Orange containment boom and white absorbent boom snake in parallel across the Tangipahoa River Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, at Lees Landing as contractors in air boat head into the nearby marina. The landing's marina is next to a now closed public boat launch on the lower end of the river near Joyce Wildlife Management Area. Boom has been stretched on dozens of miles of the river from La. 10 to its mouth, and oily contaminants from the Smitty's Supply Inc. fire started on Aug. 22 have made it close to the wildlife area in southern Tangipahoa.
The EPA and U.S. Coast Guard will investigate whether an oil sheen has reached the mouth of the Tangipahoa River and Lake Pontchartrain following heavy rains earlier this week, the federal environmental agency said, as cleanup efforts push ahead following the August explosion and fire at a petroleum plant.
The fire at Smitty's Supply Inc. unleashed an extensive spill of petroleum products into private ponds and the Tangipahoa River that federal contractors are still cleaning up weeks later.
The lubricants and plastic bottle plant had millions of gallons of motor oil, lube oil, mineral spirits, chainsaw oil, gasoline, alkylate gas, glycol, urea, antifreeze, phosphoric acid and other chemicals and hydrocarbons, according to a company inventory EPA has shared.
EPA staffers and contractors installed a system of protective and absorbent booms to try to corral and collect the oily materials heading downstream nearly 50 miles from Smitty's and to prevent the pollutants from reaching the Tangipahoa's mouth at Lake Pontchartrain.
But, in a daily report Wednesday night, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials disclosed they had received "reports" of a sheen at the river's mouth and in the lake.
EPA and Coast Guard officials said in the statement Wednesday night that they could not go out on the water to verify those reports because of conditions on the river following heavy rain earlier in the week.
"The Coast Guard has recommended EPA responders halt work on the river due to dangerous conditions from recent rainfall," the statement said. "EPA and the Coast Guard will investigate the reported sheen as soon as conditions improve, allowing operations to resume."
Rain leads to concerns
Though the first hours of the fire happened during a rainstorm, the subsequent weeks of the fire and cleanup have been through a dry period, according to the National Weather Service.
A little more than a half inch of rain fell for the entire month of September. But on Monday, nearly a half inch of rain fell in Ponchatoula, with smaller amounts on Sunday and Tuesday.
Though images of oily waste have been posted across social media, EPA officials said during a news conference last week that much of the firefighting foam and oily waste that ran off from Smitty's ended up in nearby private ponds that sit between Smitty's and the river.
Some owners of those ponds expressed concerns last week about the pace of waste removal and that a heavy rain could wash the waste into the river in the interim. But EPA officials discounted that possibility, saying that they had protective dams and other measures in place, plus plenty of storage space in the ponds to prevent an unintended overflow.
In the Wednesday report, EPA officials suggested the ponds not only had held up during the rain but also were used to store runoff from Smitty's.
In trying to manage the "significant rainfall," crews did "a controlled release of stormwater from the Smitty's Supply facility to move across the road and into the ponds adjacent to the site."
"EPA operations crews confirmed runoff was contained to the ponds and did not reach the Tangipahoa River," the statement added.
The EPA is in the midst of a federal government shutdown since early last week, but agency officials have said the cleanup work, primarily through a few hundred contractors, would continue and is funded.
EPA officials didn't immediately respond to a request for comment but have corresponded on other inquiries since the shutdown. Coast Guard officials in New Orleans said on Thursday they were looking into the EPA report to provide a response later.
Until the Wednesday report, agency officials had not previously indicated oily material from Smitty's may have reached the lake.
Governor defends cleanup
Residents living along the lower river near Lee's Landing reported that in the first days after the fire started on Aug. 22, they saw black oily material flowing down the river before boom was in place in that area, leading to speculation that some oily material may have reached the lake then.
Late last month and early this month, a Mandeville resident used his own drone to show what he said was oily residue in the river, nearby ponds and Lake Pontchartrain and shared them on social media.
The first set of images of the river and ponds prompted Gov. Jeff Landry to call for greater efforts by EPA to clean up. After speaking with agency officials and others and getting commitments for more equipment, Landry defended the EPA's cleanup in a subsequent news conference.
The massive fire near Roseland burned at least two fire trucks and sent a large, black plume over a rural corner of the parish, dropping soot on residents and requiring a 1-mile evacuation zone. The EPA has said soot was reported 15 miles away from Smitty's. The fire was not extinguished fully until Sept. 8.