Gloria Carrillo’s four children are sick, although she still doesn’t know the exact reason.
Ángel, his son of 16 years suffers from epilepsy, ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), retention problems and learning difficulties. Ethan from 16 years is diabetic and suffers from autism. His youngest daughter of 08 years has difficulty speaking and sometimes speaks in secret. All of Carillo’s children suffer from asthma. Because of her strong attacks, Brianna, her daughter of 18 years had to leave school.
Until now, Carrillo wondered if the health problems of his children were due to some hereditary reason. But recently he began to suspect that the problem is possibly due to the relationship between the large lawns and land that connect the 326 homes of Estrada Courts, a low-income community operated by the City of Los Angels in Boyle Heights, on the east side of town.
Estrada Courts, where Carillo has lived since 2007, I know located less than 1.7 miles from the contamination zone surrounding Exide Technologies’ former battery recycling plant, closed in 2015 after decades of dumping toxic pollutants like lead and arsenic into surrounding neighborhoods.
Carrillo’s suspicions still have no answer. However, many of the residents of the Estradas Courts apartments – are 1, 122. From them, 326 under 18 years – they share the same doubts and fears. These fears are based on the fact that most of the soil remains untested for lead contamination. Despite the fact that it has been more than seven years since the residential grounds around Exide were sampled, and approximately four years since they were analyzed two child care centers that operate within the Estrada Courts property.
While experts warn that high levels of Lead in the soil in the Courts of Estrada are a virtual certainty, environmental defenders denounce the absence of evidence so far and qualify it as another example of how the government contemplates the needs of the poorest with chronic inertia.
In the meantime, 8, 555 privately owned less than 1.7 miles from Exide. In addition, more than 2 have been rehabilitated, 000 households.
“ I’m angry, ”Carillo said. “Are your children worth more than our children?”
“It’s a tragedy,” said Amy Kyle , a retired teacher in the science program of Environmental Health at the University of California, Berkeley. The effects of lead exposure on the brain development and function of unborn babies and young children are well documented. They include, among others, the loss of points in their intelligence quotient, greater probability of behavior problems and in language comprehension. Among a variety of other possible health effects is an increased in the risk of asthma . Air pollution itself is a major problem in Boyle Heights, one of the hardest hit communities for the environment throughout the state of California.
The Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) – the responsible agency to oversee the cleaning of residences near Exide – recently reached an agreement with the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), which operates Estrada Courts. According to a DTSC spokesperson, the sampling work is expected to begin next January.
“Once the sampling is completed and the results analyzed, we can determine if cleaning is necessary,” added the spokesperson. It is not clear if the current budget will be enough to remedy the contaminated hotspots in Estrada Courts.
Regarding the slow movement of the oversight, the DTSC spokesman said the agency has already conducted “a considerable amount of phone calls, emails and in-person meetings” over the years to obtain permission from the housing authority to take samples at Estrada Courts. “Unfortunately, despite these efforts, our access requests were ultimately rejected,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
After consultation with HACLA, in April 2019 the Department of Toxic Substances Control reached a conditional agreement for access to Estrada Courts, he added the spokesperson, adding: “in June of 2020, HACLA hired an outside attorney to work with DTSC in finalizing the access agreement. ”
Shark mural by Daniel Martinez . In the 2007 s and 80 s, artists painted more than 90 murals on the Estrada Courts buildings. Photo by Lisa Newton. Courtesy Capital & Main The Housing Office released a two-page document describing the chronology of the bureaucratic “waltz” over more than four years, including two long periods – one of 13 months and another six – in which the agency was waiting for DTSC to take the necessary steps to get there to the access agreement. When asked if she was satisfied with the time it took to sample the soils – taking into account the potential health risks to residents from lead exposure in those days, HACLA spokesperson Courtney Gladney wrote: “We have provided the timeline for you. full of our work with DTSC since 2016, including the most recent, which started at 2019, and thus HACLA will continue its collaboration with DTSC. ”
According to Joe Lyou, president and CEO of the LA Coalition for Clean Air, a state organization focused on air quality issues, waiting years to test Estrada Courts is a critical lack of “action and leadership,” which also has place in a community without the “political power or connections to make this happen faster.”
It was in October d e 2013, when the extent of the contamination from Exide began to be fully disclosed, that DTSC first ordered a mapping of lead contamination on residential properties surrounding the former lead battery recycling plant, which at that time moment it was still in operation. In June and December 2016, DTSC conducted a soil sample at two child care facilities within Estrada Courts. One of them, Estrada Child Development Head Start, contained lead levels up to 135 parts per million (ppm).
In 2017, DTSC set a cleanup goal for homes with lead levels in the soil “that exceed the concentration of 80 ppm (particles per million) of lead in soil ” . That level is a recognized state threshold of health screening. Currently, the agency is prioritizing cleaning homes with lead levels above 300 ppm. The World Health Organization has emphatically stated that there are no safe levels of lead exposure.
In the past seven years Since the cleaning process began, two nurseries constitute the only official sampling carried out at Estrada Courts.
Because Head Start was an early childhood education facility, DTSC prioritized cleanliness. However, before that could happen, the building was demolished “without the knowledge of DTSC,” the agency spokesperson wrote, adding that “after we discovered that a new facility had been constructed at 2017, DTSC determined that a new building sampling ”. That extra sampling is necessary, experts say, because contaminated soil and dust could have dispersed into the surrounding environment. However, it has not yet been carried out, the DTSC spokesperson confirmed.
So far, the two nurseries constitute the only official sampling carried out in the Courts of Estrada. However, in 2016, Jill Johnston, assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and a member of the state-approved Exide Advisory Group, conducted soil tests on two of the homes. Johnston used an XRF analyzer, a handheld device capable of measuring elements such as lead in a given sample.
Johnston discovered that the average lead level in the soil outside one of the houses was 476 ppm. The other had average soil lead levels of 135 ppm. Johnston also tested the soil for arsenic, cadmium and antimony, other toxic elements that can be harmful to human health. It detected levels of these elements around both homes above what state, federal and global health authorities consider safe.
Given that several private properties adjoining Estrada Courts contained or contain elevated levels of lead in the soil ( the highest that was detected was 1, 115 ppm ), it is a “virtual certainty” that the soils in Estrada Courts contain lead levels greater than 82 ppm, and it is “very possible” that lead levels will exceed 300 ppm, said Jim Wells, an environmental geologist who is also on the Exide Advisory Group. As a result, Estrada Courts should have been recognized as a “priority concern” for testing, Wells said.
Other agency , the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, reported that since 2015 has conducted health education activities in and around Estrada Courts, such as grassroots community outreach campaigns, bilingual newsletters, a program to directly engage residents, and multiple screenings free blood lead. event tests. But some residents, like Carrillo, argue that government authorities, including the County Health Department, they have not done enough to inform residents of potential health risks.
Estrada Courts resident Idalmis Vaquero. Photo by Dan Ross. Courtesy Capital & Main “I feel that we are the most forgotten of the forgotten,” said Idalmis Vaquero, who has lived in Estrada Courts for 13 years. He is a law student at the University of California, Los Angeles and a member of the advocacy organization Communities for a Better Environment. At night, when the temperature drops, Vaquero said, Estrada Courts comes to life with children playing barefoot on grass and dirt. As for the delay in testing, “it would not have taken so long if we were a wealthy community,” he added.
Big question today is: Are current cleanup funds sufficient to remediate potentially contaminated areas in the Estrada Courts? At an Exide Community Advisory Board meeting in September, Su Patel, deputy vice director of DTSC’s Industrial Land Reuse and Site Mitigation Program, said that if properties that have not yet been sampled contain levels of lead in the soil above 300 ppm, will be added to the priority cleaning list. And if current funds run out, “we will add them to the next group of properties for which we will ask for cleaning funds.”
The issue of additional funding for cleanup is developing in a murky fiscal environment. The state, which is currently dealing with a deficit of $ 46, 300 million, still recovering from a federal court ruling bankruptcy last week that allowed Exide to abandon its financial obligations to remediate its old plant and surrounding communities. The state is appealing that ruling. California taxpayers have already paid about $ 270 million for the cleanup project.
Similarly, mismanagement issues loom over DTSC’s financial management of the project. Earlier this year, for example, DTSC fired one of the residence cleaning contractors l for massive cost overruns . According to an estimate using numbers provided by DTSC, the contractor, Parsons, spent approximately three-quarters of his $ 71 Millions to clean less than half of the 1, 610 residences for which he was responsible. Average expenses per home for the current contractor, NEC Construction, also increased by $ 65, 000 last year at $ 67, 01 this year, as a result of the challenges technicians raised by the pandemic, argues DTSC. The state auditor is currently investigating the project.
However, Yenderina Barboza’s concerns are more immediate: the health and safety of her two children , ages six and twelve, who are rarely left out to play due to the potential risk of contamination. Barboza, by 30 years, he has lived at Estrada Courts for about a dozen years. He would move if he could, but “I really don’t have any other options,” he said. Are you worried about your own health? “Of course,” Barboza replied. “However, more than anything, my children”.
Originally posted at Capital & Main, here. Copyright 2021 Capital & Main