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SANTA ANA, California — The news came as a shock: Lead, lurking somewhere in Nalleli Garrido’s home, was poisoning her 1-year-old son. 

His pediatrician instructed her to clean all the toys of her toddler, Ruben, keep the home dust-free and prevent him from playing in the bare soil outside her rented bungalow in Santa Ana’s Logan neighborhood. She did all she could. But the dust kept sneaking in.

No one offered an alternative. The only solution she and her husband could find was to get out. In 2019, after two years of constant worry, they moved north to the city of Buena Park, buying a home with a grassy yard — not an exposed patch of soil like her Santa Ana front yard, where the toxic metal could be found in concentrations as high as 148 parts of lead per million parts of soil. California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment considers 80 parts per million and above dangerous for children. 

“I was terrified to take my son out,” said Garrido, a psychiatric nurse. “Even walking through the yard, I would tell my kids to hold their breath. ‘Don’t breathe that in, don’t breathe in the dust.’”

About this series

Lead contaminates soil in communities around the country, often from long-gone pollution sources overlooked by officials. Our health depends on fixing that.

Read more

Across the country, the main advice given to families threatened by lead exposure in soil — keep your home clean — doesn’t work, studies show. And federal guidelines about such exposure have thresholds too high to protect children from irreversible harm. But from coast to coast, community leaders, health advocates and academics are pressing for true solutions — and an end to poisoning children with lead, generation after generation after generation.

Scientists are partnering with residents to gather soil lead samples for a national map showing hot spots. Some cities offer clean soil for covering lead-contaminated dirt in yards, protecting children and adults from further exposure. And in Santa Ana, a coalition convinced city officials to start treating the environmental hazard as a priority.  

“I think we should recognize these violent and dangerous and toxic legacies that we inherit, and then do things that really make sense to keep ourselves safe,” said New York City soil expert Sara Perl Egendorf, who helped create a network called Legacy Lead to tackle contamination there. 

Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, from brain development impacts — the capacity to learn, focus and control impulses — to later health risks like coronary heart disease. No amount, scientists say, is safe. Yet parents such as Garrido, many living in urban areas across the country, are caught in a seemingly unwinnable battle to protect their children from this invisible neurotoxin.

Lead poisoning is often considered a problem of the past. But its legacy lingers today, the result of corporate decisions and lagging government action. The lead pumped out of exhaust pipes and industrial smokestacks decades ago can still be found in soil, and lead paint used extensively throughout the first half of the 20th century remains on the walls of many homes, degrading to chips and dust. The U.S. began phasing out lead in automobile gasoline and consumer paint in the 1970s, but new lead pollution continues to be dumped on communities every year from industrial sites and the aviation gas used by small aircraft. 

One in every two American children under the age of 6 who were tested between late 2018 and early 2020 had detectable levels of lead in their blood, and studies show soil exposure is a major reason. Because lead contamination is more common in low-income neighborhoods, the people living there, disproportionately Black and Latino, face higher risks of the consequences.

That’s what motivates the people calling for and taking action. There’s no time to waste.

“This is a chemical shackle on generations of children that are going to be born into these communities if you don’t clean up this lead,” said Jane Williams, executive director of the environmental justice nonprofit California Communities Against Toxics.

The solution she wants to see: officials getting ahead of the problem by using data they already have to identify and clean soil hot spots, instead of reacting after the fact to individual cases of poisoned children.

“You know where the problem is,” Williams said. “You know what the problem is doing. You know what it’s impacting. You know what the social cost is. You know all these things, and you do nothing as either state government, local government or federal government.”

Playground of poison

Lead doesn’t break down into something safer as it sits in soil, which is why it’s so critical to remove it or cover it with clean soil to stop exposure. When lead settles into the top layer of dirt, scientists have found, it can remain there for decades, if not longer. 

Because it binds to the soil particles, wind that kicks dirt and dust into the air can reintroduce the lead into the atmosphere and spread the contamination, soil lead expert Howard Mielke of Tulane University’s School of Medicine wrote in a 2021 article he co-authored in the scientific journal Elementa. 

His research in New Orleans has shown that lead levels in exposed people’s blood increase rapidly when the soil lead levels range between nearly zero and 100 parts per million, well below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s 400 parts-per-million threshold. Blood lead levels flatten out with higher exposure.

Garrido’s yard in Santa Ana, where lead levels ranged from 33 parts per million to as high as 148, was a source of continual struggle after her son’s pediatrician told Garrido that lead was in his blood. The levels weren’t high enough for him to qualify for intervention services from the local public health agency, but were still concerning. He was later diagnosed with speech delays and began speech therapy.

When Garrido’s family first moved into the rental, the front yard had some grass, but drought conditions that followed had left it barren: a playground of poison where she refused to let Ruben go. 

“I don’t let him out at all, but no matter what I do, even when we keep the door closed all the time, so much dirt gets in. It’s right there. It’s maybe two feet away from my doorstep,” Garrido said before she moved. 

She cleaned her kitchen counters daily. A thick layer of dust would soon reappear. 

She vacuumed the small rug in her home three times a day, and it still wasn’t enough.

Between the barren soil in the yard and the dust and pollution kicked up by construction industries along the major boulevard behind her home, she faced a losing battle. Calls to code enforcement, even the police, to report shops working past regular business operating hours didn’t resolve the problem. 

Neither did reporting the soil lead levels to the owner of her rental. Garrido said he didn’t offer to remediate the soil and seemed upset that she had allowed this reporter to test it in 2018 as part of a Grist investigation. Public Integrity asked for comment through the property-management company; the landlord did not respond. 

“I think everybody has the right to health,” Garrido said, “but not everybody thinks that.”

From inaction to activism in a lead-poisoned community

In Garrido’s former community, organized residents are intent on getting the lead out.

Parents, environmental justice advocates and academic scholars have spent the past five years working together to raise awareness about the dangers of exposure in Santa Ana. Their coalition, ¡Plo-NO! Santa Ana! Lead-Free Santa Ana!, also conducted soil lead testing throughout the city and pressed city officials and the Orange County Health Care Agency to more aggressively address the problem.

The coalition’s soil lead testing, organized after a 2017 ThinkProgress investigation, confirmed that children in Santa Ana’s poorest areas are at higher risk of exposure. The 2020 study, led by a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, analyzed more than 1,500 soil samples collected throughout the city. 

The coalition’s work paid off: In April 2022, the City Council approved an update to Santa Ana’s general plan that commits for the first time to comprehensively address lead-contamination hazards. The previous fall, the council took the unusual step of adopting a cutting-edge resolution declaring a climate emergency while simultaneously pledging to limit or prevent exposure to lead and other environmental toxins. 

Even just acknowledging the widespread lead contamination in the city’s soils is a new step for the council, said Councilmember and Mayor Pro Tem Jessie Lopez, who introduced the resolution.

She first learned of the problem through her work with the public advocacy organization Orange County Environmental Justice, or OCEJ, part of the ¡Plo-NO! coalition. Lopez, elected to the City Council in 2020, said she was initially shocked to learn a few years earlier that Santa Ana’s soils were contaminated. Frustration followed as the city was slow to act.

Now, as an elected official herself, her goal is to ensure that the city addresses the land-use inequalities that create unequal exposure to pollution.

“We’re very much aware of bad decisions that have been made in the past,” Lopez said. “We are working really hard to change them, to make sure that moving forward we don’t do those things again.”

Coalition members have spent several years discussing lead policies with officials from the local planning department and the Orange County Health Care Agency, and have pressed to ensure that residents are included in that work. OCEJ, for instance, advocated for policies to protect renters from eviction while lead remediation occurs or having their rent increased as a result. 

As any activist working on a difficult problem could guess, the Santa Ana results are still a work in progress. But many of the changes that the coalition advocated for in the general plan update are concrete: The city now requires developers to provide information about a property’s prior use and history of hazardous materials so soil contamination can be remediated. It mandates buffers between heavy industry and residential areas. The city has also pledged to identify baseline soil and air contamination levels, secure grant funding to test soil and air, and create a public health plan to address environmental hazards in disproportionately affected neighborhoods.

“We’re really happy with the result,” said OCEJ Project Director Patricia J. Flores Yrarrázaval. “We pushed really hard over the last year. It was an uphill battle, and we were told at some points that our demands were unreasonable. To have them all met is a huge victory.”

The key to their success, she said, was creating a community movement that combined scientific evidence with powerful testimonials from residents. With impassioned call-ins during City Council meetings, residents pressed the city to act. Failing to do so would have allowed children to continue to be poisoned, Flores Yrarrázaval told council members during one meeting. 

Now, she said, “We’re in a lot better position as a community than we were before.” 

In addition to its policy advocacy work, OCEJ has multiple projects underway to collect data that illuminates how widespread lead exposure is in Santa Ana, particularly among youth. The organization hopes to carry out blood lead testing and to conduct a study to measure tooth lead levels to understand cumulative exposure over a Santa Ana resident’s lifetime. 

It still concerns coalition members that county health officials have been relying almost exclusively on existing blood lead level data to guide the Orange County Health Care Agency’s response to childhood lead exposure, said Alana M. W. LeBrón, an assistant professor of public health and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine, who has overseen the school’s soil lead research in Santa Ana. Studies have shown that many states fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, leaving vast numbers of children undiagnosed. 

“If you’re only exploring cases where there is a diagnosis of ‘lead poisoning,’ then you’re missing this whole swath of people,” said LeBrón, referring to people who aren’t tested and cases that don’t trigger public-health intervention because repeated exposures to lower levels of lead aren’t treated as the dangers they are. 

Throughout, it’s been Santa Ana residents leading the charge for the community’s health, said Flores Yrarrázaval, and the battle isn’t over.

“We want to engage this fight on multiple fronts,” she said.

The power of community in the war against lead

The community-wide approach to eliminating lead poisoning that Santa Ana advocates want is the most effective way to protect children, soil lead experts say. It means pinpointing lead hot spots and focusing remediation neighborhood by neighborhood, instead of a scattershot approach after kids test positive for lead in their blood. 

At the local level, municipalities can either make aggressive efforts to address lead contamination or take a lax approach, and the differences emerge in irreversible health impacts. 

Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson extensively researched lead exposure in Chicago neighborhoods and the inequalities created by unequal exposure to polluted environments. He points to the Chicago Department of Public Health as a role model because the agency didn’t wait for the federal or state governments to intervene. 

“I consider the health department there to be kind of a hero in an important way in the lead story, because starting roughly in the ’90s, they vigorously tested and attempted to regulate the sources of lead exposure in the city,” Sampson said. 

The agency collected tens of thousands of blood tests, monitored this data to focus on neighborhoods most impacted by lead poisoning, offered case management to lead-exposed children, conducted home inspections and addressed lead hazards.

While the public health agency has focused on lead paint, its partners at state and local agencies zero in on soil lead contamination. For example, Chicago requires those who buy city-owned property to look for soil hazards and remediate high levels of lead. That’s the type of all-hands-on-deck approach that needs to happen across the country, with multiple agencies collaborating, Sampson said.

It’s made a big difference in Chicago.

Lead exposure rates, which were extremely high and concentrated in the city’s poor, Black and Latino neighborhoods, declined dramatically. One of every four children tested in 1997 had levels of lead in their blood of at least 10 micrograms per deciliter — a sign of high exposure. By 2021, that had dropped to one in 200 children.

“The rates are still higher in poor, Black neighborhoods, but a poor, Black neighborhood now is much less at risk than a poor, Black neighborhood in 1995,” Sampson said. “That is an important victory.”

A national plan to reduce lead exposures

Today, across the country, most county public health agencies approach lead exposure by testing children’s blood lead levels, not the environment, said Mielke, the Tulane University soil lead expert. Focusing on individual lead poisoning cases may appear to be more manageable. But this approach — which avoids investing in wide-scale remediation — uses children as canaries in the coal mine. It allows thousands to be exposed daily to contaminated soil in their backyards. And many are never even diagnosed.

Municipalities now have the scientific tools to measure lead in the environment and map hot spots so public health agencies can focus on preventing exposure before it occurs. Requiring proof of a lead-poisoned child before action can be taken to investigate and address the contamination is a flawed approach, Mielke said.

“We’re trying to cure the disease instead of preventing the disease,” said Mielke. And in the case of lead poisoning, there is no cure.

He uses Norway as an example of what can be accomplished in the war against lead when political will and scientific knowledge come together. Norway decided to ban lead from paint half a century before the U.S., in the 1920s, the same period when U.S. public health officials were debating whether to allow General Motors to use tetraethyl lead in gasoline as an additive. U.S. public health officials at the time knew the potential health hazards and understood that the toxic additive was a “serious menace to the public health” but still made the consequential decision to support its use in gasoline. 

Norway used lower amounts of leaded gasoline, had less traffic and built fewer highways. Faced with lead poisoning regardless, the country decided to focus its testing efforts on the environment, not children’s blood. 

Almost 15 years ago, Norway’s environmental protection agency decided to systematically sample, analyze and map surface soils in areas where children were most likely to be exposed to contaminated soil: child care centers, school yards and playgrounds in the country’s 10 largest cities, using Mielke’s research in New Orleans as the basis for this work. 

Once soil tests confirm lead, Norway cleans it up. Norway also doesn’t require proof that a child has been lead-poisoned for the government to offer assistance, Mielke said. Having a lead-contaminated environment is enough to trigger government intervention and action to address the problem.

The U.S. could do this, too, Mielke said.

It simply hasn’t.

In theory, the agency best positioned to stop a nationwide epidemic of lead poisoning in this country is the EPA.

In 1992 Congress directed officials there to set standards for soil lead levels.  It wasn’t until 2001 that the agency carried out the order. And the rules have not been updated since their release 22 years ago.

Repeated studies have shown that no amount of lead exposure is safe — and at the very least should be dramatically lower than the EPA’s threshold of 400 parts of lead per million parts of soil. But public health agencies around the country use the EPA’s standards to decide whether to remediate a lead-contaminated yard after a child is exposed. 

EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Carlton Waterhouse oversees the agency’s work on solid waste and remediation. He said it’s challenging to tackle a problem that originates at a local level but is pervasive across the country. The response to lead contamination by local and state agencies varies substantially, he said, and the lack of a federal clean-soil law — something like the Clean Air and Clean Water acts — means the EPA has no authority to sample and clean up all soils in the country. 

“We don’t have any legislation or direction or funding that gives us a kind of comprehensive approach to say, ‘Let’s deal with the problem of lead,’” Waterhouse said.

Now, the EPA says it plans to finally “revisit” its outdated soil lead hazard standards. That reconsideration is part of a new strategy the agency announced in October to reduce lead exposures across the country and the racial and income disparities in who gets exposed. 

The agency intends to tackle the problem in a way advocates have long called for: by using data to predict lead hot spots, including locations where children might get exposed, and then testing those soils. If that pollution meets the threshold of a Superfund site, then the EPA will remediate, Waterhouse said. 

The agency is attempting to do what it can with the authority it has, he said, “recognizing that we don’t have the kind of footprint that allows us to do the testing of all the children by the time they start school or to go into every home and test for lead-based paint.” 

This means the agency is focusing its work in places where the EPA knows there are lead exposures through air, water or soil. Funds to replace lead service lines, the pipes connecting a home to a water main, for example, were included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2022. But the new system doesn’t account for the untold number of sites overlooked by spotty data.

Critics also note the goals don’t commit the EPA to updating the outdated lead hazard standards, despite a federal court order in 2021 that requires it. The agency has not yet disclosed a timeline.

“Communities around the country are suffering lead exposure from soil because EPA has dropped the ball for decades,” said Eve Gartner, managing attorney for the Toxic Exposure and Health Program at Earthjustice, which represented more than half a dozen organizations whose lawsuit prompted the 2021 decision.

In March 2022, groups underwhelmed by the EPA’s then-draft strategy called on the agency to make a broader commitment to eliminate lead exposure in all communities and for people of all ages, because the dangers of lead are not limited to children. The coalition also pressed the EPA to address lead exposure from continuing pollution sources.

“EPA will not prevent exposure to lead if it continues to view lead as a problem of a purely ‘legacy’ nature,” the coalition wrote in public comments submitted to the agency.

At Simon Fraser University in Canada, Professor Bruce Lanphear, an epidemiologist and leading expert on early childhood exposure to lead as well as the long-term effects on adults, is cautiously optimistic about the plan. But his hope is tempered by the agency’s history of lagging action. 

“It’s long overdue, and we can’t blame one [political] party or another. They both failed miserably for so long,” Lanphear said. “And yet at the same time, are we at a turning point where we’ll really address not only the legacy of lead poisoning, but maybe the disparities as well?” 

Lanphear has found that a headline-grabbing lead crisis, such as the water contamination in Flint, Michigan, prompts attention and funding. But the attention soon dissipates. The funding never reaches a level that would comprehensively address the widespread nature of the problem. And the insufficient lead hazard standards don’t help.

That concerns Lanphear, who has spent the better part of two decades researching and tracking the resulting health impacts. Very few toxic chemicals have been as consistently shown to harm children as lead, he said, and its effects are far-reaching. 

Lanphear’s research has shown that lead might cause at least a quarter of a million early deaths a year from cardiovascular disease in the United States alone. 

Ruth Ann Norton, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Green & Healthy Homes Initiative in Baltimore, has spearheaded efforts to aggressively reduce childhood lead poisoning across the nation. What the country needs — and the EPA strategy is missing — are opportunities to tackle multiple problems at once, she said. 

For example, the federal weatherization assistance program could be coupled with a program to remediate lead in paint and soil, problems that typically get deferred because of cost. But the cost of inaction is high. 

Communities can take creative actions now, Norton added. Her nonprofit manages a program in Pennsylvania with Lancaster General Hospital, which is paying $50 million to provide lead hazard control intervention in 2,800 homes. 

“Every community can do this,” she said. “It is just simply making the decision to do something that they know is so fundamental to their future.” 

Fighting lead in soil with more soil

Scientists are also trying to fill gaps created by insufficient government action. Knowing that most U.S. cities and towns lack a centralized database for soil lead tests, Gabriel Filippelli, a biogeochemist who has studied lead contamination for more than two decades, helped create an online platform where everyone, from scientists to residents, can share lead samples and test results. 

Launched in 2018, the online portal Map My Environment visualizes this data, includes lead levels for soil, dust and water pollution in cities around the world, and offers recommendations on how to remediate lead. “We just wanted a way to get this out of a static journal and into communities,” said Filippelli, an Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis professor who serves as executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute. 

Someone collecting dust samples can have them tested free by the initiative. Map My Environment also launched a school Bookworm Initiative, where students collect earthworms and soil for lead-contamination analysis, receiving a book voucher in return. 

At a time when Americans are more aware of the dangers of lead due to Flint’s water crisis, most are unaware that lead too often contaminates soil in urban centers, Filippelli said. 

“Water is actually a really rare thing to get affected by,” he said. “It’s really that soil and dust which is ever present, which I think is the biggest thing. That’s the message we try to put out all the time, along with the fact that it’s really easy to solve.” 

Change the soil surface in communities with high levels of lead, research by Mielke and others show, and you protect people’s health. In New Orleans, the city health department worked with Mielke to focus soil remediation in child care centers, parks and playgrounds by capping contaminated soil with clean soil. The city’s playground soils improved remarkably, Mielke said. 

But because backyards weren’t included, they “remain very hazardous,” he said, and that is where “kids are likely to be when they are very, very young.” 

To truly protect children’s health, studies have shown, soil lead concentrations across a community would need to fall below 80 parts per million, perhaps half that level, Mielke said. A 2017 study by geologist and environmental scientist Mark Laidlaw, Filippelli, Mielke and their colleagues examined approaches to address urban soil lead contamination and concluded that collecting soil lead levels would not be necessary if soil with little or no lead were spread across entire neighborhoods. 

In other words: Cover what’s there with better soil.

In New Orleans, Mielke has tapped the Bonnet Carré Spillway for lead-safe alluvial soil, sourced from the sediments of the Mississippi River, to cover hazardous areas. Most cities can access soil like that on the outskirts of urban centers, the study found. To pay for it, the researchers suggest levying taxes on gas and paint products, given that a large portion of lead in soils and home interior paints originated from these industries.

In New York City, where recent studies have confirmed local soil lead contamination, the NYC Clean Soil Bank offers residents free, clean soil that’s been tested after excavation from New York City construction sites. Creating that system “has surprisingly been more feasible than trying to mandate testing or remediation,” said Egendorf, a researcher with the NYC Compost Project. “I would love for more people to know about it and for this to keep expanding because other cities can do it too.” 

What all these solutions show is that lead poisoning is preventable. The hardships from its health impacts don’t need to touch yet more generations.

It just takes action.

In Santa Ana, the environmental justice advocates pushing for exactly that say they are committed to reforming how soil lead contamination is addressed nationwide. LeBrón, the public health professor from the University of California, Irvine, said the coalition hopes to form an exchange so people across the country can learn from each other. 

For Garrido, the solutions didn’t come soon enough. She would have gladly raised her son in Santa Ana if there were fewer risks to his health and safety. 

Now 7 and in first grade, Ruben still has significant speech delays and is being assessed because he may have a learning disability, Garrido said, but he’s otherwise healthy. 

And he can run freely on her Buena Park property without the risk of breathing or ingesting lead-contaminated soil. 

“The neighborhood is safe enough. The sidewalks are decent where we can walk, so we take the dogs out for a walk and I take my son with me,” Garrido said. “It’s like a whole new world for him.” 

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. This report was also made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and by the Kozik Challenge Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The post Lead keeps poisoning children. It doesn’t have to. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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Read the Spanish version here. Lea la versión en español aquí.

Is lead lurking in the soil around you?

Dangerous lead contamination continues to plague the soil of urban centers, particularly in high-traffic, older neighborhoods where particles and airborne dust from leaded gasoline and lead paint accumulated during the 20th century. Industrial areas where both historic and current lead emissions have settled in the soil are also high risk.     

Decades of research have shown the lasting harm for children exposed to lead, which triggers a cascade of problems for brain development, impacting the capacity to learn, focus and control impulses and other behaviors critical to navigating life. A growing body of evidence shows it also increases the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke and chronic kidney disease. 

But there are actions you can take to make your community safer.

Find out if you have a problem

Local experts might know where local soil lead hotspots are located in your region. But if you can’t find information, try the online portal Map My Environment, a database showing lead pollution in soil, dust and water across the United States and the world. The initiative originally launched at the Center for Urban Health at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, and now university scientists from around the globe participate. 

About this series

Lead contaminates soil in communities around the country, often from long-gone pollution sources overlooked by officials. Our health depends on fixing that.

Read more

(Photo credit: Grist/Amelia Bates/Daniel A. Anderson)

You can explore lead levels on the interactive map and send in test samples to be analyzed for free. You’ll also see recommendations on lead interventions.

This map shows how common elevated blood lead levels are in children by census tract or ZIP code in 34 states. States fail to adequately test children’s blood for lead exposure, research shows, but existing data can point to potential trouble areas for soil, paint or water exposure.   

Press for federal action

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it plans to address its outdated soil-lead hazard standards, which don’t protect people from harm because the thresholds are set too high. This reconsideration is part of a new strategy the agency announced in October to reduce lead exposures across the country, along with the higher risks borne by people of color and lower-income residents. 

But the agency has not disclosed a timeline for revisiting the standards. And the current rules were set more than 20 years ago.

EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan has pledged that the agency will hold itself accountable by reporting its progress on the EPA website. In the meantime, you can get in touch with the agency and watch for opportunities to weigh in with a public comment. (Keep an eye out at Regulations.gov.)

In addition, the United States lacks a systematic approach to mapping urban soil contamination. That’s often left to academic researchers, but they say that funding for comprehensive testing to identify and monitor hotspots is difficult to get. Public pressure on agencies to support more urban soil testing could produce data that not only prevents childhood lead exposure before it occurs, but also leads to stronger environmental rules. 

Team up

Research has shown that addressing pervasive, widespread soil lead contamination requires collaborative approaches that empower the people it’s hurting. This means recruiting leaders from neighborhoods with lead exposure risks, raising awareness about the health hazards, sharing ways that community members can protect their families and finding solutions that work for their circumstances. 

In Santa Ana, California, people did just that. Environmental justice advocates, concerned parents and scientists formed a coalition, ¡Plo-NO! Santa Ana! Lead-Free Santa Ana!, that conducted soil lead testing throughout the city and pressed local officials to act. Last year, the Santa Ana City Council updated the city general plan to commit to comprehensively addressing lead contamination hazards. 

Halfway across the country, University of Illinois researchers partnered with Chicago residents to produce what they say is the first citywide map of soil lead contamination in that city. They found widespread pollution. With feedback from those same residents, the scientists designed follow-up studies and approaches to treat the soil to protect people.  

Fight lead in soil with more soil

Soil lead expert Howard Mielke of Tulane University’s School of Medicine has found that if you change the surface of the soil in communities with high levels of lead, you protect people’s health. 

In New Orleans, the city health department worked with Mielke to focus soil remediation in child care centers, parks and playgrounds by covering contaminated soil with clean soil. The city’s playground soils improved remarkably, Mielke said. Most cities can access lead-safe soil on the outskirts of urban centers, his research has found. 

In New York City, meanwhile, soil expert Sara Perl Egendorf saw that residents weren’t sure how best to protect against soil lead contamination in urban gardens. So Egendorf helped create a network called Legacy Lead to tackle soil contamination throughout the city. One result: the NYC Clean Soil Bank. It offers residents free, clean soil to cover potentially unsafe areas. 

Keep an eye on research for new solutions

We know more now than we did a generation ago about how to contain lead. And new research keeps coming. 

University of Illinois scientists, for instance, plan to do more research into slowing the spread of lead particles and protecting people from inhaling or ingesting the contaminated soil and dust. 

Andrew Margenot, a soil expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said there’s no silver bullet when it comes to remediating lead in soil. He envisions solutions that put nature to work. Adding trees as windbreaks could help trap wind-blown lead particles. Planting fruit trees can be a good idea because they transfer only minimal lead to their fruits. Covering the surrounding soil with mulch adds a protective layer. 

Look for healthcare partners

The nonprofit Green & Healthy Homes Initiative in Baltimore is managing a program in Pennsylvania with Lancaster General Hospital, which is paying to provide lead hazard control intervention in 2,800 homes. They see the value in addressing a health threat — and hospitals in your area might, too.

“Every community can do this,” said Ruth Ann Norton, president and chief executive officer of the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “It is just simply making the decision to do something that they know is so fundamental to their future.”   

Engage younger generations in the fight to protect soil

Kids are most affected by lead, but they probably don’t know much about it, especially the soil connection. You can work with local schools to get the word out.

Some scientists are taking their soil lead findings into the classroom in partnership with environmental justice activists, academics at three universities wrote in a 2021 study. Actions include teaching about the dangers of lead in soil, having students participate in soil-testing programs and working to connect what they learn in school, such as chemistry, with examples of how scientific processes play out in their lives. 

Run for office

You can get a lot done as an advocate for your community. But some actions, only elected officials can take.

Jessie Lopez first learned about Santa Ana’s lead contamination problem through her work with the public advocacy organization Orange County Environmental Justice, which is part of the ¡Plo-NO! coalition. Then she ran for office.

Now, as a city councilmember and mayor pro tem, she can help chart Santa Ana’s path on lead. Among her actions: In 2021 she introduced a cutting-edge resolution adopted by the city council that declared a climate emergency while simultaneously pledging to limit or prevent exposure to lead and other environmental toxins in Santa Ana. 

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. This report was also made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and by the Kozik Challenge Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The post Eight ways to take action on lead contaminating your community’s soil  appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

Lea la versión en inglés aquí. Read the English version here.

La noticia fue un shock: el plomo, escondido en la casa de Nalleli Garrido, estaba envenenando a su hijo de un año.

Su pediatra le dijo que limpiara todos los juguetes del pequeño Rubén, mantuviera la casa libre de polvo y evitara que jugara en el suelo descubierto del exterior de su cabaña, la cual habían alquilado en el barrio de Logan, en Santa Ana, California. Ella hizo todo lo que pudo. Pero el polvo seguía colándose dentro de la casa.

Nadie le ofrecía una alternativa. La única solución que encontraron ella y su marido fue irse. En 2019, después de dos años de preocupación constante, se mudaron a la ciudad de Buena Park, en el norte, y compraron una casa con un jardín con césped, no una parcela de tierra expuesta como su patio delantero de Santa Ana, donde el metal tóxico podía encontrarse en concentraciones de hasta 148 partes de plomo por millón de tierra. La Oficina de Evaluación de Peligros para la Salud Ambiental de California considera que 80 partes por millón o más son peligrosas para los niños.

“Me aterraba sacar a mi hijo”, dijo Garrido, enfermera psiquiátrica. “Incluso paseando por el patio, les decía a mis hijos que contuvieran la respiración. ‘No respiren eso, no respiren el polvo'”.

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A través del país, el principal consejo que se da a las familias amenazadas por la exposición a suelos con plomo — mantener la casa limpia — no funciona, según demuestran los estudios. Y las guías federales sobre la exposición tienen umbrales demasiado altos para proteger a los niños de daños irreversibles. Pero de costa a costa, líderes comunitarios, defensores de la salud y académicos están presionando para que se busquen soluciones reales y se ponga fin al envenenamiento de los niños con plomo, generación tras generación tras generación.

Los científicos están colaborando con los residentes para recoger muestras de plomo del suelo y elaborar un mapa nacional que muestre los puntos peligrosos. Algunas ciudades ofrecen tierra limpia para cubrir el suelo de los patios contaminados con plomo, protegiendo a niños y adultos de una mayor exposición. Y, en Santa Ana, una coalición convenció a los funcionarios municipales para que empezaran a tratar el peligro medioambiental como una prioridad.

“Creo que deberíamos reconocer estos legados violentos, peligrosos y tóxicos que heredamos, y tomar acciones que realmente tengan sentido para mantenernos a salvo”, afirmó Sara Perl Egendorf, quien ayudó a crear una coalición llamada Legacy Lead para abordar la contaminación allí.

Décadas de investigación han demostrado los daños a largo plazo que sufren los niños expuestos al plomo, desde repercusiones en el desarrollo cerebral — la capacidad de aprender, concentrarse y controlar los impulsos — hasta riesgos posteriores para la salud, como las cardiopatías coronarias. Ninguna cantidad, dicen los científicos, es segura. Sin embargo, padres como Garrido, muchos viviendo en zonas urbanas de todo el país, están atrapados en una batalla aparentemente imposible de ganar para proteger a sus hijos de esta neurotoxina invisible.

La intoxicación por plomo suele considerarse un problema del pasado. Pero su legado perdura actualmente como resultado de decisiones empresariales y de las acciones tardías de los gobiernos. El plomo expulsado por los tubos de escape de los autos y las chimeneas industriales hace décadas aún puede encontrarse en el suelo, y la pintura con plomo utilizada ampliamente durante la primera mitad del siglo XX permanece en las paredes de muchos hogares, degradándose hasta convertirse en virutas y polvo. Estados Unidos empezó a eliminar el plomo de la gasolina de los automóviles y de la pintura para el consumo particular en los años 70, pero se sigue vertiendo plomo en las comunidades desde los emplazamientos industriales y la gasolina de aviación que utilizan las avionetas.

Uno de cada dos niños estadounidenses menores de 6 años que fueron examinados entre finales de 2018 y principios de 2020 tenía niveles detectables de plomo en la sangre, y los estudios muestran que la exposición al suelo contaminado es una de las principales razones. Dado que la contaminación por plomo es más común en los barrios de bajo nivel socioeconómico, las personas que viven allí, desproporcionadamente Negras y Latinas, enfrentan mayores riesgos de sufrir las consecuencias.

Eso es lo que motiva a la gente a pedir y tomar acciones. No hay tiempo que perder.

“Se trata de un grillete químico para las generaciones de niños que nacerán en estas comunidades si no se limpia el plomo”, afirmó Jane Williams, directora ejecutiva de la asociación sin fines de lucro California Communities Against Toxics.

La solución que desea ver es que las autoridades se adelanten al problema y utilicen la información que ya tienen para identificar y limpiar los puntos peligrosos del suelo, en lugar de reaccionar ante los casos individuales de niños envenenados.

“Sabes dónde está el problema”, dijo Williams. “Sabes lo que está haciendo el problema. Sabes cuál es su impacto. Sabes cuál es el costo social. Sabes todas estas cosas, y no haces nada ni como gobierno estatal, ni como gobierno local, ni como gobierno federal”.

Parque de juegos envenenado

El plomo no se descompone en algo más seguro cuando se asienta en el suelo, por eso es tan importante retirarlo o cubrirlo con tierra limpia para detener la exposición. Los científicos han descubierto que, cuando el plomo se deposita en la capa superior de la tierra, puede permanecer allí durante décadas, o más.

Como se adhiere a las partículas del suelo, el viento que levanta la tierra y el polvo puede reintroducir el plomo en la atmósfera y propagar la contaminación, escribió el experto en plomo Howard Mielke de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Tulane, en un artículo publicado en 2021 en la revista científica Elementa.

Su investigación en Nueva Orleans ha demostrado que los niveles de plomo en la sangre de las personas expuestas aumentan rápidamente cuando los niveles de plomo en el suelo oscilan entre casi cero y 100 partes por millón, muy por debajo del umbral de 400 partes por millón establecido por la Agencia de Protección del Medio Ambiente de Estados Unidos. Los niveles de plomo en la sangre se estabilizan a mayor exposición.

El jardín de Garrido en Santa Ana, donde los niveles de plomo oscilaban entre 33 partes por millón y 148, fue una fuente continua de problemas después de que el pediatra le dijera que había plomo en la sangre de su hijo. Los niveles no eran lo suficientemente altos como para que el niño tuviera derecho a los servicios de intervención de la agencia local de salud pública, pero seguían siendo preocupantes. Más tarde le diagnosticaron retrasos en el habla y comenzó terapia de lenguaje.

Cuando la familia Garrido se mudó por primera vez a la casa alquilada, el jardín delantero tenía algo de pasto, pero la sequía posterior lo dejó estéril: un patio envenenado al que no dejaban salir a Rubén.

“No lo dejo salir para nada, pero no importa lo que haga, incluso cuando mantenemos la puerta cerrada todo el tiempo, entra mucha tierra. Está justo ahí. Está como a medio metro de mi puerta”, dijo Garrido antes de irse.

Limpiaba a diario las encimeras de la cocina, pero una gruesa capa de polvo pronto volvía a aparecer.

Aspiraba la pequeña alfombra de su casa tres veces al día, y aun así no era suficiente.

Entre el suelo estéril del patio, y el polvo y la contaminación levantados por las industrias constructoras a lo largo del bulevar principal, situado detrás de su casa, se enfrentó a una batalla perdida. Las llamadas a las autoridades competentes, e incluso a la policía, para denunciar a los comercios que operaban fuera del horario habitual de trabajo, no resolvieron el problema.

Tampoco el informar a los propietarios de su casa rentada sobre los niveles de plomo en el suelo. Garrido dijo que no se ofreció a arreglar el suelo y parecía molesto porque ella había permitido que esta reportera lo analizara en 2018 como parte de una investigación de Grist. Public Integrity solicitó una entrevista a través de la empresa de gestión de la propiedad; el propietario no respondió.

“Creo que todo el mundo tiene derecho a la salud”, dijo Garrido, “pero no todo el mundo piensa eso”.

De la falta de acción al activismo en una comunidad envenenada por plomo

En la antigua comunidad de Garrido, los residentes organizados se han propuesto eliminar el plomo.

Padres, defensores de la justicia medioambiental y académicos han pasado los últimos cinco años trabajando juntos para concientizar sobre los peligros de la exposición al plomo en Santa Ana. Su coalición, ¡Plo-NO! ¡Santa Ana! ¡Santa Ana sin plomo!, también ha realizado pruebas de plomo en el suelo a lo largo de la ciudad y ha presionado a las autoridades municipales y a la Agencia de Salud del Condado de Orange para que aborden el problema de forma más agresiva.

Las pruebas de plomo en el suelo de la coalición, organizadas tras una investigación de ThinkProgress en 2017, confirmaron que los niños de las zonas más pobres de Santa Ana corren un mayor riesgo de exposición. El estudio de 2020, dirigido por un equipo de investigadores de la Universidad de California en Irvine, analizó más de 1,500 muestras de suelo recogidas en toda la ciudad.

El trabajo de la coalición dio sus frutos: En abril de 2022, el ayuntamiento aprobó una actualización del plan general de Santa Ana que se compromete por primera vez a abordar de forma integral los peligros de la contaminación por plomo. El otoño anterior, el ayuntamiento dio el inusual paso de adoptar una resolución vanguardista declarando una emergencia climática y, al mismo tiempo, comprometiéndose a limitar o prevenir la exposición al plomo y a otras toxinas medioambientales.

Incluso el mero hecho de reconocer la contaminación generalizada por plomo en los suelos de la ciudad es un nuevo paso para el ayuntamiento, dijo la integrante del ayuntamiento y alcaldesa provisional Jessie López, que presentó la resolución.

Se enteró del problema por primera vez a través de su trabajo con la organización de defensa pública Orange County Environmental Justice (OCEJ), que forma parte de la coalición ¡Plo-NO! López, elegida al ayuntamiento de la ciudad en 2020, dijo que inicialmente se sorprendió al enterarse de que los suelos de Santa Ana estaban contaminados. Siguió mucha frustración porque la ciudad se tardó en actuar.

Ahora, como funcionaria electa, su objetivo es garantizar que la ciudad aborde las desigualdades en el uso de los suelos que generan una exposición desigual a la contaminación.

“Somos muy conscientes de las malas decisiones que se han tomado en el pasado”, dijo López. “Estamos trabajando muy duro para cambiarlas, para asegurarnos de que en el futuro no volveremos a hacer esas cosas”.

Los miembros de la coalición llevan varios años debatiendo políticas sobre el plomo con funcionarios del departamento de planificación local y de la Agencia de Salud del Condado de Orange, y han presionado para que se incluya a los residentes en esa labor. La OCEJ, por ejemplo, abogó por políticas que protegieran a los inquilinos de ser desalojados mientras se lleva a cabo el saneamiento del plomo o de que se les aumente el alquiler como consecuencia de ello.

Como podría suponer cualquier activista que trabaje en un problema difícil, los resultados de Santa Ana siguen siendo un trabajo en curso. Pero muchos de los cambios por los que abogó la coalición en la actualización del plan general son concretos: la ciudad exige ahora a los desarrolladores inmobiliarios que faciliten información sobre el uso anterior de una propiedad y su historial de materiales peligrosos, de modo que la contaminación del suelo pueda ser resuelta. También obliga a mediar entre la industria pesada y las zonas residenciales. La ciudad se ha comprometido a determinar los niveles de referencia del suelo y el aire, conseguir subvenciones para analizarlos y crear un plan de salud pública para hacer frente a los riesgos medioambientales en los barrios más afectados.

“Estamos muy contentos con el resultado”, dijo Patricia J. Flores Yrarrázaval, directora de proyectos de la OCEJ. “Hemos presionado mucho durante el último año. Fue una ardua batalla, y en algunos momentos nos dijeron que nuestras peticiones no eran razonables. Que se hayan cumplido todas es una gran victoria”.

La clave de su éxito, según ella, fue crear un movimiento comunitario que combinara pruebas científicas con poderosos testimonios de los residentes. Con apasionadas llamadas de atención durante las reuniones del ayuntamiento, los residentes presionaron a la ciudad para que actuara. No hacerlo habría permitido que los niños siguieran siendo envenenados, le dijo Flores Yrarrázaval a los miembros del ayuntamiento durante una reunión.

Ahora, dijo, “como comunidad estamos en una posición mucho mejor que antes”.

Además de su labor de defensa de políticas, la OCEJ tiene en marcha varios proyectos para recopilar datos que pongan de manifiesto lo extendida que está la exposición al plomo en Santa Ana, especialmente entre los jóvenes. La organización espera llevar a cabo pruebas de plomo en la sangre y realizar un estudio para medir los niveles de plomo en los dientes a fin de entender la exposición acumulativa a lo largo de la vida de un residente de Santa Ana.

Los miembros de la coalición siguen preocupados de que los funcionarios de salud del condado se hayan basado casi exclusivamente en los datos existentes sobre el nivel de plomo en la sangre para orientar la respuesta de la Agencia de Salud del Condado de Orange a la exposición infantil al plomo, dijo Alana M. W. LeBrón, profesora adjunta de salud pública y estudios Chicanos/Latinos en la Universidad de California, Irvine, quien ha supervisado la investigación sobre el plomo en el suelo en Santa Ana. Los estudios han demostrado que muchos estados no realizan análisis de sangre adecuados a los niños para detectar la exposición al plomo, dejando a un gran número sin diagnosticar.

“Si sólo se analizan los casos en los que hay un diagnóstico de ‘envenenamiento por plomo’, entonces se está pasando por alto a todo este grupo de personas”, afirma LeBrón, refiriéndose a las personas a las que no se les hacen pruebas y a los casos que no desencadenan una intervención de salud pública, porque las exposiciones repetidas a niveles más bajos de plomo no son tratadas como el peligro que son. 

En todo momento, han sido los residentes de Santa Ana quienes han liderado la lucha por la salud de la comunidad, dijo Flores Yrarrázaval, y la batalla aún no ha terminado.

“Queremos emprender esta lucha en múltiples frentes”, afirmó.

El poder de la comunidad en la lucha contra el plomo

El enfoque comunitario general para eliminar la intoxicación por plomo que desean los defensores de Santa Ana es la forma más eficaz de proteger a los niños, afirman expertos en suelos afectados por el plomo. Significa localizar con precisión los focos peligrosos de plomo y centrar las medidas correctoras barrio por barrio, en lugar de aplicar un enfoque disperso después de que se ha encontrado plomo en la sangre de los niños.

En el ámbito local, los municipios pueden hacer esfuerzos enérgicos para hacer frente a la contaminación por plomo o adoptar un enfoque laxo, y las diferencias se traducen en repercusiones irreversibles para la salud.

El sociólogo Robert Sampson, de la Universidad de Harvard, investigó a fondo la exposición al plomo en los barrios de Chicago y las desigualdades creadas por la exposición desigual a entornos contaminados. Sampson señala que el Departamento de Salud Pública de Chicago es un ejemplo a seguir porque no esperó a que intervinieran el gobierno federal o estatal.

“Considero que el departamento de salud es una especie de héroe importante en la historia del plomo, porque a partir de los años 90 se dedicó enérgicamente a analizar e intentar regular las fuentes de exposición al plomo en la ciudad”, dijo Sampson.

La agencia recogió decenas de miles de análisis de sangre, monitoreó esta información para enfocarse en los barrios más afectados por el envenenamiento por plomo, ofreció gestión de casos a los niños expuestos, realizó inspecciones de viviendas y abordó los peligros del metal.

Mientras que la agencia de salud pública se ha centrado en la pintura con plomo, sus socios de las agencias estatales y locales se centran en la contaminación por plomo del suelo. Por ejemplo, Chicago exige a quienes compran propiedades de la ciudad que detecten peligros en el suelo y remedien los niveles elevados de plomo. Este es el tipo de acción conjunta que debe aplicarse en todo el país, con la colaboración de múltiples organismos, dijo Sampson.

Ha significado una gran diferencia en Chicago.

Las tasas de exposición al plomo, que eran muy altas y se concentraban en los barrios pobres, Negros y Latinos de la ciudad, han disminuido drásticamente. Uno de cada cuatro niños analizados en 1997 tenía niveles de plomo en la sangre de al menos 10 microgramos por decilitro, señal de una exposición elevada. Para 2021, la tasa había bajado a uno de cada 200 niños.

“Las tasas siguen siendo más altas en los barrios pobres y Negros, pero un barrio pobre y Negro tiene ahora mucho menos riesgo que un barrio pobre y Negro en 1995”, dijo Sampson. “Es una victoria importante”.

Un plan nacional para reducir la exposición al plomo

En la actualidad, en todo el país, la mayoría de los organismos de salud pública de los condados abordan la exposición al plomo analizando los niveles del metal en la sangre de los niños, no el entorno, afirma Mielke, experto en suelos contaminados con plomo de la Universidad de Tulane. Centrarse en los casos individuales de intoxicación puede parecer más manejable. Pero este planteamiento, que evita invertir en medidas correctoras a gran escala, utiliza a los niños como canarios en la mina de carbón. Permite que miles de ellos estén expuestas diariamente a suelos contaminados en sus patios traseros. Y a muchos ni siquiera se les diagnostica.

Los municipios disponen ahora de herramientas científicas para medir la presencia de plomo en el medio ambiente y cartografiar los puntos peligrosos, de modo que los organismos de salud pública puedan centrarse en prevenir la exposición antes de que se produzca. Exigir pruebas de envenenamiento por plomo de un niño antes de investigar y abordar la contaminación es una estrategia fallida, dijo Mielke.

“Intentamos curar la enfermedad en lugar de prevenirla”, dijo Mielke. Y en el caso del envenenamiento por plomo, no hay cura.

El experto utiliza Noruega como ejemplo de lo que puede lograrse en la lucha contra el plomo cuando la voluntad política y el conocimiento científico están en sintonía. Noruega decidió prohibir el plomo en la pintura medio siglo antes que Estados Unidos, en la década de 1920, el mismo periodo en que las autoridades sanitarias estadounidenses debatían si permitir a General Motors utilizar tetraetilo de plomo en la gasolina como aditivo. Las autoridades sanitarias estadounidenses de la época conocían los riesgos potenciales para la salud y comprendían que el aditivo tóxico era una “grave amenaza para la salud pública”, pero aún así tomaron la decisión de apoyar su uso en la gasolina.

Noruega utilizaba menos gasolina con plomo, tenía menos tráfico y construyó menos autopistas. Cuando, a pesar de todo, se enfrentaron con el envenenamiento por plomo, el país decidió centrar sus esfuerzos en analizar el medio ambiente, no la sangre de los niños.

Hace casi 15 años, la agencia noruega de protección del medio ambiente decidió analizar y cartografiar sistemáticamente los suelos superficiales de las zonas donde los niños tenían más probabilidades de estar expuestos a tierra contaminada: guarderías, patios de colegio y zonas de recreo de las 10 ciudades más grandes del país, basándose en la investigación de Mielke en Nueva Orleans.

Una vez que los análisis del suelo confirman la presencia de plomo, Noruega lo limpia. Noruega tampoco exige pruebas de que un niño haya sido envenenado con plomo para que el gobierno ofrezca ayuda, dice Mielke. Basta con que el entorno esté contaminado para que el gobierno intervenga y actúe para resolver el problema.

Estados Unidos también podría hacerlo, dijo Mielke.

Simplemente no lo han hecho.

En teoría, la agencia mejor posicionada para detener una epidemia nacional de envenenamiento por plomo en este país es la EPA.

En 1992, el Congreso ordenó a sus funcionarios que establecieran normas para los niveles de plomo en el suelo. La agencia no cumplió la orden hasta 2001. Y las normas no se han actualizado desde su publicación hace 22 años.

Repetidas pruebas han demostrado que ningún nivel de exposición al plomo es seguro y que, como mínimo, debería ser muy inferior al umbral establecido por la EPA de 400 partes de plomo por millón de partes de suelo. Sin embargo, las agencias de salud pública de todo el país utilizan las normas de la EPA para decidir si se debe limpiar un patio contaminado con plomo después de que un niño estuvo expuesto.

El administrador adjunto de la EPA, Carlton Waterhouse, supervisa el trabajo de la agencia en materia de residuos sólidos y descontaminación. En su opinión, es difícil abordar un problema que se origina a nivel local pero está muy extendido por todo el país. La respuesta a la contaminación por plomo de los organismos locales y estatales varía sustancialmente, dijo, y la falta de una ley federal de suelos limpios — algo así como las leyes de Aire Limpio y Agua Limpia — significa que la EPA no tiene autoridad para tomar muestras y limpiar todos los suelos del país.

No tenemos ninguna legislación, dirección o financiación que nos ofrezca un enfoque global para decir: ‘Vamos a abordar el problema del plomo'”, dijo Waterhouse.

Ahora, la EPA dice que finalmente planea “revisar” sus anticuadas normas sobre el peligro del plomo en el suelo. Esta reconsideración forma parte de una nueva estrategia que la agencia anunció en octubre para reducir la exposición al plomo en todo el país y las disparidades raciales y de ingresos en las personas expuestas.

La agencia pretende abordar el problema de una forma que los defensores llevan mucho tiempo pidiendo: utilizando datos para predecir las zonas peligrosas debido a la contaminación con plomo, incluyendo los lugares donde los niños podrían estar expuestos, para luego analizar esos suelos. Si la contaminación alcanza el umbral de un sitio de Superfondo -como se conoce un área afectada por materiales peligrosos que el gobierno federal determina debe ser descontaminada-, la EPA procederá a su remediación, dijo Waterhouse.

La agencia está intentando hacer lo que puede con la autoridad que tiene, dijo, “reconociendo que no tenemos el tipo de presencia que nos permite hacer pruebas a todos los niños en el momento en que empiezan a ir a la escuela o ir a cada casa y buscar pintura a base de plomo”.

Esto significa que la agencia está centrando su trabajo en lugares donde la EPA sabe que hay exposición al plomo a través del aire, el agua o el suelo. En la Ley Bipartidista de Infraestructuras de 2022 se incluyeron fondos para sustituir las tuberías de servicio de plomo, es decir, las tuberías que conectan una vivienda con la red de suministro de agua. Pero el nuevo sistema no toma en cuenta el incalculable número de lugares que se pasan por alto debido a datos incompletos.

Los críticos también señalan que los objetivos no comprometen a la EPA a actualizar estándares obsoletos sobre el peligro del plomo, a pesar de una orden judicial federal de 2021 que así lo exige. La agencia aún no ha dado a conocer una fecha específica.

“Comunidades de todo el país están sufriendo la exposición al plomo del suelo porque la EPA ha fallado en atender el problema durante décadas”, dijo Eve Gartner, abogada gerente del Programa de Exposición Tóxica y Salud de Earthjustice, cuya demanda motivó la decisión de 2021.

En marzo de 2022, los grupos, decepcionados por el entonces proyecto de estrategia de la EPA, pidieron a la agencia que asumiera un compromiso más amplio para eliminar la exposición al plomo en todas las comunidades y para las personas de todas las edades, porque los peligros no se limitan a los niños. La coalición también presionó a la EPA para que abordara la exposición al plomo procedente de fuentes de contaminación continuas.

La EPA no impedirá la exposición al plomo si sigue considerando que se trata de un problema de naturaleza puramente ‘heredada'”, escribió la coalición en los comentarios públicos presentados a la agencia.

En la Universidad Simon Fraser de Canadá, el profesor Bruce Lanphear, epidemiólogo y experto en la exposición al plomo en la primera infancia y sus efectos a largo plazo en los adultos, se muestra cautelosamente optimista sobre el plan. Pero su esperanza se ve atenuada por el historial de la agencia de retrasar las acciones.

“Hace tiempo que debería haberse hecho, y no podemos culpar a un partido [político] u otro. Ambos fracasaron miserablemente durante mucho tiempo”, dijo Lanphear. “Y sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, ¿estamos en un punto de inflexión en el que realmente abordaremos no sólo el legado del envenenamiento por plomo, sino quizá también las disparidades?”.

Lanphear ha descubierto que una crisis debido al plomo que acapara titulares, como la contaminación del agua en Flint (Michigan), atrae la atención y el financiamiento. Pero la atención se disipa pronto. Los fondos nunca llegan a un nivel que permita abordar de forma integral la naturaleza generalizada del problema. Y los estándares insuficientes sobre el peligro del plomo no ayudan.

Esto le preocupa a Lanphear, quien lleva casi dos décadas investigando y haciendo un seguimiento de su impacto sobre la salud. Pocas sustancias químicas tóxicas han demostrado ser tan nocivas para los niños como el plomo, y sus efectos son de gran alcance.

Las investigaciones de Lanphear han demostrado que el plomo podría causar al menos un cuarto de millón de muertes prematuras al año por enfermedades cardiovasculares tan solo en Estados Unidos.

Ruth Ann Norton, presidenta y directora ejecutiva de la organización sin ánimo de lucro Green & Healthy Homes en Baltimore, ha encabezado esfuerzos para reducir drásticamente la intoxicación infantil por plomo en todo Estados Unidos. Lo que el país necesita — y le falta a la estrategia de la EPA — son oportunidades para atacar varios problemas a la vez, dijo.

Por ejemplo, el programa federal de ayuda a la climatización podría combinarse con un programa de remediación del plomo en la pintura y el suelo, problemas que suelen aplazarse por su costo. Pero el coste de inacción es alto.

Las comunidades pueden tomar medidas creativas ahora, añadió Norton. Su organización sin ánimo de lucro gestiona un programa en Pennsylvania con el Hospital General de Lancaster, que está pagando 50 millones de dólares para intervenciones para el control del plomo en 2,800 hogares.

“Todas las comunidades pueden hacer esto”, dijo. “Se trata simplemente de tomar la decisión de hacer algo que saben que es tan fundamental para su futuro”.

Combatir el plomo en el suelo con más suelo

Los científicos también intentan llenar las brechas creadas por la falta de acción gubernamental. Gabriel Filippelli, biogeoquímico que lleva más de dos décadas estudiando la contaminación por plomo, sabe que la mayoría de las ciudades y pueblos de EE.UU. carecen de una base de datos centralizada para las pruebas de plomo en el suelo, por ello ha ayudado a crear una plataforma en línea en la que todo el mundo, desde científicos a residentes, pueden compartir muestras y los resultados de las pruebas.

Lanzado en 2018, el portal en línea Map My Environment visualiza estos datos, incluye los niveles de plomo de contaminación del suelo, el polvo y el agua en ciudades de todo el mundo, y ofrece recomendaciones sobre cómo remediar el plomo. “Solo queríamos una manera de sacar esto de una revista de ciencia especializada y llevarlo a las comunidades”, dijo Filippelli, profesor de Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, quien funge como director ejecutivo del Instituto de Resiliencia Medioambiental.

Las personas que recojan muestras de polvo pueden analizarlas gratuitamente gracias a esta iniciativa. Map My Environment también puso en marcha el programa escolar Bookworm, en la que los alumnos recogen lombrices y tierra para analizar la contaminación por plomo, y reciben a cambio un vale para libros.

En un momento en que los estadounidenses son más conscientes de los peligros del plomo a raíz de la crisis del agua en Flint, la mayoría ignora que el plomo contamina con demasiada frecuencia el suelo de los centros urbanos, dijo Filippelli.

“En realidad, es muy raro que el agua afecte a las personas”, dijo. “Es realmente el suelo y el polvo que están siempre presentes lo que es lo más importante. Ese es el mensaje que intentamos transmitir todo el tiempo, junto con el hecho de que es muy fácil de solucionar”.

Las investigaciones de Mielke y otros demuestran que cambiando la superficie del suelo en comunidades con altos niveles de plomo se protege la salud de las personas. En Nueva Orleans, el departamento de salud de la ciudad colaboró con Mielke para sanear el suelo de guarderías, parques y patios de recreo recubriendo la tierra contaminada con tierra limpia. Los suelos de los parques infantiles de la ciudad mejoraron notablemente, dijo Mielke.

Pero como no se incluyeron los patios de las casas, “siguen siendo muy peligrosos”, dijo, y ahí es donde “es probable que estén los niños cuando son muy, muy pequeños”.

Para proteger realmente la salud de los niños, los estudios han demostrado que las concentraciones de plomo en el suelo en toda una comunidad tendrían que reducirse a menos de 80 partes por millón, tal vez la mitad de ese nivel, dijo Mielke. Un estudio de 2017 realizado por el geólogo y científico ambiental Mark Laidlaw, Filippelli, Mielke y sus colegas examinó los enfoques para abordar la contaminación por plomo del suelo urbano y concluyó que la recolección de los niveles de plomo del suelo no sería necesaria si el suelo con poco o ningún plomo se diseminara en vecindarios completos.

En otras palabras: cubre lo que hay con un suelo mejor.

En Nueva Orleans, Mielke ha utilizado el vertedero de Bonnet Carré para obtener tierra aluvial con niveles mínimos de plomo, procedente de los sedimentos del río Mississippi, para recubrir zonas peligrosas. La mayoría de las ciudades pueden acceder a suelo como ése en las afueras de los centros urbanos, encontró el estudio. Para pagarlo, los investigadores sugieren imponer impuestos a los productos de gasolina y pintura, dado que una gran parte del plomo presente en el suelo y en las paredes de las viviendas procede de estas industrias.

En la ciudad de Nueva York, donde estudios recientes han confirmado la contaminación local por plomo en el suelo, el NYC Clean Soil Bank (Banco de Suelo Limpio de Nueva York) ofrece gratuitamente a los residentes suelo limpio que ha sido analizado tras su excavación en obras de construcción de la ciudad. La creación de este sistema “ha sido sorprendentemente más factible que intentar exigir la realización de pruebas o la remediación”, afirma Egendorf, investigadora del NYC Compost Project. “Me encantaría que más gente lo conociera y que siguiera expandiéndose porque otras ciudades también pueden hacerlo”.

Lo que demuestran todas estas soluciones es que el envenenamiento por plomo se puede prevenir. Las dificultades derivadas de sus impactos a la salud no tienen por qué afectar a más generaciones.

Sólo hace falta actuar.

En Santa Ana, los defensores de la justicia medioambiental que abogan exactamente por eso afirman que se han comprometido a modificar el modo en que se aborda la contaminación por plomo del suelo en todo el país. LeBrón, profesor de salud pública de la Universidad de California en Irvine, dijo que la coalición espera crear un intercambio para que las personas de todo el país puedan aprender unas de otras.

Para Garrido, las soluciones no llegaron lo bastante pronto. Habría criado con gusto a su hijo en Santa Ana si hubieran menos riesgos para su salud y seguridad.

Rubén, que ahora tiene 7 años y está en primer año de primaria, sigue teniendo retrasos significativos en el habla y está siendo evaluado porque podría tener problemas de aprendizaje, dijo Garrido, pero en general es bastante saludable.

Y puede correr libremente por su propiedad de Buena Park sin riesgo de respirar o ingerir tierra contaminada con plomo.

“El barrio es bastante seguro. Las aceras son decentes y podemos pasear, así que sacamos a los perros a caminar y llevo a mi hijo conmigo”, dijo Garrido.  “Es como un mundo completamente nuevo para él”.

Myriam Vidal tradujo este artículo al español.

Esta pieza se produjo en alianza con el McGraw Center for Business Journalism de la Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Esta nota también fue posible con ayuda del Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, y las becas Kozik Challenge Grants financiadas por la National Press Foundation y el National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The post El plomo sigue envenenando a los niños. No tiene que ser así. appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

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Lea la versión en inglés aquí. Read the English version here.

¿Hay plomo acechando en los suelos que te rodean?

La peligrosa contaminación con plomo sigue plagando el suelo de centros urbanos, particularmente en vecindarios antiguos y de alto tráfico, donde durante el siglo XX se acumularon partículas y polvo transportado por el aire proveniente de gasolina y pintura con plomo. Áreas industriales, donde emisiones históricas y recientes de plomo se han asentado en el suelo, también son de alto riesgo.

Décadas de investigación han demostrado el daño persistente para los niños expuestos al plomo, que desencadena toda una serie de problemas para el desarrollo del cerebro, lo que afecta la capacidad de aprender, prestar atención y controlar los impulsos y otros comportamientos críticos para navegar la vida. Evidencia creciente muestra que también aumenta el riesgo de enfermedad coronaria, accidente cerebrovascular y enfermedad renal crónica.

Pero hay pasos que puedes tomar para que tu comunidad esté más segura ante el plomo.

Averigüa si tienes un problema

Expertos locales pueden saber dónde se ubican los puntos peligrosos de suelos contaminados con plomo en tu región. Si no puedes conseguir esa información, prueba con el portal Map My Environment. Se trata de una base de datos que muestra áreas importantes de contaminación del agua, el suelo o el polvo debido al plomo en Estados Unidos y otras partes del globo. La iniciativa fue inicialmente lanzada en el Centro de Salud Urbana de Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, y ahora universidades de todo el mundo participan.

Puedes explorar los niveles de plomo en el mapa interactivo y enviar muestras para que sean analizadas gratuitamente. También encontrarás recomendaciones de estrategias para enfrentar la situación. 

Este mapa muestra qué tan elevados son los niveles de plomo en la sangre en niños por tramo del Censo (census tract) en 34 estados. Los estados no examinan adecuadamente la sangre de los niños para detectar la exposición al plomo, de acuerdo con estudios, pero los datos existentes pueden indicar áreas potencialmente problemáticas debido a una exposición a través del suelo, pintura o el agua.

Presiona para que el gobierno federal actúe

La Agencia de Protección Ambiental de EE. UU. ha dicho que planea evaluar sus viejos estándares de riesgo de plomo en el suelo, que no protegen a las personas de daños porque los umbrales son demasiado altos. Esa decisión es parte de una nueva estrategia anunciada en octubre para reducir la exposición al plomo en todo el país, así como diminuir el riesgo más elevado que corren personas de color y residentes de bajos ingresos.

Sin embargo, la agencia no ha anunciado un cronograma para sus planes de revisitar los estándares. Los actuales fueron establecidos hace más de 20 años. 

El jefe de la EPA, Michael S. Regan, se comprometió a que la agencia se responsabilizará por su progreso reportando los avances en el sitio web de la EPA. Mientras tanto, puedes ponerte en contacto con la agencia y aprovechar las oportunidades que se abran para enviar un comentario público. (Está atento a Regulations.gov.)

Además, Estados Unidos carece de un enfoque sistemático para mapear la contaminación del suelo urbano, lo que a menudo se deja en manos de investigadores académicos. Sin embargo, estos dicen que es difícil obtener fondos para realizar pruebas exhaustivas para identificar y monitorear puntos peligrosos. La presión pública sobre las agencias para que respalden más análisis de suelos urbanos podría producir datos que no solo prevengan la exposición infantil al plomo antes de que ocurra, sino que también conduzcan a normas ambientales más estrictas.

Suma esfuerzos con otros

Estudios muestran que abordar la contaminación generalizada y persistente del suelo debido al plomo requiere enfoques colaborativos que empoderen a los afectados. Esto implica reclutar líderes de vecindarios con riesgos de exposición al plomo, crear conciencia sobre los peligros para la salud, compartir formas en las que los miembros de la comunidad pueden proteger a sus familias y encontrar soluciones que funcionen para sus circunstancias.

En Santa Ana, California, la gente hizo precisamente eso. Defensores de la justicia ambiental, padres preocupados y científicos formaron una coalición, ¡Plo-NO! ¡Santa Ana! ¡Santa Ana sin plomo!, que realizó pruebas de plomo en los suelos de toda la ciudad y presionó a funcionarios locales para que actuaran. El año pasado, el Ayuntamiento de Santa Ana actualizó el plan general de la ciudad para comprometerse a abordar de manera integral los peligros de contaminación por plomo.

Al otro lado del país, investigadores de la Universidad de Illinois se asociaron con residentes de Chicago para producir lo que aseguran es el primer mapa de la contaminación con plomo en el suelo de toda la ciudad. Encontraron un problema generalizado. Con los comentarios de esos mismos residentes, los científicos diseñaron estudios de seguimiento y estrategias para tratar el suelo y proteger a las personas.

Lucha contra el plomo en el suelo con más tierra

El experto en suelos contaminados con plomo Howard Mielke, de la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Tulane, descubrió que si se cambia la superficie del suelo en comunidades con altos niveles de plomo, se protege la salud de las personas.

En Nueva Orleans, el departamento de salud de la ciudad trabajó con Mielke para remediar los suelos de centros de cuidado infantil, parques y áreas de juego al cubrir el área contaminada con tierra limpia. Los suelos de los parques infantiles de la ciudad mejoraron notablemente, dijo Mielke. La mayoría de las ciudades pueden acceder a terrenos libres de plomo en las afueras de los centros urbanos, según ha descubierto su investigación.

Entretanto, en la ciudad de Nueva York, la experta en suelos Sara Perl Egendorf observó que los residentes no estaban seguros de cuál era la mejor manera de protegerse contra la contaminación por plomo en los jardines urbanos. Ante esto, Egendorf ayudó a crear una red llamada Legacy Lead para abordar la contaminación del suelo en toda la ciudad. Un resultado: el Banco de Suelos Limpios de la Ciudad de Nueva York. Ofrece a los residentes tierra limpia y gratuita para cubrir áreas potencialmente riesgosas.

Mantente atento a nuevas soluciones

Sabemos más de lo que sabíamos hace una generación sobre cómo abordar la contaminación por plomo. Y las investigaciones continúan. 

Científicos de la Universidad de Illinois, por ejemplo, planean estudiar más la ralentización de la propagación de partículas de plomo y la protección de la gente que inhala o ingesta el suelo o el polvo contaminado.

Andrew Margenot, un experto en suelos de la Universidad de Illinois Urbana-Champaign, señala que no hay una solución mágica cuando se trata de remediar el suelo contaminado con plomo. Visualiza soluciones que involucren a la propia naturaleza. Agregar árboles como rompevientos podría atrapar partículas de plomo arrastradas por el aire. Plantar árboles frutales puede ser una buena idea porque estos transfieren solo una mínima cantidad de plomo a sus frutos. Cubrir los suelos aledaños con mantillo (mulch) agrega una capa de protección.

Busca aliados en materia de salud

La organización sin fines de lucro Green & Healthy Homes Initiative en Baltimore está manejando un programa en Pennsylvania con el hospital Lancaster General, que paga para ofrecer intervenciones para controlar el riesgo del plomo en 2,800 hogares. Entienden el valor de atender una amenaza para la salud; y hospitales en tu zona podrían también. 

“Cada comunidad puede hacer esto”, dijo Ruth Ann Norton, presidenta y directora ejecutiva de Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “Es simplemente tomar la decisión de hacer algo que saben que es fundamental para su futuro”.

Involucra a los jóvenes en la lucha

Los niños son los más afectados por el plomo, pero probablemente no saben mucho al respecto, especialmente la conexión con los suelos. Puedes trabajar con escuelas locales para diseminar esta información.

Algunos científicos están llevando los resultados de sus estudios sobre suelos contaminados con plomo a los salones de clase, en alianza con activistas que abogan por la justicia ambiental, como describieron académicos de tres universidades en un estudio de 2021. Entre sus actividades incluyen la enseñanza de los peligros de los suelos contaminados con plomo, la participación de estudiantes en programas que toman muestras de los suelos para detectar la presencia de plomo y esfuerzos para conectar lo que aprenden los alumnos en la escuela, como química, con ejemplos de cómo se desarrollan los procesos científicos en sus vidas. 

Lánzate a un cargo público

Es mucho lo que puedes hacer movilizándote en tu comunidad; pero hay acciones que solo los funcionarios públicos pueden tomar. 

Jessie López se enteró del problema de la contaminación por plomo en Santa Ana a través de su trabajo con la organización Orange County Environmental Justice, que forma parte de la coalición ¡Plo-NO! Luego, se lanzó para un cargo público elegido a través de los votos. 

Ahora, como integrante del Concejo de la ciudad y alcalde pro tem, puede ayudar a trazar el camino de Santa Ana para atender la situación con el plomo. Entre sus acciones: en 2021 presentó una resolución de vanguardia adoptada por el Concejo Municipal que declaró una emergencia climática y, al mismo tiempo, se comprometió a limitar o prevenir la exposición al plomo y otras toxinas ambientales en Santa Ana.

Univision tradujo la versión en español de este artículo.

Esta pieza se produjo en alianza con el McGraw Center for Business Journalism de la Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Esta nota también fue posible con ayuda del Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, y las becas Kozik Challenge Grants financiadas por la National Press Foundation y el National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The post Ocho medidas que puedes tomar cuando el plomo contamina los suelos de tu comunidad appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

On a crisp, fall day in Santa Ana, California, Mary Acosta Rodriguez Martinez Garcia steps forward gingerly, leaning on her cane as she walks to the spot along the railroad tracks that intersect with Santa Ana Boulevard. This is where her grandfather’s house once stood, before it was swallowed whole by the expansion of the boulevard that today leads into the heart of Santa Ana’s downtown and the Orange County Civic Center. Like her grandfather’s home, where she lived most of her childhood, most of the landmarks from her formative years during the 1940s and 1950s — the places and buildings that she cherished the most from her youth — have long disappeared.

Surrounding orange groves, walnut and apricot orchards gave the Logan barrio, one of Santa Ana’s oldest neighborhoods, a pastoral atmosphere throughout Garcia’s childhood. But the barrio was also squeezed between two railroads on its eastern and western boundaries. The neighborhood was originally settled by European Americans, and as they moved out, Mexican and Mexican American residents moved in. Many of them, like Garcia’s uncles, worked the orchards harvesting oranges, or in packing houses, sorting the fruits of Orange County’s citrus and walnut trees.

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(Photo credit: Grist/Amelia Bates/Daniel A. Anderson)

During the early part of the 20th century, trains hauled goods ranging from citrus to lumber out to destinations across the country. But by the middle part of the century, as the city welcomed industry, the goods reflected the new businesses that the city allowed into the neighborhood and throughout the eastside of Santa Ana: among them oil, petroleum, aviation gasoline, lead ore, metals, chemicals, fertilizers, and herbicides.

Insurance maps created by the Sanborn Map Company between 1920 and 1960 show that the area surrounding Logan’s residential core, known as the Greater Logan Area, included fossil fuel companies that stored their oil and gasoline in steel tanks above ground. One oil depot was located near the home of Garcia’s grandfather. As a child Garcia recalls jumping over slick oil puddles in the alley on her way to school. “We just thought it was part of living there,” Garcia, now 78 years old, told Grist. “I mean: Doesn’t everybody live near where there’s oil on the ground?”

Heavyweight businesses like Standard Oil Company, General Petroleum Corporation of California, and Shell Oil Company shared the neighborhood with a foundry, a lead smelter and battery recycling facility, and a liquid fertilizer company. Garcia wonders whether the fact that so many of her family members lived with asthma was connected to the pollution that came with those firms and facilities. “Nowadays you wouldn’t have that,” said Garcia. But her relatives never complained. They were grateful, given the poverty in which they were raised, to have homes and jobs to support their families. Her grandparents used to repeat a Mexican saying: “Los Estados Unidos para vivir, y México para morir” — in the United States they could live prosperously by working hard, and then return to Mexico to die in peace.

Today, there is scant physical evidence that these businesses from Garcia’s era existed, and if you attempt to paint a picture of industrial pollution in Santa Ana using even the most rigorous governmental data, you wouldn’t conclude that the city — and Logan, in particular — is hazardous. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory, a database that catalogs 35 years of site-specific pollution, shows 99 distinct entries in Santa Ana since the program’s inception. Only one, a chemical company, borders the Logan barrio.

A Grist analysis of historical business directories, however, offers a different view. Most states, including California, have published directories documenting industrial businesses since the mid-20th century, listing addresses, products produced, and number of employees, among other data points. Borrowing methodology from the 2018 book Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities, by sociologists Scott Frickel and James Elliott, Grist cataloged the accumulation of defunct industrial sites in these directories that have evaded the oversight of the EPA, often due to their age. California directories cataloging manufacturing businesses that Grist analyzed as far back as the 1960s describe nearly 2,000 such sites dotting Santa Ana’s urban landscape. More than 300 were active as of 2014, the most recent directory Grist analyzed. The other businesses — in industries like plastics, fabricated metals, and chemicals — might never have had their toxic footprints cleaned up. Indeed, some properties were merely rezoned for residential use.

Former industrial sites, forgotten pollution

Mapping these historic manufacturing sites, which Frickel and Elliott describe as “relic sites,” reveals a potential legacy of pollution. In the 92701 ZIP code, where Logan is located, only 19 industrial sites appear in the 2014 compendium. But almost 200 appear in the older directories. Neighborhoods like Logan, a historically segregated residential barrio that the city subsequently zoned as industrial in 1929, reveal exactly the problem that Frickel and Elliott discovered while researching the four cities in Sites Unseen: Minneapolis, Portland, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.

“Because these are small places — these are [like] little welding shops — so regulations don’t require them to report. There’s no records kept on these places,” Frickel told Grist. “They’re small, so they’re not heavily capitalized, so these people don’t have money to clean things up when there’s a problem.”

In their study, Frickel and Elliott tapped manufacturing directories dating as far back as the 1950s in those four cities and discovered that more than 90 percent of sites where hazardous industry (defined as businesses that perform work known to release toxic chemicals and heavy metals) has operated over the past half-century have become essentially invisible to regulatory agencies. One reason for this: The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program doesn’t require businesses below a certain size to report emissions, so small polluters that go in and out of business relatively quickly are able to escape formal scrutiny.

“TRI data don’t begin to do justice to — or they don’t begin to render a historically accurate picture of — industrial activity and the contamination (and legacy contamination) that inevitably sticks around when those industries leave,” Frickel said, noting that Grist’s findings in Santa Ana underscore the shortcomings of government data for revealing contamination.

While neighborhoods on the city’s eastside, like the Greater Logan Area, have housed facilities such as a foundry and lead smelter in decades past, today the area is primarily surrounded by small and medium-sized industrial and commercial businesses. As recently as 1984, massive Shell oil tanks, like the ones from Garcia’s childhood, loomed over what is now Santa Ana Boulevard near the original Santa Fe railroad depot. Part of that area was paved over to make way for a parking lot for the Santa Ana Regional Transportation Center. The parcel where Sun Battery once manufactured batteries is now an auto wrecking lot, a cemetery of mangled car skeletons. Add to those potential hazards Santa Ana Boulevard, which bisects the Greater Logan Area and every day carries a stream of suburban commuters from nearby Interstate 5 headed into downtown — bringing with them dirty air and toxic exhaust from cars and trucks.

Each business in Logan has its own unique history: For example, the Shell Oil yard, which Orange County property records show operated from 1932 to at least 1976, included a warehouse, gasoline storage tanks, outbuildings, and a railroad connection to the Southern Pacific tracks. In 1942, a fire started by static electricity while a truck was being loaded swept through the warehouse, causing an estimated $4,000 to $5,000 in damages and endangered “scores of 50-gallon barrels of high-test aviation gasoline,” according to an article in the Santa Ana Register, now known as the Orange County Register. The story also noted that the property had seven 20,000- to 25,000-gallon stationary fuel tanks.

In the late-1940s, Sun Battery began making lead acid storage batteries (used for cars and marine storage) near the present-day train depot. The California manufacturing directories show that as the company grew to employ hundreds of workers, its property parcel expanded. In the 1950s, it also went by the name of the Lippincott Lead Company, which produced lead and lead alloys. A Sanborn map from this era notes that one of its buildings was dedicated to “battery lead melting.” According to National Park Service history documents, the company’s owner, George Lippincott, had another company mining for lead, silver, and zinc in the Lippincott “Lead King” Mine in Death Valley. The same records show that, in the early 1950s, the company erected a blast furnace operation in Santa Ana, where lead and silver were smelted for use in storage batteries. It’s unclear when the facility ceased operations: The directories confirm it operated as late as 1972 (when it had 400 employees), but it appears to have shuttered during the following decade.

What kind of mess the operation might have left in its wake — at the time that Sun Battery opened there were no federal regulations requiring monitoring of its emissions — has not been documented, until now. Grist sampled soil outside the gate of the former Sun Battery address in 2019. An XRF analyzer, which produces X-rays to measure the lead content of soil, found one lead level as high as 1,935 parts per million — more than six times the soil screening level for lead in industrial and commercial areas set by the state of California. RJ Lee Group Inc., a Pennsylvania-based industrial forensics analytical laboratory and scientific consulting firm, found that that sample contained high concentrations of two types of lead, with no direct evidence of automotive leaded gasoline contributions. (However, there was evidence of lead phosphate in the sample, which is a degraded byproduct of automotive lead.) The analysis — conducted by computer-controlled scanning electron microscopy, a method that collects images and a chemistry profile of individual particles — concluded that one of the likely sources of some of these particles was an industrial process using lead.

RJ Lee Group analyzed an additional four samples from the east side neighborhoods where Grist found the highest lead soil levels (Logan, French Park, and Lacy) and confirmed that, of the five samples, the highest lead concentrations were found near the former Sun Battery property. The firm is in the process of conducting a deeper analysis, but its initial findings suggest that the battery facility emissions appear to dominate in four of the five samples. The sources in the other samples vary: One sample taken from the yard of an older painted home contained lead barium, which is likely associated with lead paint. Others contained lead phosphate, which could come from multiple sources, including car exhaust.

Not much is known about the extent that Sun Battery’s operations might have polluted the surrounding soil in Logan, but an example just north of Santa Ana in Los Angeles County illustrates how, even during an era when regulations exist to monitor lead smelters, the environment around these facilities can become heavily contaminated. Researchers Jill Johnston and Andrea Hricko of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine found that, in the decades after Exide began recycling batteries at the site in the late 1970s, public agencies failed to protect the predominantly Latino communities surrounding the smelter.

The researchers noted that it wasn’t until the community exerted pressure on the state Department of Toxic Substances Control that the agency conceded that Exide’s pollution could extend at least 1.7 miles from the facility. In their 2017 study, Johnston and Hricko pointed to soil data suggesting that 99 percent of properties within that area had lead concentrations that exceeded 80 parts per million, the level that the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment considers dangerous for children in residential areas.

The work of scientists across the country has shown exactly how pervasive soil lead contamination is in urban centers. Mark Laidlaw, a geologist and environmental scientist, has conducted extensive studies on lead exposure in the United States that have shown that soils in older urban areas remain highly contaminated by lead due largely to the use of leaded gasoline and paint in decades past, as well as industrial sources. Multiple studies have shown seasonal spikes in children’s blood lead levels in the summer and fall — meaning the problem extends beyond common culprits like leaded paint. Researchers have found this particularly in older, inner city areas where decades of accumulated lead in surface soils have produced lead hot spots. This lead is then reintroduced into the atmosphere as soil dust. While the amount of lead deposited in the soil of each city will vary depending on vehicle traffic, the age of its housing stock, and its industrial history, Laidlaw said that these soils remain a major source of blood lead poisoning, particularly for children.

Despite overwhelming evidence, little has been done at the federal level to address this source of childhood lead exposure, said Laidlaw, a former researcher in the Centre for Environmental Sustainability and Remediation at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who now works as an environmental consultant. “I think it’s just awareness,” he said. “I think a lot of this has been buried in academic journals.”

The problem is that most people forget that the very ground they walk on has become an invisible sink that catches the urban industrial waste of cities as land is bought, sold, and resold for different uses, Frickel and Elliott found. “Cities are always changing; that’s just what cities do,” said Frickel. “The question is how do we keep track of those changes especially when those changes present risks that may accumulate and continue to pose dangers to people decades after the activities that created them have gone away and are no longer visible or remembered.”

The perils of not knowing the industrial past of an urban environment can come at a steep cost for working-class communities and communities of color that are often living in areas where environmental hazards have existed for decades. According to California State University, Fullerton, Professor Erualdo González, an urban and regional planning expert who has studied the effects of redevelopment in Santa Ana’s urban core, tackling the toxic byproducts of formerly polluting industries in these neighborhoods has usually taken a backseat to more immediate needs such as affordable housing, addressing immigration status, or tackling threats such as the construction of new polluting facilities. “Environmental justice is oftentimes, in communities like [Logan], it’s historical things that have happened and persist, and it’s a harder battle,” said González, author of the 2017 book Latino City: Urban Planning, Politics, and the Grassroots.

Two studies examining levels of soil lead contamination in New York City have confirmed the risks faced by residents who live near former industrial sites. One 2018 study created the first comprehensive map of soil lead in the city, finding the highest levels in its oldest sections, which tend to be areas that are industrial and have seen heavy vehicle traffic. A second study published in 2020 focused on determining the lead contamination risks faced by residents in areas undergoing population growth, as well as land use changes — such as the redevelopment of land originally zoned for industry and manufacturing. It found that median concentrations of soil lead — and the rates of young children with elevated blood lead levels — were twice as high in redeveloped areas with a history of industrial and manufacturing land use, polluting facilities, and more roadways.

Juliana Maantay, a professor of urban environmental geography at the City University of New York’s Lehman College, identified an inverted variation on that process, in which residential neighborhoods are rezoned to allow industry and manufacturing to creep in, such as Logan in Santa Ana. Maantay found that over a nearly four-decade period in the last half of the 20th century, rezoning actually concentrated industry in New York City neighborhoods where residents have less political clout, particularly communities of color and low-income areas. She’s found that neighborhoods were often zoned to increase industrial activity after they became poorer and more ethnically and racially diverse than the city itself. “In New York, as my research has shown, the likelihood of living near these noxious facilities, these polluting facilities, drastically increases with a population that’s more Black and Hispanic, and that is incontrovertible,” Maantay told Grist.

Even as cities across the country, including New York City, have de-industrialized, the footprint left behind by toxic facilities remains a danger to residents. “What’s not usually taken into account,” Maantay said, “is all these ghost facilities that are quite often still a source of contamination even though the facility may have closed a decade or two ago – so this is something that is quite worrisome.”

In the Bronx — the part of New York City that has had the highest number of manufacturing zone additions between 1961 and 1998 — the cumulative effects of many small businesses, even seemingly innocuous enterprises such as dry cleaners and auto body shops, have had a devastating impact on residents, according to Maantay. “When you add them all together, if there’s many of them in the neighborhood, it can be very deleterious,” she said, reiterating that small industrial operations don’t receive the same regulatory scrutiny as large ones.

As far as what can be done to address the long-term health effects, Maantay recommends adopting what’s known as the “precautionary principle”: Even in the absence of cause-and-effect scientific evidence linking residents’ health problems to industrial activity, cities should still work to improve conditions in the most environmentally-burdened neighborhoods. The challenge for cities is addressing the problem without displacing residents, she said. “We know how to do the cleanups — it’s expensive, but we know how to do it,” Maantay said. “But the trick is, how do we do it without harming the people that are already being harmed?”

In 2020, a coalition of Santa Ana residents, advocates, and academic scholars published a study highlighting how children in Santa Ana’s poorest areas are at a higher risk of being exposed to lead soil contamination. Last year, the coalition released additional research, a risk assessment of eight toxic heavy metals from the initial soil study. It found that census tracts where the median household income was under $50,000 had higher concentrations of lead, arsenic, zinc, and cadmium compared to high-income tracts. The analysis also found that tracts with a greater proportion of children, renters, residents lacking health insurance coverage, and fewer college-educated residents had higher average lead and zinc levels. The tracts with a greater proportion of non-native residents, who spoke limited English, and identified as Latino, also had much higher concentrations of these metals than other census tracts, with the researchers finding a similar pattern for arsenic and cadmium.

The findings indicate that a greater number of Santa Ana residents are likely to be exposed to lead, which has irreversible developmental effects on a child’s brain, and a smaller group of residents are at higher risk of being exposed to potentially cancer-causing chemicals like arsenic. Shahir Masri, who co-authored the study, told Grist that the findings indicate how pervasive the health risks are, particularly for vulnerable populations.

“I think it just makes for a further case as to why we need to remediate the soil,” said Masri, an assistant specialist in air pollution exposure assessment and epidemiology at the University of California, Irvine.

In Santa Ana’s Logan barrio, where generations of residents have fought to keep industrialization at bay, Garcia said she is proud that the neighborhood still has the spirit she cherishes from her childhood. The people, and their pride in what Logan represented — a place to call home for all who traveled through — have kept the barrio alive. It’s a neighborhood where family ties and friendship have survived despite the challenges of World War II, repatriations to Mexico, segregation, and battles over civil rights. “It was pride, that — even though we didn’t have a lot of money — what we did have, it was through hard work and struggles,” said Garcia, who now lives nearby in the city of Orange.

The homegrown businesses that thrived during her childhood have long vanished: The tortillería, the tamalería, the corner grocery market, the barbershop, and the shoe repair shop are gone. But as she makes her way through the barrio, Garcia recalls the sticky sweetness of the oranges the local grocer would freeze for the neighborhood children. Her mind takes her back in time to the days when the Santa Ana winds would howl through the streets, when the trains would thunder through the barrio, and when she’d walk along the railroad tracks with her cousins seeking adventures.

As new families move into the neighborhood, she wonders if they know how hard the generations before them have fought to preserve that Logan spirit. “I hope,” said Garcia, “that they recognize that it took a lot to get even where the Logan barrio is right now.”

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. This report was also made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and by the Kozik Challenge Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

The post Toxic churn: The legacy of long-gone industry pollutes U.S. cities appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds that whip through Orange County’s Logan barrio are fierce and temperamental. In the mid-20th century, they’d deliver gusts forceful enough to wreak havoc throughout the Southern California region, destroying orange crops, uprooting trees, downing power lines and upending lives. But in the Logan neighborhood, one of the city of Santa Ana’s poorest barrios at the time, children like Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez eagerly awaited the wind’s arrival in the fall.

On days when the winds rushed through Logan, Andrade Rodriguez and her friends would race to gather carton barrels discarded by a business in the neighborhood, which at the time was squeezed between a pair of railroad tracks and adjacent to the Interstate 5 freeway. She remembers how she’d drag a barrel to the fence in the Logan Elementary School yard, then crawl into the tube and wait for a gust of wind to blast her across the playground. The children sailed as far as the winds would take them, letting their imaginations carry them to places that they couldn’t go, outside the boundaries of this tiny barrio, home to generations of Mexican Americans who helped build the city.

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Lead contaminates soil in communities around the country, often from long-gone pollution sources overlooked by officials. Our health depends on fixing that.

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(Photo credit: Grist/Amelia Bates/Daniel A. Anderson)

Logan has been described as the Plymouth Rock of Santa Ana, a predominantly Latino city now home to about 335,000 people, because it’s where the city’s earliest Mexican and Mexican American residents settled. But it’s also an apt analogy for a barrio that has weathered many storms — political battles that the Andrade family and generations of Logan residents have fought in order to defend their homes against the industrialization that surrounded and eventually infiltrated their neighborhood. They would eventually win many of those battles, against the odds. Despite those efforts, the development of the barrio would leave a toxic legacy that still plagues them to this day.

There was a time, in the 1970s, when a proposed extension of one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, Civic Center Drive, was slated to cut through the heart of Logan and split the barrio in half. Led by Andrade Rodriguez’s mother, Josephine “Chepa” Andrade, who was born and raised in the barrio and served as spokeswoman and president of the Logan neighborhood association, residents went to war against the city and eventually blocked the extension. A parcel of land that was saved by the effort was subsequently christened “Chepa’s Park.”

It was the first of many battles — fought first by Chepa and then by her son Joe, Andrade Rodriguez’s younger brother and the current neighborhood association president — where residents faced off with the city to preserve the soul of their community.

So firmly rooted in the life that the barrio offered its residents, families like the Andrades lived and died on this land — in some cases literally on Logan’s streets, where Chepa’s father suffered a fatal heart attack while walking home from work. Logan offered not just familial ties, friendship and support, but also a respite from the racism and discrimination that Mexican Americans faced in other parts of Santa Ana, which was once segregated across social spaces like movie theaters, where Mexicans were forced to sit in the balconies. Uptown neighborhoods used racially restrictive covenants in residential deeds to prevent Mexicans and other people of color from living in the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods.

Located on the easternmost edge of Santa Ana, Logan was often overlooked when it came to city services. While the city’s strictly residential tract home neighborhoods had ample backyards and wide, paved streets, these were largely absent in Logan and other working-class Latino barrios in the industrial sections of town. Neighborhood residents relied on ingenuity to make neighborhood improvements — for example, covering Logan Street with apricot pits in the early 20th century to tamp the dust and cover holes in the road. Then, in the early 1930s, the barrio petitioned the city to pave its two primary thoroughfares, Logan and Stafford streets, but was forced to raise the money to cover the cost. The residents ultimately celebrated the paving of their roads with a street dance.

Most Logan families survived on meager earnings, and life along the railroad tracks was never peaceful. Picture frames hung askew on living room walls due to the constant rattle of the trains. Over the decades, Logan’s residents confronted racism and discrimination by creating a self-sufficient world within the barrio that offered opportunities for community members: hosting festivals to raise money to build a church, convincing the city to convert vacant lots for the creation of Chepa’s Park where children could play, and calling on the school district to provide busing so students wouldn’t have to cross major intersections to get to class. Parents proudly enlisted their sons in the military during World War II and planted victory gardens to survive the war’s food shortages.

That tradition of neighborhood pride was on full display on a clear, sunny Saturday morning last September, when Logan’s current and former residents trickled into Chepa’s Park for their first reunion since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The reunions have been held annually for more than two decades, and they are above all a celebration that the community has survived the city’s attempts to eliminate the barrio altogether. “We’re Back!!” declared last year’s reunion flyer, which described the barrio as a place “where memories are made and history is cherished.”

“Being born here, right down the street, your heart’s always in it,” Joe Andrade told me last fall. In 2004, Andrade was taken under the wing of one of Chepa’s long-time fellow activists, Logan native Sam Romero, now 87. Together, Romero and Andrade began mapping and tracking neighborhood businesses that they saw as environmental nuisances, calling on Santa Ana to take a tougher stance against firms that violated city ordinances. For example, they fought to regulate an auto paint shop that operated late into the evening, overwhelming the neighborhood with noxious paint fumes as residents tried to sleep.

It was the first of many battles the two men would fight together.

At the reunion, one of Chepa’s best friends, Helen Parga Moraga, sat at a picnic table with Andrade at her side as he ticked off a list of recent victories he and Romero had secured from the city, including installing speed bumps residents had been requesting for 50 years along several highly trafficked streets. Soon, Lincoln Avenue, near where the Santa Ana winds once swept Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez away in her carton barrel on the Logan playground, will get a major facelift with new sidewalks, curbs and sewer lines, as well as artificial vines to cover the chain-link fence that now serves as a barrier between the street and the railroad tracks.

Nothing could have pleased Parga Moraga more than to see her best friend’s son take over where his mother had left off in the battle to save Logan. “He’s a fighter,” she said as Andrade described an effort to eliminate congestion on Lincoln Avenue, one of the barrio’s main thoroughfares.

“Oh, I hope I’m alive! I want to see that,” Parga Moraga exclaimed upon hearing the plan. “Really, God give me life until then!”

Andrade told her that every time he fixes a problem in Logan, he remembers his mother and — his eyes glancing upward toward the sky — says: “Another one, mom.”

It’s been nearly a century since the city zoned the already-established residential barrio of Logan for industrial use. Today, the neighborhood’s soil bears the cost of that decision. It absorbed the environmental degradation of each era that thrust Logan into modernity. As the neighborhood’s agricultural roots gave way to industry, products like petroleum, aviation gasoline, lead ore, heavy metals, chemicals, herbicides and pesticides came and went on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroad lines — but a part of them never left.

The soil would become a repository of proof illustrating how generations of a Mexican barrio were poisoned by lead and other noxious pollutants. Residents knew little about this soil contamination, despite the city’s environmental assessments calling for a deeper exploration of potential lead exposure in the neighborhood in the late 1970s. Comprehensive citywide soil test results were not publicly available until 2017, when I published an investigation that found hazardous levels of lead in the soil in neighborhoods across Santa Ana, which today is Orange County’s second-largest city. To follow up, I conducted hundreds of additional soil tests over the course of 2018 and 2019 in neighborhoods that, like Logan, carried the burden of the city’s industrialization.

More than half of those tests returned lead levels that the state of California considers unsafe for children.

Today, the Logan census tract is identified as a “disadvantaged community” by the state Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental health screening tool because it’s among California’s most pollution-burdened areas. While generations of Mexican Americans battled the encroachment of industry in the Logan barrio and won several major victories, Romero and Andrade concede that they’ve yet to achieve their ultimate goal of restoring Logan to what it once was: a residential neighborhood untainted by industrial contamination. The neighborhood remains filled with scrap yards, recycling centers, auto repair shops and other industrial and commercial businesses that continue to take their toll on the neighborhood.

“A lot of these businesses don’t care if you get any sleep or not,” said Romero, who recently moved elsewhere in Santa Ana. “You had the big cement trucks running all over the neighborhood, and they’re still doing that. So the quality of life went down the tubes.”

The transformation of Logan from an agricultural, residential hamlet to a barrio surrounded by toxic emissions was no accident. It was determined by city leaders who made zoning and land use decisions throughout the last century that purposefully changed the very nature of Logan and its surroundings. For years, however, the ramifications of those decisions were buried in the dust, leaving residents exposed to soil lead particles that are perpetually resuspended in the air the residents breathe. For years, Logan’s residents have celebrated their history as a barrio, but many never imagined that their past could also come back to haunt them.

As in other urban centers across the country throughout the 20th century, city leaders’ decisions transformed Santa Ana’s built environment, leaving a cumulative legacy of lead contamination in neighborhoods where Mexicans and Mexican Americans were forced by segregation, discrimination and historical social norms to live during the first half of the 20th century — and where Latino residents continue to reside today.

The fight to restore Logan could one day make the neighborhood healthier to live in, but without a massive remediation effort, the barrio will always carry the stain of its industrial past.

Urban residents in every corner of the U.S. unknowingly live in neighborhoods burdened by toxic contaminants. Most of this residue escaped regulatory scrutiny — the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t comprehensively regulate toxic releases until the late 1980s — and indeed most cities never even bothered to measure these pollutants.

Instead, the work was left to the occasional academic researcher.

In their 2018 book Sites Unseen: Uncovering Hidden Hazards in American Cities, sociologists Scott Frickel and James Elliott outline how the failure to map what they describe as “relic” industrial sites leaves communities in the dark about potential contamination hot spots seeded by businesses that leave behind hazardous byproducts. Using historical industrial directories dating as far back as the 1950s in four American cities, Frickel and Elliott discovered that more than 90% of sites where hazardous industry (defined as businesses that perform work known to release toxic chemicals and heavy metals) has operated over the past half-century have become “lost, hidden from view,” and ignored by federal, state and municipal agencies.

While large polluters such as oil refineries tend to draw the most regulatory scrutiny, Frickel and Elliott’s research concluded that the other types of trouble spots go “unnoticed administratively and legislatively.” They also found that the vast majority of manufacturing facilities and businesses in the directories are small operations with few employees, but they have historically numbered in the thousands in any given city, popping in and out of existence about every eight years on average.

“There is a lot of turnover on these sites, so over time you’re going to get a whole witch’s brew of contaminants,” said Frickel, a professor at Brown University. “You’re going to get different kinds of industry piling on top of one another over time.”

Regulators typically don’t require businesses below a certain size threshold to report emissions. For example, the federal Toxic Release Inventory Program requires reporting from facilities with 10 or more employees that also manufacture or process toxins at volumes greater than 25,000 pounds per year. Thus, according to Frickel, smaller businesses like welding shops tend to fly under the radar. Because the number of historically industrialized sites across the country is so vast — and continues to expand — potentially contaminated soil is a systemic problem, and one that is not being tracked by most regulatory agencies.

Among the most insidious contaminants of this “witch’s brew” is lead. Its use in everything from bullets to car batteries, from aviation fuel to automobile fuel, has allowed it to pervade every aspect of our urban lives and environment — so much so that the social historian Christian Warren has concluded that America’s cities have become “veritable lead mines” as a result. “This lead will not go away by itself — after all, one of the element’s chief attractions has always been its incorruptibility,” he wrote in his 2000 book Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning.

A 2018 study published in the medical journal The Lancet estimates that lead exposure is responsible for more than 400,000 deaths annually in the United States, a number that’s 10 times what scientists previously estimated and comparable to deaths attributed to tobacco smoke exposure. The higher mortality estimate was due to the study’s finding that low-level environmental lead exposure has been a largely overlooked risk factor for death from cardiovascular disease, which could be responsible for nearly two-thirds of the deaths attributed to lead exposure.

“It is not surprising that lead exposure is overlooked. It is ubiquitous, but insidious and largely beyond the control of patients and clinicians,” concluded Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and his co-authors in the study.

Five decades ago, Clair C. Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist who pioneered techniques to measure lead levels, warned that legacy lead contamination would come back to haunt cities. He argued that Americans’ blood lead levels were unsafe, and his findings provided key evidence for environmental activists who successfully sought to remove lead from gasoline.

Subsequent scientific research has shown that the use of lead in gasoline, lead-based paint, smelters, industrial emissions and other factors have led to a buildup of soil lead contamination in the interior of America’s cities over the past century. The phasedown in the use of leaded gasoline that began in the 1970s led to drastic reductions in Americans’ blood lead levels over the past five decades, but scientists warn that blood lead levels still remain unnaturally high.

In 1980, Patterson predicted that much of lead’s damage had already been done. “Sometime in the near future it probably will be shown that the older urban areas of the United States have been rendered more or less uninhabitable by the millions of tons of poisonous industrial lead residues that have accumulated in cities during the past century,” Patterson wrote in a National Academy of Sciences report. Sure enough, according to Lanphear’s study, despite the striking drop in blood lead levels over the last 50 years, these amounts are still “ten times to 100 times higher than people living in the preindustrial era.”

Comprehensive, citywide soil lead mapping in urban centers has been limited, for the most part, to the realm of university researchers in a small number of cities. Nobody had mapped Santa Ana until six years ago, when I went door to door in the city’s predominantly immigrant and low-income neighborhoods with an X-ray fluorescence analyzer, which produces X-rays to measure the lead content of soil. I found lead in nearly a quarter of more than 1,000 soil tests. In addition, I discovered that the ratio of Santa Ana children who had dangerous levels of lead in their blood exceeded the state average by 64%. Latino children represent the majority of children who are lead-poisoned statewide, according to public health data.

To follow up on that investigation, in 2018 and 2019 I conducted more than 600 soil lead tests in residential areas of the city that were zoned for industry or are adjacent to industrial areas. Fifty-five percent of those tests, which were conducted on residential properties and public spaces, showed lead concentrations that exceeded the level that the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment considers dangerous for children: 80 parts per million. Nearly 9% of those tests showed lead concentrations higher than 400 parts per million, the federal standard set in 2000 by the Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous for children in residential play areas. (It should be noted that, in 2012, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that lead is not safe at any level in children’s bodies.)

The combined soil lead tests clearly point to where the greatest concentration of hazardous lead soil contamination is found in this 27-square mile city of 335,000 people: in neighborhoods like Logan, French Park and Lacy, which are situated in the historic urban core of the city. Many of these neighborhoods are low-income, densely populated and predominantly Latino — as is all of Santa Ana, a majority-Latino city (nearly 78%) that skews young, with about 27% of the population under the age of 18.

What more than 1,600 soil tests showed

In response to my first investigation, a coalition of residents, advocates and academic scholars has spent four years raising community awareness about the dangers of lead exposure in the city. In 2020, the coalition released a study that corroborates my findings, highlighting how children in Santa Ana’s poorest areas are at a higher risk of being exposed to lead soil contamination. The study, led by a team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, analyzed more than 1,500 soil samples collected throughout the city and found a higher incidence of lead contamination in the city’s poorest neighborhoods and areas with the highest percentages of young children, residents without health insurance and renters.

Although regulations like the national ban on lead in gasoline and the phase-out of lead paint have significantly reduced lead in the environment — and with it, levels in Americans’ blood — the legacy contamination has not been addressed comprehensively, leaving large deposits of lead in neighborhoods with a history of high-density traffic flow and industry, according to one of the nation’s top experts on soil lead contamination, Howard Mielke of Tulane University’s School of Medicine. At the federal level, existing laws primarily focus on regulating the present and future production, use and disposal of chemicals, but they don’t offer solutions to intervene in already-contaminated areas unless polluted sites are large-scale.

“We’ve reached a point where [children’s blood lead levels have] come down enormously, but not evenly for the whole community,” said Mielke. “There are still the communities that are in the interior of the city where the highest traffic flows were in the past, or lead industry, incinerators, a combination of lead aerosols — all cleaned up, but it’s still in the environment and it’s still exposing children at unacceptably high levels.”

One of the challenges, according to Mielke, is that while much work has been done to decrease water contamination and reduce air toxics, soil is typically ignored as a potential source of contamination. While the U.S. has a national Clean Water Act and a Clean Air Act, there’s no federal Clean Soil Act to address soil contamination comprehensively. Further, at the local level, not enough is done by public health care agencies to proactively pinpoint hot spots of soil lead contamination by using existing childhood blood lead level data, Mielke said.

“Unfortunately, public health has been in denial,” said Mielke. “They don’t seem to connect the dots. If you put something in the air, ultimately it will contaminate the ground.”

“In some ways, what we are experiencing is uninhabitable cities,” he added. “It’s very tragic.”

The soil lead contamination in Santa Ana is not unique. Soil lead mapping conducted by researchers across the country and around the globe shows that soil contamination is pervasive and widespread. A recently published study found that lead particles deposited in London’s soil by leaded gasoline throughout the 20th century continue to pose a threat to Londoners as contaminated dust is recirculated in the air near highly trafficked streets. In the U.S., Mielke and others have mapped soil lead levels in small and large urban centers like Baltimore, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh, noting the same trend — that, as in Santa Ana, there are higher levels in the interior cores.

Further, racial and class disparities among children with elevated blood levels have persisted since the height of leaded gasoline use in the mid-20th century, with higher numbers of Black, Latino and low-income children suffering from elevated levels. Harvard University sociologist Robert Sampson has shown that, while the risk of lead exposure is higher in poor neighborhoods, it’s even higher in racially and ethnically segregated neighborhoods. In a 2018 article in the Annual Review of Sociology, Sampson and his colleagues examined blood lead level differences across small neighborhoods in Chicago. Even when controlling for factors such as poverty, housing and population density, they found that Black neighborhoods still had higher levels of lead exposure.

Sampson also discovered that even within these neighborhoods there was variation in the blood lead levels, which he attributes to the local manufacturing history. He found that lead exposure rates are higher in neighborhoods that have mixed industrial and residential uses, much like Logan.

“You have this phenomenon where you have residential units smack up against, like a battery shop, a paint [shop], or an industrial shop. Some people are kind of shocked actually at that, but it was not unusual,” Sampson said. “It’s still not unusual.”

Like his mother, Chepa, Joe Andrade was raised in Logan. As a young adult, he moved away for more than a decade but ultimately returned to settle on Logan Street, where he’s now raising his grandchildren and running the neighborhood association in a no-nonsense style: no fees, no bureaucracy, just a determination to protect the barrio.

“If we have something to fight for, we get together and we take care of business,” he told me.

Landmarks may be lost over time, and memories can fade, but for people like Andrade, whose family history is intertwined with protecting the barrio, the battle scars remain. The few, dedicated families of Logan who persisted are a story of a people who paid the cost of modernization while being segregated from the very progress that Santa Ana hoped to achieve.

In the late 19th century, Logan attracted the Mexican and Mexican American railroad workers who helped build the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads. The Southern Pacific — the first railroad to Santa Ana — was completed in 1877, nine years before the city was incorporated. Before the turn of the century, the Santa Ana Chamber of Commerce was outlining its vision of the city as the urban center of the region — a vision that became reality over the next century. Local publications described Santa Ana as a “sitting queen in the midst of this smiling valley of happy homes and fruitful lands.”

Though Logan, an agricultural area, was originally settled by European Americans, the residential neighborhood “became Mexican because it was one of the very few places that Mexicans could actually live and buy,” said Mary Acosta Rodriguez Martinez Garcia, who compiled the history of her neighborhood into a book, Santa Ana’s Logan Barrio: Its History, Stories, and Families.

“We had everything here that we needed,” said Garcia, whose mother, a seamstress, worked seasonally packing oranges and walnuts from the area’s agricultural groves. The scent of oranges trailed her in the summer, followed by the fragrance of walnuts in winter. The natural alchemy of the neighborhood was hard to duplicate, and it’s why children who grew up in Logan often returned. They couldn’t find that chemistry elsewhere.

The east side of the town became a distribution hub for agricultural goods and a burgeoning manufacturing center, with working-class neighborhoods built along the railroad tracks. During the first decade of the 20th century, according to historian and anthropologist Lisbeth Haas, Santa Ana’s Mexican Americans — California-born Mexicans or Mexicans who had migrated to the U.S. before 1870 — settled exclusively in those multi-ethnic neighborhoods, including Logan, which were zoned for residential use in an early city ordinance. By 1910, 40% of Logan’s households had Spanish surnames.

“The important thing about the barrios is they became very specific sites of commerce and culture and family life, and are really thought of as a really positive space in those days,” said Haas, a history professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Nevertheless, the barrios were essentially abandoned in terms of urban development, she noted. Many didn’t have sewers until the 1960s and lacked other basic amenities.

Historical documents from that era show that racially restrictive covenants in residential deeds prevented Mexicans, Blacks, Asians, or “any person or persons not of the Caucasian Race” from occupying, leasing, or renting homes in neighborhoods north and immediately northwest of downtown Santa Ana, which were distanced from the industrial zones. At Grist’s request, Orange County archivists searched for and found evidence of half a dozen such covenants in Santa Ana. One from 1941 restricted “African, Mongolian, Japanese, Asiatic, Spanish, Mexican, or Indian races or their decendants [sic]” from occupying lands and properties in a tract called Westwood Park. The earliest racial covenant uncovered was part of a grant deed signed in 1921, while the latest was signed in 1943, just five years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such covenants unenforceable.

Santa Ana planning commission records show that the commissioners were strategically approving and denying zone changes that placed a heavier industrial burden on eastside barrios that were near the downtown central core. In 1929, records show that the commission was pressured by the Santa Fe Railroad and Richfield Oil companies to consider zoning a portion of the Logan barrio for heavy industrial use.

This moment could be seen as Logan residents’ first fight against city officials, as planning commission minutes indicate that residents opposed this zoning change, and the commissioners backed off and denied the zoning request in June of that year. The win was short-lived, however: A month later, the planning commission did an about-face and voted unanimously to rezone the entire Logan barrio to heavy industry. In other parts of the city, by contrast, the planning commission showed an unwillingness to place industry within residential neighborhoods, denying permits to operations like welding shops and protecting other neighborhoods of single-family homes from being rezoned to allow for oil drilling.

By the end of World War II, Santa Ana had more than 50 industries and only two industrial areas. The boundaries of the two zones fell squarely around existing Mexican barrios in the city, including Logan. As the city pushed to attract more industry in the following decades, the commission’s zoning decisions would have dramatic long-term consequences for the Latino residents in those neighborhoods.

In 1953, as the expansion of the industrial pockets took root, the city announced an amendment to the zoning ordinance prohibiting the construction of new dwelling units or major additions to dwellings in industrial zones like Logan. Even after a 1969 zoning amendment permitting improvements and expansions on existing homes, few residents applied for such permits, conducting little rehabilitation on their homes and not building new homes for more than a quarter of a century.

In a 1982 oral history interview conducted as part of a project with California State University, Fullerton, Chepa Andrade described how the residents were caught off guard when the city first zoned the neighborhood as industrial in 1929. Many residents only learned about the decision when a sign was posted in the neighborhood, she said. When the 1953 prohibition preventing residents from improving their homes took effect, the condition of the barrio’s housing spiraled downward. “The city has been trying to get rid of the neighborhood,” Chepa said. “They’ve been trying to get rid of us for years and years.”

As homes fell into disrepair, the city condemned them. “A lot of the folks around there, once their houses were condemned, they had no alternative — so they had to move,” said Romero. His father was one of the few residents fortunate enough to be able to renovate his home without a loan after he became the first Latino to get a job paving roads with the city’s public works department, a job that paid him a higher wage than most of his neighbors.

Shortly after the city implemented the zoning amendment, the Logan barrio and the neighborhoods surrounding it were struggling. Data from the 1960 U.S. Census show that the eastside of Santa Ana was further entrenched in poverty. That year, the census tract encompassing Logan had the highest percentage of Mexican-born people in the city: Nearly one-third of its population had a Spanish surname. The residents had a median education level of seven years and a median family income of $4,993. The census also found that nearly half of the population with Spanish surnames occupied housing that was either deteriorated or dilapidated.

That year, construction of the Santa Ana Freeway was completed. The highway not only reshaped the physical landscape of the region — some Logan families had already been displaced to make way for freeway construction — but also introduced new industries as well as toxic traffic emissions during the height of leaded gasoline use in automobiles throughout the U.S.

A 1963 visual survey conducted by the city noted a change in character in the central city area, where neighborhoods were deteriorating, where people of color lived, and where buildings were old and poorly maintained. For example, an industrial corridor just south of the Artesia barrio is described as a “no-man’s land of industry, yards and green houses,” while another industrial and heavy commercial strip in Northwest Santa Ana is described as “unattractively developed” in a large “Mexican area.” The city described the housing in Logan as poor and noted the neighborhood’s open storage yards and deteriorating buildings.

In 1969, the city lifted the ban against home improvements and expansions, but residents told city officials that they still faced resistance from banks who weren’t eager to make loans in a neighborhood that was still zoned industrial. By the early 1970s, the barrio had over 130 single-family and apartment units as well as more than 30 industrial or commercial properties, including metal works, auto salvage shops and lumber supply businesses. One resident, whose property shrank when the state appropriated a portion through eminent domain for the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway, told the Los Angeles Times that her house rattled when the trains passed, and she didn’t like how the nearby junkyard burned tar on Saturdays.

By 1970, about 8% of the acreage in the area around Logan was dedicated for manufacturing industries. At the time, the vast majority of the land was zoned for either light or heavy industrial use, while only 1.4% was zoned residential. The industrial businesses at that time employed between 1,200 and 1,400 people, but few of those firms employed Logan residents. A 1970 housing condition survey found that many homes had fallen into disrepair, with only six units in sound condition; only 10% of the dwellings were worth more than $10,000.

City documents from that era showcase citizen concerns that Santa Ana’s eastside residential neighborhoods were bearing the brunt of the city’s industrialization, describing these areas as having the “highest degree of inter-mixing” of single-family homes with commercial and industrial uses. In 1972, the Santa Ana Human Relations Commission submitted a resolution noting how grievously the Logan community had suffered at the hands of past planning commissioners due to zoning decisions and the introduction of industry to the barrio.

Those fateful decisions would lead to an explosive level of turnover of polluting businesses in Logan in the latter half of the 20th century. A Grist analysis of businesses that churned through Logan from the early 1960s to 2014 shows that a majority of those businesses no longer exist, and have been replaced by new commercial or light industrial businesses. The problem, according to Brown University’s Frickel, is that even as environmental regulations were put in place at the local and national level during the late 1980s to monitor polluting industries, this business-by-business approach cannot account for pollution and contamination left behind by businesses that have closed up shop.

“Our laws regulate individual pieces of property and adjudicate those claims on a case-by-case basis, so it’s the wrong scale,” said Frickel.

Despite the challenges of living in an industrialized neighborhood, Logan residents tended to put down roots, settling in the barrio for long periods — the mean length of residency at the time was nearly 20 years — “indicating a high degree of community stability,” the 1970 housing survey found. The cohesiveness of the neighborhood was hard to duplicate, and it’s why children who grew up in Logan, like Joe Andrade, often returned.

In the early 1970s, Logan residents began organizing. They realized that the city intended to split the neighborhood in half by extending Civic Center Drive East through the heart of the barrio. Sam Romero said the proposed road extension opened residents’ eyes to just how little regard the city had for the neighborhood.

Logan residents would defeat the Civic Center Drive plan, forcing the city to reroute the thoroughfare around the barrio. That kicked off a period of organizing against zoning and land use planning decisions to further defend the barrio from industrial encroachment.

In 1976, as part of a redevelopment project to “revitalize” Santa Ana’s downtown area, city planners recommended that Logan be incorporated into a project to construct an industrial park. A consultant also proposed phasing out residences in Logan altogether. The irony was not lost on Chepa, who told the Los Angeles Times that when she was a child, the barrios were the only place where Mexicans could live: “Now they’re saying we can move out of here, can live anywhere we want. But we can’t, not with the (housing) prices the way they are. Where can we go?”

Latino community activists from across the city came together and were trained by professional organizers from the Oakland Training Institute, an organization founded by Jesuit priests. Eight neighborhoods, including Logan, joined together by 1977 to create the Santa Ana Neighborhood Organization, or SANO. In her book Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County since World War II, Lisbeth Haas described the tactics that the Logan barrio used to protest the revitalization plan as a crucial part of a grassroots movement that redefined municipal politics and brought the struggle for civil rights straight to city hall. The residents called on local leaders to address the political and economic implications of urban development for the city’s Latino working class. “For the first time, a Latino neighborhood defined itself to the public and press, making its history and the organization of community life the grounds on which the neighborhood should be saved,” Haas wrote.

Romero, who was part of the negotiating team representing Logan during discussions with the city, said residents sprang into action, attending city council meetings, protesting and pressuring city leaders. Even his mother, who at the time was about 70, went before the city council to declare: “If you move me, I will die.”

By 1977, when the barrio had 130 residential units and 20 industries, residents were calling on the city to phase out those businesses by removing the neighborhood’s industrial zoning designation altogether. The city resisted. The councilman who represented Logan told the Santa Ana Register that the zoning change was not the answer, claiming that if it happened, many residents wouldn’t be able to afford to upgrade their homes, or would choose not to upgrade. Meanwhile, Chepa rallied Logan residents by “banging on doors.” She was able to fill the city council chambers.

In 1979, after two years of debate, organizing, protests, pamphlet-waving, marches and meetings, the Santa Ana City Council approved a plan to rezone portions of Logan from industrial to residential. At the time, Romero praised the decision, noting in a Los Angeles Times article that the plan would ease the way for families to seek low-interest loans to upgrade their homes. The existing industrial businesses would be allowed to remain, but the new ordinance also established a residential zone — a striking victory that the Los Angeles Times noted was an about-face that had occurred only once before in modern Orange County history.

“We’re not going back to sleep like we did the other times,” Romero, then the newly-elected vice president of the SANO coalition, told the Times. “And the city knows it.”

As the Logan residents began to reclaim parts of their barrio, city documents indicate that Santa Ana’s leaders knew about potential soil lead contamination that had stemmed from the neighborhood’s multiple industries, as well as leaded gasoline emissions from the Interstate 5 freeway. A 1978 environmental assessment done as part of a general plan amendment to rezone Logan outlines how the neighborhood was located in a part of town where lead concentrations were consistently high. The report noted that, in order to avoid carbon monoxide and lead pollution near the freeway, “it would be helpful to perform field tests to determine the fall-off of concentrations of these contaminants with distance.”

In response to a request from Grist, the city of Santa Ana searched for but could not locate any records indicating that these field tests were conducted in response to the 1978 report’s recommendation. That report also said that, at the time, airborne lead concentrations were declining and would continue to do so as lead was phased out of gasoline. However, if Logan was converted to residential use, the report cautioned, more people would likely suffer from lead exposure.

And that’s exactly what happened.

The 1980s saw a construction boom of high-density apartment complexes on Santa Ana’s east side, which increased the population in the very areas that had long borne the brunt of industrialization — and where Grist’s own testing found elevated levels of lead in the soil. In essence, by allowing private developers to replace single-family homes with high-density apartment complexes, the city effectively increased the number of children exposed to lead and other contaminants. One survey of a Logan ZIP code by the nonprofit Latino Health Access in 1996 showed that, on average, about half the residents there were younger than 20.

Nevertheless, long-time neighborhood dwellers continued to fight with city officials to preserve the residential qualities of their neighborhood. As late as 1987, the city’s planning manager predicted that Logan would someday be “completely industrial.” By that point, the neighborhood was about evenly split between residential and industrial zoning, according to Deputy City Manager Rex Swanson. He told the Orange County Register that Logan had all the markings of an industrial area: “The only thing that has made it a neighborhood is that people have lived there and wanted to stay.”

And they continued to want to live away from polluting businesses. In 1994, residents rose up to oppose a car salvage yard that had proposed opening near the Interstate 5 freeway. The last thing residents wanted was more noise and more traffic, they argued at the time. Ultimately, the salvage yard withdrew its request.

The next year, Romero was again in front of the city council advocating for a residential-only designation for the neighborhood. In an Orange County Register story, some council members were quoted as saying they “didn’t think they’d ever find a final solution to a problem that began before they were born.” They also pledged to try to be fair to both sides. Ultimately, the neighborhood would remain mixed-use — though Romero and Joe Andrade have worked with the city to convert various individual industrial parcels back to residential use.

“The idea has always been that we’ll try to revert Logan back to purely residential,” Romero told me.

The mixed-use nature of the Logan neighborhood has burdened residents with exposure to pollution, health problems and a bevy of annoyances. So in addition to working to make Logan more residential, local activists must also battle to ensure that nuisance businesses comply with existing regulations. The city may have heard their calls to change the “business-as-usual” approach in recent decades, but ultimately, those who live there now still pay the price for the decades that it was an industrial hotspot.

Even in recent decades, as science has provided more evidence to justify transitioning polluting industries out of the neighborhood to protect human health, the residents have yet to convince the city to help right a wrong that scarred the barrio so long ago. “We tell the city, ‘What you guys did, the bad things you did to the neighborhood — all we’re asking is that you go back and put the neighborhood the way it was when we were kids,’” said Romero.

The contamination hollows out the victories, of course, but Logan remains a tight-knit community its residents are proud to call home. After years of hearing it from the barrio, Chepa Andrade explained in her oral history interview, the city appeared to learn a lesson: to leave the neighborhood alone. “They don’t dare come and touch us anymore,” she said. “We’re too united.”

That unity is apparent at Logan’s annual reunions, where residents proudly display photographs of the bygone years, dance to everything from doo-wop to Mexican ballads, and share plates of carne asada and lasagna.

In September, Romero arrived at Chepa’s Park carrying an armload of pan dulce. Glancing over the group gathered on the lawn, he tells me that with every year that passes “somebody is missing” from the reunion. He makes light of it, greeting a longtime pal with a sly, “You’re still alive!”

“So are you!” his friend retorts.

“Barely!” Romero answers with a chuckle.

The assembled kicked off the reunion by reciting the United States Pledge of Allegiance. Andrade stood up with his fellow residents, put his hand on his heart and recited the words he’s known nearly his entire life in reverence of the only country he’s ever known: “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

For Logan residents, justice and equality have been elusive. Activating the neighborhood turned out to be the easy part. Going back in time to the era when orange blossoms and walnut orchards perfumed the air, when parents and children could breathe freely — that’s a challenge for tomorrow, for another generation, said Romero. “Hopefully,” he said, “in time this neighborhood will be back the way it was before.”

Romero, who is struggling with health issues, realizes his activist days are nearing their end. It’s time, he said, to pass the baton on to the next generation — though what keeps him up at night is wondering who exactly will take over for him and Andrade.

He’s not quite done yet, though, having just secured the recent concessions from the city to improve Logan’s infrastructure. It’s another victory that’s taught him never to give up. “We’re persistent. We raise hell,” said Romero, noting that he’s currently petitioning the city for new park playground equipment. “We’re getting results. They’re slow in coming, but they’re coming.”

Andrade has an idea who might take over for him and Romero, having recently brought in his adult son, Michael, to help organize. The younger Andrade is now working to make his father’s top priority a reality: ensuring that the neighborhood transitions back to 100% residential use. The barrio’s hope is that the city will establish a building fund to help rebuild the neighborhood by replacing industrial businesses with new homes.

Any effort to rebuild the Logan that once was would require cleaning up any contaminants found in the soil. In September, as part of an emergency resolution on climate change, the Santa Ana City Council pledged to address lead contamination throughout the city. Whether that includes remediating lead-contaminated soil remains to be seen.

Ultimately, if the transformation of Logan can improve the health of residents, Logan will have won, said Andrade, who has watched generations of Logan residents get cancers and battle heart disease and other health issues. His mother Chepa, who died of a heart attack while undergoing dialysis, was one of them.

Looking ahead, Andrade sees the future of his neighborhood with an eye toward the environment in which his grandsons, Nicholas, age 3, and Logan, 2, will grow up. On the day of the reunion, Nicholas scampered around Andrade, trailing his grandfather as he finished last-minute arrangements. Standing under a weeping willow tree, the child scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt and began sorting the rocks. Within minutes, he had dirt streaks on his face and hands. “I’ve got some rocks to paint,” he happily declared.

Naturally, lead contamination concerns Andrade. Despite how much he and his wife clean their house, there’s an ever-present layer of dust that seeps in from outdoors. “How can you [protect your children]?” he asked. “You can’t keep them in the house all the time.”

The Logan that Andrade sees today is not the Logan that he or his sister, Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez, remember from childhood. Andrade Rodriguez, now 71, lives nearby in the city of Garden Grove but still helps organize the annual Logan reunion. She dreams of one day returning to her old neighborhood for good. But she understands the risks of the contaminated environment. At 42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which her doctor told her was likely due to environmental causes.

In the 1970s, when her mother, Chepa, was fighting the city’s efforts to extend Civic Center Drive through the middle of Logan, Andrade Rodriguez said she was too young to understand the ramifications. But today, Andrade Rodriguez realizes how crucial her mother’s, her brother’s, and the barrio’s battles were to protecting Logan from further environmental degradation. Her hope is that she’ll make it back to Logan before she dies. “I do want to come back to Logan,” she told me. “Or I want to come as close as I can to Logan.”

But as long as the toxic dust remains in the earth, and as long as the Santa Ana winds whip through the streets of Logan, Andrade Rodriguez realizes that the only way to return to the cherished barrio of her youth is by letting her imagination carry her to a place that once was.

This story was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. This report was also made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and by the Kozik Challenge Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.

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