damn fine town, if we’re talking about the people solely. The city itself, from what I heard from residents and saw myself, had better times, even if its origin and history has never been separate from some kind of extractive industry.
Parties in the ship channel and shrimping are over. Downtown is dead. It’s the era of Port Freeport’s Take-A-Child Fishing Tournament (sponsored by Freeport LNG) and other industry-backed events that turned local culture into exercises of compromise.
Freeport LNG takes its name from the town but it’s actually on Quintana, which is now a company town and county park. Besides a derelict, never-completed pier project in the gulf and the LNG storage tanks, its beaches are the closest to South Padre Island’s that I’ve personally visited.
A week later I went to Cameron Parish, Louisiana, not realizing that was just the point of origin of the state (and country’s) LNG export facilities. More facilities were being built towards Lake Charles and New Orleans. Plaquemines LNG, the facility near New Orleans, just started operating. The facilities being built towards Lake Charles follow a ship channel that had been there a long time, so long that the first LNG ever exported out of the U.S. was from said channel. So long that a steam boat was how people used to go from Cameron to Lake Charles, before there were roads.
Cameron Parish and Cameron County are two different places, the latter having many more people and types of industries. But their similarities are not coincidental. To me they’re places that are only separate in distance and place in time. There was one point in history where the Laguna Madre area looked a lot like Cameron Parish, before it was even the U.S.
A report from The Data Center published in April, about Louisiana’s industrialization over the past decade, much of it from LNG terminals, feels prophetic in a way that most everything contemporary does when you spend any time reading history. All of the job and prosperity promises from petrochemical companies, which also came from the same elected officials that approved tax abatements for them, didn’t happen in any way that mattered.
All that occurred, based on data and what I saw with my own eyes, was betrayal. A betrayal that could be measured in pollution and erasure, the latter being cultural, physical, or people leaving their communities. The following is what I saw and what I can corroborate in the report, however informally empirical it may be.
— Gaige Davila
Industry Boosters Pledged Billions Would Flow to Local Communities on the Louisiana Coast—But Most Everything Flowed in Reverse Instead
Gaige Davila | Deceleration
When all of these companies and their projects came to Louisiana more than a decade ago, The Data Center published a 2014 report that the billions of dollars industry would spend building their plants would do the state some good. That report focused on projects coming to southeast Louisiana then, which the Data Center estimated could bring up to 42,000 jobs to the state.
I didn’t witness the dire straits the state was in back then, but being there last year gave me some idea. Like in Texas, the oil bust hit Louisiana hard in the 1980s and unemployed a lot of people. Louisiana also endured an unfathomable amount of storm damage, leading to an exodus of people from the southwestern part of the state.
In 2005, Hurricane Rita hit southwest Louisiana just a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans. Some people didn’t come back because there simply wasn’t anything to come back to. Every building in Holly Beach was destroyed, and nearly everywhere else in the parish fared the same. A few years later it all happened again with Hurricane Ike. Then again during the COVID-19 pandemic with Hurricanes Laura and Delta.
Rita gave hell and then some. The storm pulled bodies out of graves and carried away homes into the gulf. That was enough for some people. A couple years after Rita, in 2007, at least 2,000 people left Cameron Parish, then another 1,000 by 2009. The population has been decreasing across the parish since, with the fewest people, it seems, staying along the coast. The exorbitant home insurance costs there are to blame for this partly. They’ve increased statewide, too.
I mention the storms because no matter how hard people tried they couldn’t engineer their way out of nature’s violence. And I don’t mean the people who lived in the parish or those homegrowns still there bravely waking up every morning. I mean the leadership that thought the problem of people leaving could be "solved" by something like an LNG plant, not seeing that these companies saw places like Cameron Parish as locations with less people who could get in the way.
These LNG plants are far away from each other but they have a metaphysical sprawl over the land and coast. There wasn’t one aspect of life here that wasn’t interrupted or changed because of their presence. It now borders on being a cliche, but for whatever reason people who work at LNG plants seem to believe that their sole goal during their drives home is to see how close they can get themselves or the people around them to death's door. The speed that these employees drive out of these facilities is common discussion in the parish. The LNG tankers that come in and out of the ship channel are making a wake that blows out both shrimp and the edges of the channel, another instance of the industry's fuel-injected hubris.
In Cameron the town, I saw homes exorcised by the gusts of hurricanes. Which storm didn’t matter to me so much as the fact of the home sitting empty, on pylons, haunting the neighborhood from its perch. Time is flat everywhere in the parish but at Calcasieu Pass LNG, where the facility grows forever, the employee traffic, too, with license plates from Texas and Arkansas and other states that aren’t Louisiana, and the sense that Cameron proper, the town, the one that had a roller rink and a movie theater and grocery stores and churches every block would one day not exist even in memory. CP2, the expansion of Calcasieu Pass LNG, has already cleared land south of town that was lush and green when I was there. Now that’s gone, and the wetlands north of town, behind the courthouse, will be, too, for CP3.
The plants didn’t bring anything back to Cameron other than a Venture Global-built restaurant and convenience store that seemed empty every time I drove by. People seemed to prefer going to the locally owned gas station and Anchor’s Up Grill, the latter operating out of a food truck since Hurricane Laura destroyed its brick and mortar location, remains of which lie a block away next to the First Baptist Church, which is also destroyed.