Town Ponders Worse Fate: Toxic Leak or Lawyer Glut? : Louisiana: Attorneys find a silver lining of clients in orange cloud. But some fear suing plant will backfire.

Even as a toxic orange cloud hovered over this rustic factory town last month, forcing thousands of residents to flee, a potentially greater crisis was already in the making.

Dozens of lawyers--some of them local, others from Louisiana’s bigger cities and a few from out of state, including Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.--came to tiny Bogalusa, seeking out prospective plaintiffs with a zeal that many folks here consider nothing short of vulturous.

And they came to fight the company that is the economic heart of the town.

Attorneys drove campers onto vacant lots, designating them as mobile law offices. They transformed motels into personal-injury centers, providing in-room consultations with medical experts flown in from around the country. They plastered the local newspaper with full-page ads, offering free hot lines (1-800-99-TOXIC) and legal seminars (“Learn the truth about toxic gas exposure!”). They even deluged residents with personalized mailings, including prepaid business reply cards: “Yes, Morris, I want you to be my lawyer.”

“We probably had as many attorneys here as people working on the accident,” said Linda Chastant, 46, who has lived all her life in this rural corner of southeastern Louisiana, about an hour north of New Orleans. “It’s almost comical, if it weren’t so sad.”

So far, at least 45 lawsuits on behalf of several hundred victims have been filed, the first coming from an attorney who was at the courthouse, waiting for the doors to open, the morning after the eruption. Nobody was killed or critically injured in the Oct. 23 accident at Gaylord Chemical Corp., but nearly 5,000 people--almost one-third of the city--swarmed Bogalusa’s hospitals after spotting the vaporous ball of nitrogen tetroxide.

Most of the lawsuits cite nausea, burning eyes and shortness of breath--the same symptoms that lawyers repeatedly named in their advertisements and, in some cases, inserted into legal contracts before even interviewing their clients. Another group of attorneys, including Cochran, has raised the specter of “environmental racism,” alleging that black residents were not evacuated until white residents had been escorted to safety.

“I’m just a soldier for justice,” the captain of O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” told a cheering crowd at Bethlehem Baptist Church here on Nov. 9. “That’s all I’ve ever been.”

What makes this skirmishing such a dilemma for many Bogalusa residents is the nature of the target, which is anything but a far-off, faceless corporation. The Gaylord facility, which has existed in one form or another since 1906, single-handedly created Bogalusa, carving out a company town from what was once virgin pine forest.

After nearly a century, it remains Bogalusa’s economic lifeblood, employing nearly 1,000 people with an annual payroll of more than $40 million. It is responsible for Bogalusa’s official nickname, “The Magic City,” a reference to the town’s overnight hatching. In fact, their histories have been so intertwined for so long that the factory’s belching smokestacks are featured on the municipal seal.

“Let us not kill the goose that laid the golden egg,” one civic-minded reader cautioned in a letter to Bogalusa’s Daily News.

The unseemliness of the legal assault, which is being investigated by the Louisiana Bar Assn., has prompted an unusual exchange of public recriminations and atonements in the newspaper.

Several local attorneys were moved to take out a full-page ad, assuring fellow citizens that “there are some of us who subscribe to a higher standard of professionalism than has been exhibited by others in recent days.”

The Traveler’s Rest Motel, a small roadside lodge that has become the unofficial headquarters for out-of-town lawyers, similarly sought to distance itself from its guests. Noting that many attorneys have been using the inn’s name and phone number to publicize their legal services, the management apologized for “what may have appeared to be our involvement or approval of the use of our facilities by lawyers that have invaded our city.”

But one of those guests, Frank J. D’Amico Jr., a high-powered attorney from New Orleans who is doing a brisk business from his Traveler’s Rest suite, has another theory about the chilly reception being extended by his hosts.

The way he sees it, Bogalusa has grown so reliant on the Gaylord plant that civic boosters simply can’t accept the idea that their benefactor might be harming them. He compares the relationship to that of a child and an alcoholic father. “You love him and you depend on him for support,” said D’Amico, dapper in his blue suit and sunglasses. “But when he slaps you around, it ain’t right.”

He continues with the analogy, noting that even though the child may be suffering, he usually feels guilty about complaining. “That’s why there has to be some outside intervention,” D’Amico explained, casting himself as the legal equivalent of a 12-step program. “The child’s not in a position to do it himself.”

That view was echoed by Dr. Tony Palazzo, Bogalusa’s only pediatrician. When he came to town nine years ago, he intentionally sought out a home that wouldn’t be downwind of the plant, which he views as an ominous landmark even under normal operating conditions.

“This place stinks,” he said bluntly. “I don’t know what’s coming out of those smokestacks. But it can’t be good for you.”

Soon after taking the job, Palazzo began noticing an unusually high rate of asthma in his young patients, about one-third of whom suffer from bronchial problems, he said. His fear, both before and after last month’s gaseous explosion, is that Bogalusa residents are too cowed by Gaylord to register serious objections.

“You don’t fight the mill,” said Palazzo, whose nephew, New Orleans attorney Leo J. Palazzo, has taken to advertising on local TV with his face concealed by a gas mask.

Originally known as the Great Southern Lumber Co., the Bogalusa factory was the brainchild of two members of the Goodyear clan, who ventured south at the turn of the century to build what was then the world’s largest sawmill.

The site they picked on Bogue Lusa Creek became the focal point for one of America’s earliest planned communities. Architects mapped out an instant city around the mill with 850 homes--the largest ones reserved for white workers, while smaller bungalows were constructed across town for blacks.

Sold to Crown Zellerbach and, later, to Gaylord Container Corp., the mill is now one of the nation’s top producers of cardboard, pumping out an average of 2,700 tons a day. Its next-door subsidiary, Gaylord Chemical, converts the mill’s waste into DMSO, used by drug manufacturers in pain-relieving ointments.

A monstrous sprawl of chimneys and tanks, all bedecked with white lights and metal rigging, the plant resembles an other-worldly vessel that has landed in the geographic heart of the city. In “Neon Vernacular,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry, native son Yusef Komunyakaa calls Gaylord the “fog galleon,” its “horse-headed clouds” and “dead phosphorescence” rising from the “swamp mist.”

He writes: “The whole town smells like the world’s oldest anger.”

Records show that Gaylord has been cited numerous times, including $175,000 in penalties, for violations of state and federal environmental laws. It has exceeded limits on the dumping of effluent at least 14 times, killing fish in Bogue Lusa Creek. It also has been disciplined for failing to notify authorities about the removal of asbestos.

Last month’s explosion, however, has placed a much higher degree of scrutiny on the plant, including an ongoing investigation by the Louisiana State Police. A leaking rail car triggered the accident. As Gaylord officials struggled to contain it, the ruptured tank exploded, spewing a stunning auburn cloud that stretched as wide as the football field at Bogalusa High School’s Lumberjack Stadium. The odorless chemical, used as an oxidizer, is explosive and can be fatal if inhaled in high enough concentrations.

Because the wind was initially blowing north, according to police, those were the first neighborhoods evacuated. After the wind began to shift the next day, authorities said, so did the evacuation area. But that explanation hasn’t satisfied residents of the city’s oldest black neighborhood, which lies to the south, just a block or two from the perpetually chugging smokestacks.

“Gaylord is a big company,” said the Rev. Aaron J. Thompson, who hosted Cochran, a Louisiana native, at Bethlehem Baptist Church. “If they want to protect themselves, who do they get? The best lawyer they can find. The black community also wants the best.”

By the time officials lifted the evacuation order on the third day, Bogalusa’s two hospitals resembled M.A.S.H. units, with patients piled up outside emergency rooms--and lawyers trying to slip them business cards before being shooed off by doctors.

A handful of the injuries were serious, including the burns suffered by Bogalusa Fire Chief James Dunaway, who had been tipped secondhand about a problem at Gaylord and arrived without any protective gear. “I’m upset they didn’t notify us in a timely fashion,” said Dunaway, a 35-year veteran of the department who has joined one of the lawsuits. “I didn’t know what we were walking into. If I did, there ain’t no way I’d be standing there.”

But many of the patients at Bogalusa Community Medical Center had no discernible symptoms, leaving some members of the emergency room staff openly skeptical about the ailments they were supposedly treating. “They’d be looking at you, saying: ‘I’m having trouble breathing,’ and they’d be saying it just like I’m saying it now--without any trouble,” said Regina Runfalo, the hospital’s director of nursing.

Other patients seemed to be suffering from excessively watery eyes and noses even after the cloud had dissipated, leading to widely circulated--although unconfirmed--reports that their symptoms had been self-inflicted with Mace or pepper spray. Finally, there were those who came to the hospital from well outside the evacuation area, risking exposure to the gas only as a result of seeking treatment.

As one patient told Runfalo: “I got the symptoms I saw on TV.”

Although much of the initial finger-pointing has been aimed at lawyers, there is also a growing wave of resentment against those Bogalusa residents who share complicity in taking Gaylord to court.

A good part of that anger seems to be class-based, fueled by a perception that the lazy and indigent account for the apparently bogus claims. Despite having such a hefty economic anchor, Bogalusa is largely a depressed community. Its residents, 65% of whom are white and 35% of whom are black, have an annual per capita income of $8,232--a figure 30% below the Louisiana average and 75% below the U.S. average, according to the 1990 census.

“What kind of gas is this?” insisted one caller to the Daily News, which allows readers to sound off in its “Hot Line” column. “No one is sick except the people who need money.”

The fear, of course, is that a multimillion-dollar judgment, or even the threat of one, could be enough to drive Gaylord out of town. It is a prospect based on so many variables and uncertainties, said Gaylord’s president, Louis Zeillmann, “that I would hate to even speculate on that.”

In the meantime, victims of the leak continue to straggle into the Traveler’s Rest Motel, sometimes flaunting a self-conscious cough that invariably leaves the front-desk clerks rolling their eyes. Those who come to see D’Amico have an attorney so supremely confident that he has spent $25,000 of his own money so far, bringing in experts and commissioning medical studies.

Lest he outstay his welcome at the motel, plans are already under way to secure a more permanent stake in Bogalusa’s fortunes. “I’m opening up an office here,” D’Amico said. “Buying a building actually.”

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.