Williams Olefins Plant explosion

The Columbian Chemicals plant explosion was a hoax claiming an explosion at a chemical plant in Centerville, St. Mary Parish, Louisiana. On September 11, 2014, reports of an alleged explosion were sent to local residents via text messages and spread through various social media. Several reports claimed that the militant group ISIS had taken responsibility for the attack. St. Mary Parish officials claimed that the reports of an explosion were a hoax. A spokesperson for the company told reporters that the reports of an explosion were a hoax: We have been informed by the community that a text message has been received by several individuals indicating a release of toxic gas from the Birla Carbon's Columbian Chemicals Plant near Centerville, Louisiana. The content as stated by the text message is not true. There has been no release of such toxic gas, explosion or any other incident in our facility. We are not aware of the origin of this text message. Law enforcement authorities have been contacted and are following up on this matter. The hoax was reported to have involved "dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers." It was one of "a wave of similar attacks" in the US during the second half of 2014 that used hoaxes (including fabricated ebola outbreaks and police shootings) in an attempt to create public panic or outrage.

LeBlanc is an unincorporated community in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, United States. The community is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) southeast of St. Gabriel.

Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) is a prison for women with its permanent pre-2016 facility located in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. It is the only female correctional facility of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. Elayn Hunt Correctional Center is immediately west of LCIW. LCIW includes the state's female death row. As of 2017 the prison has temporarily moved due to flooding that occurred in August 2016, and its prisoners are housed in other prisons. The administration is temporarily located in the former Jetson Youth Center near Baker. By 2021 the Baker area address was given for the prison on the LCIW website.

Geismar is an unincorporated community in Ascension Parish, Louisiana, United States and is at the heart of Louisiana's chemical corridor. The community is part of the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area. Geismar is south of Prairieville and west of Gonzales. The community has two schools, Dutchtown Primary/ Middle School and Dutchtown High School, which are ranked among the top schools in the state of Louisiana. The Mississippi River flows to the southeast along the southwest side of the community. The area is vulnerable to hurricanes and tropical systems due to its low elevation and its proximity to the coast of southeast Louisiana.

Elayn Hunt Correctional Center (EHCC) located in St. Gabriel, Louisiana, is a multi-security- level Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections institution for adult men. It is the second-largest prison in Louisiana and is located about 70 miles northwest of New Orleans. Elayn Hunt has about half the number of prisoners held at the larger Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola.Since 2010, male inmates from all parishes enter the DOC system through the Hunt Reception and Diagnostic Center (HRDC) at Hunt.

Carville is a neighborhood of St. Gabriel, and is located in Iberville Parish in located in southern Louisiana, sixteen miles south of the capital city of Baton Rouge, on the Mississippi River.The childhood home of famed political consultant James Carville, the area was named for his grandfather, Louis Arthur Carville, a postmaster, in 1909, to differentiate the area, formerly called "Island" from the many other places in Lousiana with that name. "In 1917, On February 3rd, Senate Bill number 4086, an act to establish a National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, is passed by the US Senate." That marked the start of Carville's nearly sixty-five-year history as the only place in America to treat leprosy until outpatient treatment became viable in 1981. Nowadays, that legacy is celebrated at the National Hansen’s Disease Museum, which educates visitors about the condition.

Mulberry Grove is a historic mansion in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, U.S.. It was designed in the Greek Revival architectural style, and it was built in 1836 for Dr Duffel.It was subsequently purchased by German-born John B. Reuss, who made it part of his Germania Plantation. Reuss's daughter, who inherited the Mulberry Grove part of Germania Plantation, sold it to Mrs C. C. Clifton in 1951. In the late 1980s, Mrs. Clifton sold the plantation house, after a restoration work, to Lawrence J. Noel III & Allen T. Noel.The mansion, along with a water cistern and four quarters houses located shortly to the east, have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 14, 1993.

St. Gabriel is a city in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, United States. The city of St. Gabriel includes the Carville neighborhood and portions of Sunchine. Part of the Baton Rouge metropolitan statistical area, it had a population of 6,677 at the 2010 U.S. census, and 6,433 at the 2020 census.St. Gabriel was incorporated as a town in 1994 and received city designation in 2001. It is located on the east bank of the Mississippi River, approximately 12 miles south of Baton Rouge. Bayou Manchac serves as the official boundary between St. Gabriel, Ascension Parish, and East Baton Rouge Parish. Over the years, the area has been transformed from a primarily agricultural economy to one that is now dominated by the petrochemical industry.

East Iberville Elementary and High School is a PK-12 combined elementary through high school in St. Gabriel, Louisiana. It is a part of the Iberville Parish School Board. As of 2013 it, along with one other school, Mathematics, Science, and Arts Academy - East (MSA East), also in St. Gabriel, serves the portion of Iberville Parish on the east bank of the Mississippi River, which has fewer residents compared to the west bank.

Bluff Swamp (French: Marais de Bluff, Spanish: Pantano de Bluff) is located in northwest Ascension Parish, Louisiana. The potential site covers 2,208 acres (8.9 km2). About 1,240 acres (5.0 km2) of the Bluff Swamp area make up the Bluff Swamp Wildlife Refuge. In 1996, local resident Frank Bonifay outbid a timber company for the purchase of the swamp, in order to protect the swamp's cypress trees from logging. Ascension Parish contributed $292,825 to the purchase of the swamp, as part of a mitigation agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to make up for wetland violations committed previously. Ownership of the swampland transferred to Bluff Swamp Wildlife Refuge & Botanical Gardens Inc, a non-profit headed by Bonifay. The swamp is adjacent to Spanish Lake, and in 1997 was reported to be the home of up to forty species of birds. Historically, the swamp was used by local Native Americans for hunting and fishing.

Spanish Lake (French: Lac Espagnol) is located in the Bluff Swamp on the Iberville - Ascension Parish line. Early European settlers of the area that was developed as French and Spanish ancestry. Among the projects and plans carried out by Luis de Unzaga 'le Conciliateur' while he was governor of Louisiana between 1769 and 1777 was the promotion of new settlements by Europeans, among them were French Acadians and Malaga in the fertile Mississippi region and more specifically in the Unzaga Post or 'Puesto de Unzaga' that he created in 1771 in Pointe Coupee, the parish of Saint Gabriel in 1773 and Fort Manchac in 1776.It is fed into by Alligator Bayou, Brand Bayou, Bayou Braud, and Bayou Paul. Spanish Lake is a part of the Bluff Swamp Wildlife Refuge and Botanical Gardens, a national non-profit organization which has preserved 901 acres (3.65 km2) of Bluff Swamp.

Dutchtown High School is a 5A school that was completed in 2003 in Geismar, an unincorporated area of Ascension Parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. It is within the Ascension Parish School Board. Dutchtown Middle School, Bluff Middle School and Prairieville Middle School feed into Dutchtown High. The architecture is based on that of the old Dutchtown High, which was situated across the highway at the current Dutchtown Middle School. According to the Louisiana School Performance Scores/Letter Grades released by the Louisiana Department of Education, Dutchtown High School is an "A" school and is the #1 high-performing open-enrollment public high school in the state of Louisiana.In 2017, Dutchtown High School was named a 2017 World-Leading Learner and invited to join the Global Learning Network (GLN), a community of educators from schools that develop, practice, and share innovative approaches to education.