In south Louisiana, Atlantic Alumina operates the nation's only remaining bauxite ore refinery — a process that creates fields full of a by-product called "red mud."

Now, state environmental regulators have issued orders and threatened fines against the company, claiming the levees and other systems built to contain the waste have allowed smelly, bright orange runoff to flow into a nearby swamp.

The massive operation in St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes, founded in the late 1950s by Kaiser Aluminum, extracts alumina from red earth mined in Jamaica. Alumina is used by smelters elsewhere to make aluminum.

Hundreds of acres of red mud — which is contaminated with trace amounts of naturally occurring heavy metals and slightly radioactive elements — stretch out on the facility

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