Gaylord Chemical Company LLC is based in the New Orleans suburb of Slidell, Louisiana. The manufacturing facilities are in Bogalusa, Louisiana. The company manufactures dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethyl sulfide.
Gaylord Chemical Corporation was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Temple-Inland Inc. (NYSE: TIN) until early 2007, when it was acquired by its management. After the transition it continued to operate from its Slidell office. Gaylord announced expanded DMSO production capacity in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which will come on-line in 2010.[1]
Prior to being a subsidiary of Temple-Inland, Gaylord Chemical was a division of Gaylord Container Corporation, the successor (1986–2002) of the brown paper division of Crown Zellerbach (1928-86).
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Crown Zellerbach, the San Francisco-based forest products company, developed the DMS / DMSO manufacturing technology in use today; CZ built the original DMSO plant in the 1960s at the site where Gaylord Chemical currently operates.
Crown-Z was the object of a hostile takeover by James Goldsmith in mid-1985, which split up the corporation in May 1986. The majority of its manufacturing assets (fine paper mills) were acquired by the James River Corporation of Richmond, Virginia (which became Fort James in 1997, acquired in 2000 by Georgia-Pacific).[2] The remaining CZ assets were divided between timber holdings (primarily in Canada), and the brown paper division, which became Gaylord Container Corporation in November 1986, and relocated its headquarters to Deerfield, Illinois, a Chicago suburb. After less than 16 years as a company, Gaylord was acquired by rival Temple-Inland in 2002.
In 1995 a railroad tank car imploded at the Bogalusa facility, which caused a release of dinitrogen tetroxide and forced an evacuation of about 3,000 people within a one mile (1.6 km) radius. Residents say "the sky turned orange" as a result. Emergency rooms filled with about 4,000 people who complained of burning eyes, skin, and lungs. Dozens of lawsuits were filed against Gaylord Chemical and were finally settled in May 2005, with compensation checks issued to around 20,000 people involved in the accident.