~For the past few years, tiny Doyline, Louisiana, best known as the Southern Gothic setting of HBO's True Blood, has been perched next to a powder keg. Next month, the Environmental Protection Agency will decide whether to light a match.
In 2012, an explosion at Camp Minden, a former military base just
outside of town that had become a hub for munitions contractors, sent a
7,000-foot mushroom cloud into the Louisiana sky. The blast rattled
homes as far away as Arkansas and forced Doyline residents to evacuate.
"I thought I was in Afghanistan," one resident told
the Associated Press. State police investigators, who raided Camp
Minden soon after, discovered that Explo Systems Inc., a munitions
recycling company that operated there, was storing 15 million pounds of
toxic military explosives on-site—with some of it in in paper sacks,
cardboard boxes, or even outside. After the raid, the company, at the
direction of state officials, moved the munitions into old bunkers the
Louisiana National Guard had made available on the base in order to
reduce the risk of an explosion caused by a fire or a lightning strike. ~Read more.
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