BATON ROUGE (AP) — The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has given Noranda Alumina one month to say how it plans to determine the breadth and severity of possible unpermitted mercury air emissions from its St. James Parish facility.
In a new compliance order signed Friday that threatens a host of fines, The Advocate’s David J. Mitchell reports DEQ also directed Noranda to conduct and submit the results of those efforts just 30 days after the agency grants its approval to the monitoring plan, known as an air modeling protocol.
The order's quick-turnaround commands on the mercury emissions come 10 months after Noranda first informed DEQ that mercury appeared to be unexpectedly emitting from steam vents at the company's large Mississippi River complex near Gramercy, possibly for decades.
