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<font size="1"><a href="https://theintercept.com/2021/01/13/epa-public-housing-lead-superfund/">https://theintercept.com/2021/01/13/epa-public-housing-lead-superfund/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Thousands of U.S. Public Housing Residents Live in the Country’s Most Polluted Places</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">
<div class="gmail-PostByline-names"><a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/angela-caputo/"><span>Angela Caputo</span></a>, <a class="gmail-PostByline-link" rel="author" href="https://theintercept.com/staff/sharonlerner/"><span>Sharon Lerner</span></a> - January 13, 2021</div></div></div>
<hr>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div><p><u>In some ways,</u>
they couldn’t be more different. Gerica Cammack is a Black woman from
Alabama; Floyd Kimball is a white man from rural Idaho. Yet they’re
facing a similar ordeal. They’re both single parents, forced by
difficult circumstances to live in government-subsidized housing
surrounded by pollution that is, or could be, poisoning their children.
Like tens of thousands of people across the country, they live near, or
on, some of the most toxic places in the nation. And the government has
failed to protect them.</p>
<p>In 2019, Cammack moved into the Collegeville Center, a public housing
complex in north Birmingham, Alabama. She knew that moving into the
neighborhood came with risk. The complex sits near a bevy of industrial
sites that produced steel and iron and spewed pollution over nearby
residents for decades. She’d lived up the road years earlier and
remembered how the fumes could be so overwhelming that the taste of them
would linger in her mouth. But she was pregnant, homeless, and grateful
for the apartment, so it was a danger she had to face.</p>
<p>Little did she know that the Environmental Protection Agency had
classified the area as a Superfund site, signifying that it was one of
the most polluted places in the country. Testing had found the soil in
her housing complex contaminated with lead, arsenic, and other
carcinogens.</p>
<p>More than 2,000 miles away, Kimball and his 4-year-old son live on a
Superfund site as well. The federally subsidized apartment complex in
Wallace, Idaho, they moved into three years ago, after Kimball lost his
job, sits on one of the largest Superfund sites in the country. Though
pollution from heavy metal mining was documented decades ago, neither
the local nor federal government has moved people from dangerous
conditions or sufficiently clean up the contamination. Meanwhile, many
residents, including Kimball’s young son, have been exposed to dangerous
amounts of lead. Kimball’s 4-year-old son hasn’t yet begun to speak.</p>
<p>An EPA analysis obtained by APM Reports and The Intercept found that
more than 9,000 federally subsidized properties — many with hundreds of
apartments or townhouses — sit within a mile of Superfund sites. Those
properties are in 480 cities in 49 states and territories. But even that
is an undercount. The list of 9,000 properties doesn’t include several
subsidized-housing complexes within a mile of Superfund sites.</p>
<p>In most cases, the federal government has chosen not to relocate
housing complexes near Superfund sites and made only piecemeal attempts
to address the health threats. Housing officials often don’t inform
people who move into these housing complexes that a Superfund site is
nearby. Neither the EPA nor the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development, the two federal agencies primarily responsible for
protecting residents, regularly monitor the potential health threats to
residents from nearby environmental pollution. In fact, some housing
complexes near Superfund sites haven’t been tested for contamination in
years, according to the APM Reports and Intercept investigation. Even
when testing is conducted and dangerous contamination is found, the
pollution isn’t always cleaned up.</p>
<p>As a result, thousands of residents continue to live in places that are potentially dangerous to their health.</p></div><p>The
problem is rooted in a history of the federal government developing
public housing on cheap land in industrial, polluted areas. The approach
was summed up in 1966 by Benjamin Lesniak, then executive director of
the East Chicago Housing Authority in Indiana, when he noted the city’s
lack of available land for new public housing and floated a possible
solution. “We can build them in vacant areas that are surrounded by
industries,” he said. Lesniak went on to oversee the construction of a
housing complex on the site of an old copper smelter and a lead refinery
in the city. (The complex was <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-east-chicago-lead-20161004-story.html">emptied</a> in 2016 after residents were exposed to elevated levels of lead and arsenic for decades.)</p><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/052_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3270.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="052_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3270" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Floyd
Kimball and his 4-year-old son Steve in Wallace, Idaho, on Jan. 5,
2021. They have lived in public housing located on the Bunker Hill
Superfund site for four years.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept</p></div><div><p>Experts
say many of the communities identified by APM Reports and The Intercept
likely couldn’t be built today in their current locations under state
environmental regulations enacted after the EPA was created in 1970.
Nearly a third of the roughly 9,000 public housing properties flagged by
the EPA for their proximity to Superfund sites were built before
environmental assessments were required under federal regulation.</p>
<p>The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability
Act — commonly known as the Superfund law — passed in 1980 established a
program under the EPA to clean up some of the nation’s most polluted
sites and hold corporations accountable for their environmental messes. A
tax on polluters funded the program in its early years, but it expired
in 1995. Since then, the government has had to pay for these massive
cleanups, many of which have stalled because of funding shortages.</p></div><blockquote><span></span><p>Nearly
a third of the roughly 9,000 public housing properties flagged by the
EPA for their proximity to Superfund sites were built before
environmental assessments were required under federal regulation.</p></blockquote><div><p>The
residents — many of whom can’t afford to live anywhere else — are left
in a bureaucratic gap between various governmental agencies that lack
the authority or resources to directly address the problem. The EPA and
state environmental agencies have struggled to clean up Superfund sites
and, in many instances, can’t confirm that they’ve contained the threat
to human health. Local housing authorities lack the money to address
pollution or test for contaminants, and it’s rare for the Department of
Housing and Urban Development to analyze the health risks or relocate
people from hazardous housing complexes despite its own regulations
requiring the agency to provide tenants with a safe and healthy place to
live.</p>
<p>The problem is well known to housing officials. The inspector
general’s office that monitors HUD requested money in its 2020 annual
budget to investigate the threat to public housing residents from
Superfund sites, writing in its request, “The dangers posed to HUD
programs by inadequately responding to this looming risk of unsanitary
and unsafe housing are incalculable.”</p>
<p>Following the East Chicago crisis, EPA and HUD officials agreed to
meet quarterly to share information and address housing sites where
there was concern about residents’ health, according to a <a href="https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20429431-hud-mou-slides-final">document</a>
from an early meeting between the two agencies in 2017. Among the goals
of the collaboration was to “coordinate communications with public
housing residents.” The EPA contends that it communicates with residents
who live near Superfund sites. “Notification to the community would
occur, at a minimum, when a site is proposed and listed [as a Superfund
site], and community involvement activities would continue throughout
the cleanup process and be tailored to meet community needs,” an agency
spokesperson wrote in an email.</p>
<p>Superfund cleanups can take decades, though, and residents who move
into a complex are often not informed of the nearby pollution.
“Sometimes people know anecdotally,” said Michael Kane, executive
director at National Alliance of HUD Tenants, “but most of the time
people that live on toxic sites don’t know their kids are going out and
playing on contaminated land, with lead and other toxins.” Those who do
know about the contamination receive little guidance from the government
aside from general tips from health and environmental officials, such
as monitor children so they don’t eat soil and don’t chew gum while
gardening.</p>
<p>Eugene Goldfarb, a retired HUD official who oversaw the
implementation of environmental regulations dating back to the EPA’s
earliest days, cautions that “just because there’s contamination on the
property doesn’t mean that there’s a pathway to adversely affect health
and safety. That’s an important distinction.”</p>
<p>But hundreds of documents — including environmental assessments and
reports drawn up by private consultants and government officials across
the country — gathered by APM Reports and The Intercept reveal for the
first time what’s known about environmental hazards at public housing
properties, which are occupied disproportionately by children, the
elderly, and disabled people. Combined, the records show a troubling
pattern, much like the one in Birmingham and Wallace, where people have
been left exposed to hazardous conditions even years after the EPA or
state officials found nearby pollution.</p>
<p>The few checks created by HUD often fall short. While local and
federal housing officials are supposed to provide a safe environment,
they aren’t required to test to determine if environmental hazards pose a
threat to human health. In fact, federal and state regulations
typically require housing officials to test for contaminants primarily
in one circumstance: when they are seeking money to redevelop or improve
a property. It’s a system that critics say prioritizes shielding
lenders and developers from liability over residents’ health.</p>
<p>Robert Weinstock, an attorney with the University of Chicago’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic who recently co-authored a <a href="https://www.povertylaw.org/report/poisonoushomes/">report</a>
on subsidized housing near toxic sites, said the problem is that a
number of government agencies on the local, state, and federal levels
are involved and none of them have taken decisive action to protect
residents’ health. “Who is responsible?” Weinstock said. “Everyone and
no one at the same time.”</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/IMG_4873.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="IMG_4873" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">The
view from a housing complex in North Birmingham, Ala. In the 1960s and
’70s, the Housing Authority of the Birmingham District built hundreds of
public housing units for Black families in the most polluted part of
the city.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Miranda Fulmore for The Intercept</p></div><div><h3>A City of Iron and Steel</h3>
<p>Since its founding in the years following the Civil War, Birmingham
has been a center of steel and iron production. And the Collegeville
Center public housing complex on the city’s north side, built in 1964 on
the edge of a pipe foundry, is surrounded by facilities that have
fueled those industries.</p>
<p>The neighborhood faces a toxic threat both past and present.
Poisonous remnants of heavy metal production at facilities long since
closed — carcinogens like lead and arsenic — lace the soil. But there is
also pollution that is ongoing and severe.</p>
<p>Today, the census blocks where the Collegeville Center sits in North
Birmingham are subject to more dangerous emissions from local factories
than 95 percent of census tracts nationwide, an analysis of EPA data
shows. The area’s toxic concentration scores — a measure of chemical
releases weighted by toxicity — are three times higher than the citywide
average. The top polluters, according to EPA data, are two facilities
that produce coke, a fuel derived from coal that’s used in the smelting
of iron ore, and a steel plant. They have long been under scrutiny for
dangerous emissions.</p>
<p>In 2018, the year before Gerica Cammack moved in, Birmingham Mayor
Randall Woodfin sounded the alarm about Collegeville Center when he <a href="https://www.birminghamal.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/385697058-Birmingham-Mayor-Randall-Woodfin-s-letter-to-EPA.pdf">warned</a> the EPA’s top administrator that “thousands remain at risk including the 1,070 people living in 394 public housing units <span>and 751 children attending Hudson K-8 school.</span><span>” </span>Cammack
knew there was pollution nearby, but she had little way to know how bad
it was. And toxic chemicals in the air weren’t her top concern at a
time when she was so broke that she slept on the floor.</p>
<p>Like many residents in North Birmingham, she had come to think of
pollution as simply a fact of daily life. People have long adapted by
closing windows or taking laundry off the lines when the air grew thick
with ash or smog. They grew up in it, worked in it, ate in it, and
played in it.</p>
</div><blockquote><span></span><p>Like many residents in North Birmingham, she had come to think of pollution as simply a fact of daily life.</p></blockquote><div><p>After
moving in, Cammack, 27, tried to make a home for herself and her
daughter, who is now 15 months old. Cammack’s grandmother taught her to
garden when she was growing up, and it always lifted her spirits. But
when she tried to grow flowers outside her apartment, nothing would take
in her front or backyard. She blames the soil’s infertility on the
pollution that’s hung in the air and sunk into the ground in North
Birmingham for as long as she can remember.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, Cammack’s mom, aunts, and grandparents lived in the
nearby North Birmingham Homes, a public housing complex less than a
half-mile from Collegeville Center. The developments are divided by an
area zoned for heavy industry and includes a metals scrap yard, a
foundry, and a coke plant.</p>
<p>As in North Birmingham, where most residents are Black, the
environmental burden from Superfund sites across the country falls
disproportionately on people of color, who are also overrepresented in
public housing for families. In the 1930s, public housing was built for
people of all races temporarily laid low by the Great Depression. But
over the years, the proportion of residents who were Black and Latinx
grew. “Because of housing segregation and housing discrimination, in
many cases across the country, low-income whites were better able to
escape this housing,” said Robert Bullard, an advocate and scholar who
is sometimes called the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/17/coronavirus-environmental-justice-racism-robert-bullard/">father of the environmental justice movement</a>. “People of color were more likely to be stuck in these areas with high concentrations of pollution.”</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/Test_Gerica-3.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=668" alt="Test_Gerica-3" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Gerica
Cammack has tried to make a healthy home for herself and her daughter
despite the environmental hazards that surround them in North
Birmingham, Ala.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Andi Rice for The Intercept</p></div><div><p>Unbeknownst
to Cammack, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an
arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, had issued an
alarming assessment of the community that includes Collegeville Center
in 2017 that “daily exposure to soil at properties with elevated lead
concentrations could have in the past and could currently be harming
their health,” particularly children.</p>
<p>That report was based, in part, on soil testing that the EPA
conducted throughout the neighborhood between 2012 and 2014 that found
dangerous amounts of lead and the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene in more than
a dozen samples taken from the Collegeville Center alone.</p>
<p>Benzo(a)pyrene is a chemical byproduct of coal when it’s cooked to
produce coke for processing iron and steel. Long-term exposure to
benzo(a)pyrene is linked to lung, stomach, and skin cancer. It’s also
proven to cause miscarriages and birth defects in lab animals. Lead
exposure can cause permanent brain damage, and children and pregnant
women are most susceptible.</p>
<p>Cammack had no idea that the soil around her home had a history of
contamination and, like the parents of 90 percent of the other young
children who live in Jefferson County, never got her daughter tested for
lead exposure.</p>
<p>The EPA began investigating the area back in 2009. Eventually the
agency drew the Collegeville Center, North Birmingham Homes, and several
industrial facilities into an area deemed the 35th Avenue Superfund
site. By 2014, the EPA proposed adding it to the National Priorities
List, which gives areas preference for further investigation because of
known or threatened releases of hazardous substances. But that effort
was beset by <a href="https://www.al.com/news/2019/04/how-a-lawyer-a-lobbyist-and-a-legislator-waged-war-on-a-birmingham-superfund-site.html">controversy</a>, and even after years of study and remediation, people are still exposed to dangerous soil and air emissions.</p>
</div><blockquote><span></span><p>A coal executive hatched a secret scheme to keep the 35th Avenue site off the National Priorities List to avoid cleanup costs.</p></blockquote><div><p>There’s
been so much industrial churn in North Birmingham over the past century
that the EPA can’t pinpoint the exact source of the contamination. By
the agency’s calculation, the area has featured at one time or another:
20 foundries and kilns; seven coal, coke, or byproducts facilities; 26
scrap and metal processing plants; and four chemical plants. Many of the
companies went out of business in the late 1970s and 1980s, according
to a city planning document, when enforcement of environmental
regulations started to cut into profit margins.</p>
<p>The EPA’s investigation and testing found high levels of air
pollution and, in 2014, the agency assigned the 35th Avenue site the
maximum score for likely soil exposure by residents under the Hazard
Ranking System, the scorecard for determining eligibility for the
National Priorities List.</p>
<p>But an executive from Drummond, a coal producer that owns the nearby
ABC Coke plant named as one of the potentially responsible polluters,
hatched a <a href="https://www.law.georgetown.edu/environmental-law-review/blog/birmingham-bribery-trial-ends-but-who-should-pay-for-the-35th-avenue-superfund-site/">secret scheme</a>
to keep the site off the National Priorities List. He and a lawyer
representing the company were eventually criminally charged with quietly
leading an effort to get local, state, and federal elected officials,
including Alabama’s attorney general, to oppose the additional
oversight. The scheme became public and ended in scandal. A state
representative and a regional EPA administrator pleaded guilty to
criminal charges as well.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/superfund-north-birmingham-11.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90" alt="superfund-north-birmingham-11" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="424"></p><p class="gmail-caption">The
map shows the 35th Avenue Superfund site in North Birmingham. The
Collegeville Center and the North Birmingham Homes both are within the
boundary of the Superfund site, an area that’s endured industrial
pollution for years. Though the EPA says the area is cleaned up, the
agency’s own records show that there are still toxic chemicals in the
area. The map may not have the full extent of the Superfund location.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Map: APM Reports, The Intercept</p></div><div><p>Though
the scheme was exposed, the 35th Avenue Superfund site wasn’t added to
the priorities list. While the corruption and political drama initially
drew more attention to the neighborhood’s problems, Haley Colson Lewis,
an attorney with GASP, a local environmental advocacy organization, said
the momentum for getting the site on the National Priorities List has
since stalled.</p>
<p>The EPA did conduct an initial cleanup of the Superfund site and the
neighborhood, but records obtained by APM Reports and The Intercept show
that environmental officials knew residents would likely continue to
face health dangers from ongoing pollution. The EPA warned in 2011 that
dangerous ash would only continue to migrate from the coke plant that
sits less than 3,000 feet away from both public housing complexes. “The
surrounding community will continue to experience deposition from the
plant unless controls are put in place,” the EPA’s on-scene coordinator
wrote in a memo to his peers as they prepared to expand testing and
cleanup in the area.</p>
<p>The agency has since shifted its stance. EPA officials now say they
believe, based on a few samples from the surrounding neighborhood, that
contaminated dirt brought in from nearby industrial sites is to blame
for much of the pollution; they still maintain that the public housing
is clean.</p>
<p>EPA records show that during the 2014 cleanup of the public housing,
the agency left in place lead, arsenic, and benzo(a)pyrene in some areas
because the pollution didn’t exceed the level that would trigger
removal. The agency hasn’t conducted significant soil testing at the
housing complexes in six years.</p>
<p>The current hazards in the soil at the housing complexes are unknown;
the agency hasn’t conducted significant soil testing at the housing
complexes in six years.</p>
<p>Rep. Terri Sewell, a Democrat who represents North Birmingham in
Congress, said the only way residents can rest assured that they are
safe is if federal and local officials’ oversight is vigilant. “This
problem didn’t happen overnight,” she said. “It’s not going to be solved
overnight.”</p>
<p>Residents have come to distrust government pronouncements about the
safety of the area. That’s in part because whenever the EPA has
conducted environmental testing in the past decade, the results show
pollution levels worse than people were led to believe. For instance,
following the first tests by the EPA back in 2009, when dangerous levels
of the benzo(a)pyrene and arsenic were found at two elementary schools
that sit next door to each of the public housing complexes, the area was
cleaned up and given the all-clear. Based on those limited results, the
federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded
exposures to soil in the area “do not present a public health hazard.”
That conclusion would be proven false when the EPA soon found further
contamination in the area that led to the 2014 cleanup.</p>
<p>The fact that the EPA can’t confirm health risks have been eliminated
at the 35th Avenue Superfund site or the surrounding area — which
includes two coke plants, asphalt batch plants, pipe manufacturing
facilities, steel producing facilities, quarries, and a coal gas holder
and purification system facility — has led to distrust among residents
and environmental activists.</p>
<p>Charlie Powell, an activist with the local environmental justice
group People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination, or PANIC,
wonders how officials consider the site cleaned up with so much
pollution still spewing over the community. “How can you say it is not
going to happen again, but the plants are still doing the same thing?”</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/SF_BHM_ENV-42.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=668" alt="SF_BHM_ENV-42" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">After
the EPA named ABC Coke one of the potentially responsible parties for
contamination across the 35th Avenue site, an executive from Drummond,
which owns the plant, hatched a plan to shield the company from
liability.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Andi Rice for The Intercept</p></div><div><h3>Opening Pandora’s Box</h3>
<p>Activists like Powell believe that residents should be moved out, and the area should be rezoned for industrial use only.</p>
<p>The Housing Authority of the Birmingham District may have other
ideas. In a 2018 planning document, the housing authority notes that it
would like to redevelop the North Birmingham Homes, which, like the
Collegeville Center, also have “widespread environmental issues.” Using
public money to redevelop the property would require thorough
environmental reviews. And therein lies an irony, critics note.</p>
</div><blockquote><span></span><p>“It’s a process to protect projects, not people.”</p></blockquote><div><p>Some
of the same public housing properties that haven’t undergone a thorough
environmental assessment in years, despite their proximity to a
Superfund site and large amounts of pollution, would be studied to pave
the way for a redevelopment project.</p>
<p>“It’s a process to protect projects, not people,” said Weinstock, the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic attorney.</p>
<p>Such environmental reviews of polluted properties sometimes turn up
more toxic pollution than anyone was expecting. That’s what happened in
Anniston, Alabama, which lies 50 miles east of Birmingham. The local
housing authority opened Pandora’s box when it attempted to rebuild
three of its largest public housing complexes near the Anniston PCB — <a href="https://www.epa.gov/pcbs/learn-about-polychlorinated-biphenyls-pcbs">polychlorinated biphenyl</a> — and Lead Superfund sites.</p>
<p>As in Birmingham, numerous officials had claimed over the years that
the site had been cleaned up and the housing complexes were safe. But
when consultants conducted the environmental review, they found traces
of PCB, lead, and industrial fill on three separate sites where families
lived for years.</p>
<p>APM Reports and The Intercept collected similar environmental reviews
from 75 properties clustered around Superfund sites across the U.S. and
found that consultants flagged chemicals and toxic waste — including
lead, arsenic, chromium, and PCB — at half the properties. In other
cases, the findings were inconclusive, the inspections were only visual,
or consultants cleared the properties based on data provided by
companies that would have to pay for remediation.</p>
</div><blockquote><span></span><p>HUD’s inspections look for building-related hazards like lead paint and asbestos but not environmental threats.</p></blockquote><div><p>In
Anniston, the EPA gave the properties a clean bill of health years ago
and, like most of the public housing that sits within a mile of a
Superfund site, they passed HUD’s health and safety inspections
repeatedly. That’s because HUD’s inspections look for building-related
hazards like lead paint and asbestos but not environmental threats. The
consultants’ conclusions only affirmed the suspicions of David Baker, a
local environmental activist who sits on a local Superfund advisory
committee, that more cleanup is needed.</p>
<p>Baker spent the past couple of years trying to get a fence put up
around one of the last parts of the community to be cleaned up, a
PCB-contaminated stretch of Snow Creek that runs along the north east
corner of the Glen Addie apartments where kids play, trying to catch
fish, turtles, and tadpoles. The housing authority had big plans to
modernize the complex, but the problems revealed in the environmental
testing, Baker said, only affirms what he’s been saying all along:
“Anniston needs to be retested.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, only one of the public housing redevelopments is moving ahead. The other two are still on hold.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/112_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3378.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="112_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3378" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p></div><div><div><p><img alt="102_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill_DSCF0067" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/102_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill_DSCF0067-1000x667.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p><img alt="033_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3227" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/033_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3227-1000x667.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p></div><p><span>The
Lower Burke Canyon Repository on the Bunker Hill Superfund site, seen
across the street from Canyonside Townhouses. Below, Floyd Kimball's
son, Steve, plays on the ground near his apartment.</span><span>Photo: Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept</span></p></div><div><h3>Living on Idaho’s “Megasite”</h3>
<p>Floyd Kimball’s son, Steve, was just 7 months old in 2017 when the
two moved into Canyonside Townhouses in Wallace, Idaho, which sits on
the massive Bunker Hill Superfund site. Floyd, who had recently lost his
job as a cook at a resort, was relieved to find an affordable
two-bedroom. And he and his son, a happy and playful toddler, quickly
settled into their new home. But even as Steve thrived in some ways, he
began to lag in others. At 2 years old, he didn’t talk or babble the way
other toddlers did, which worried his father.</p>
<p>Last year, Floyd brought Steve to a pediatrician who tested his blood
and found elevated levels of lead. Afterward, Floyd called the local
health department, which then tested for lead at Canyonside Townhouses
in July 2019. The results pointed to the source of the boy’s elevated
blood lead level — or, rather, to several sources.</p>
<p>Lead, a heavy metal associated with speech delays and other
developmental problems, was detected in the dust on Floyd’s boots; on
the gray couch where Steve often colors and watches cartoons; on the
stairs leading up to the boy’s bedroom; and in several areas on the
property where he and other children in the complex often played,
including on the playground equipment, in the sandbox, and on a nearby
hillside.</p>
<p>A specialist with the local health department also measured lead on
Floyd’s car keys, which Steve liked to put in his mouth at the time. The
level of lead on the keys was 1,110 parts per million, almost three
times the safety threshold the agency set for soil. In a vacant field
across the road from the apartment complex, a former mining spot where
Steve and other children play, lead was measured at 19,810 parts per
million: almost 50 times the action level that would trigger a federal
cleanup.</p>
<p>APM Reports and The Intercept hired contractors to conduct
independent testing at three federally subsidized housing complexes on
the Bunker Hill Superfund site, where decades of heavy metal mining
contaminated a huge area. The results confirmed the presence of lead in
house dust — the best predictor of blood lead levels in children — at
each of the complexes.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/013_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3165.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="013_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3165" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">An
empty field and a playground at Canyonside Townhouses, seen on Jan. 5,
2021, is the primary area where children of the public housing complex
play in Wallace, Idaho.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept</p></div><div><p>In
the Amy Lyn Apartments, a subsidized family complex in Kellogg, Idaho,
just a short drive from the Kimballs’ apartment, lead was found on the
laundry room floor. Though the EPA doesn’t have a cleanup level
specifically for laundry rooms, the level of the neurotoxin was more
than 13 times higher than the actionable levels for the floors of
apartments, according to analysis of samples conducted by American
Scientific Lab, an EPA-approved independent lab hired by APM Reports and
The Intercept.</p>
<p>In the nearby Shoshone Apartments, the APM Reports and Intercept
testing discovered lead in the corner of an apartment floor, where a
children’s scooter and toys were stored, in an amount above a safety
level set by the EPA.</p>
<p>In an email, a spokesperson for the local housing authority
emphasized the agency’s concern for the health and safety of residents
of the Shoshone Apartments and noted that the complex underwent
extensive remediation in 2002 and an environmental review in 2015.</p>
<p>At Canyonside, lead was detected above EPA’s safety threshold for
apartment floors on the playground and on the floor of Kimball’s
apartment. (The EPA does not have a standard for playground floors.) For
Floyd, the presence of lead in the samples was devastating but not
surprising. From his apartment window, he regularly sees heavy machinery
moving contaminated earth.</p>
<p>In most places throughout the country, the presence of lead at such
levels would trigger immediate action. But in these three federally
supported housing complexes, the heavy metal is allowed to be present at
significantly higher levels because they are on Bunker Hill, one of the
largest Superfund sites in the U.S.</p>
<p>The Canyonside complex, 24 apartments arranged into three neat rows
set in a woody hillside, was built in 1982, after a century of metal
mining had turned the surrounding area of north Idaho into one of the
most polluted places on Earth. The complex was finished just a year
before the EPA first deemed a 21-square-mile area around the Bunker Hill
mine a Superfund site. Though some environmental experts felt the only
safe solution was to move the residents from the area, this was never
done.</p>
<p>The area was once the largest silver-producing region in the world.
Bunker Hill was the largest lead and zinc mine in the U.S., and the
Bunker Hill lead smelter was also the nation’s largest. The industry
left behind more than 100 million tons of mine waste — including
aluminum, antimony, arsenic, cadmium, iron, manganese, zinc, and lead —
much of which was dumped into local rivers and streams. Trees couldn’t
grow in the metal-laden soil. Fish disappeared from the waters.
Livestock routinely grew sick and died. And local residents experienced
brain damage on a massive scale.</p>
<p>Young children like Steve are the most vulnerable to the effects of
lead. Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recognizes
that no level of lead is safe, while setting 5 micrograms per deciliter
of blood as the level at which “public health action” should be taken.
In 1976, after a smelter fire caused the largest lead poisoning event of
children in U.S. history, the mean blood lead level of children living
nearest the Bunker Hill smelter was 68 micrograms per deciliter — more
than 13 times the current threshold, according to “Living With Lead,” a
book about the environmental history of the mining area.</p>
<p>Concerns about the lead poisoning of Kellogg’s children helped fuel
the 1983 decision to designate Bunker Hill as one of the nation’s first
Superfund sites. At the time, the Superfund program was still paid for
by the tax on polluting industries, which was fortunate since by then
both the Bunker Hill Mine and Gulf Resources & Chemical Corp., which
had bought the mine years earlier, had declared bankruptcy. In 1998,
the site was extended to include the area surrounding the “box,” as the
original site is known. The whole site — or “megasite,” as the EPA calls
it — is now larger than Delaware.</p>
<p>In 2005, a National Academy of Sciences<a href="https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20432063-bunker-hill-nas-report"> report</a>
on “Superfund and Mining Megasites” predicted that the cleanup of
Bunker Hill, which had already been underway for more than two decades
and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, would take centuries more and
additional hundreds of millions of dollars to remediate — and even then
the area would remain polluted.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/091_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill_DSCF0170.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="Floyd Kimball, and his four-year-old son Steve, have lived in public housing located on the Bunker Hill Superfund site – or megasite, as the EPA refers to the 1,500 square mile area in the city of Wallace, Idaho, for four years. In 2018 the soil levels were tested at the public housing complex, and the management at the housing site tried to cover up the toxic levels by throwing a pizza party for the residents. Kimball, in turn, had his son's blood lead levels tested, which came back with a reference value of over eight micrograms per deciliter. Kimball's was around six micrograms per deciliter. Kimball believes the lead poisoning has contributed to his son's delay in speech development. Kimball is growing increasingly frustrated that nothing is being done to remediate the areas where the residents live and the children play at his housing complex. Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept." style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Floyd Kimball outside his home in Wallace, Idaho, on Jan. 5, 2021.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept</p></div><div><h3>Nuclear Weapons Against BB Guns</h3>
<p>The Superfund program, one of the federal government’s most ambitious
environmental efforts, has struggled financially and politically amid
ongoing budget cuts. Though the EPA works hard to get companies to cover
some of the costs of cleaning Superfund sites, “they’re never covering
the actual cost of the damage they caused,” said Joel Hirschhorn, who
spent much of his career working on Superfund issues, both through the
Office of Technology Assessment — which advised Congress on scientific
issues — and as an independent environmental engineering consultant.</p>
<p>While the Trump administration has <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/12/04/epa-wheeler-quarantine-environment/">claimed success</a> in the Superfund program, pointing to its role in the cleanup of <a href="https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-deleted-all-or-part-27-superfund-sites-including-duell-gardner-superfund-site">27 polluted sites</a>,
Jim Woolford, who was director of the EPA’s Superfund program from 2006
until retiring last April, disputed that characterization. Woolford
said some of these sites were cleaned up by previous administrations and
pointed out that there is a long list of sites awaiting cleanups that
have yet to be funded.</p>
<p>“The backlog is a train wreck that has been long in the making,” said
Woolford, who estimates that the cost of fully remediating the sites
awaiting cleanup to be between $750 and $850 million. “I was forthright
with the [Trump] administration about needing more money, and they just
pushed back and said ‘you’re not going to get it,’” he said.</p>
<p>In part due to this lack of funding, most cleanups are only partial.
“Between 80 and 90 percent of our sites leave some contamination in
place,” Woolford said.</p>
<p>The Superfund program’s struggles are especially evident at Bunker
Hill. The massive amounts of pollution made cleanup extraordinarily
challenging, and the powerful local mining industry made it harder
still, said Hirschhorn, who worked on dozens of Superfund cleanups.
“They fought against better testing of blood in kids, better testing of
lead in soils. They were just against protecting public health and
safety.”</p>
<p>The result, Hirschhorn said, was a “failed remedy” that resulted from
the government’s inability to stand up to industry. “EPA didn’t stand a
chance. They didn’t have good enough staff or the political leadership
willing to go against the major corporations.” He described the power
mismatch between the agency and mining companies as “nuclear weapons
against BB guns.”</p>
<p>With residents still potentially exposed to dangerous heavy metals,
government officials are relying on long out-of-date health standards.
And they’re not monitoring the health of all children in the area.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/Area-around-Woodland-Park-that-is-not-open-for-recreation.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=666" alt="Area-around-Woodland-Park-that-is-not-open-for-recreation" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">A
map of the area surrounding the Canyonside apartments that the
Panhandle Health District sent Floyd Kimball along with test results
showing the presence of lead in his home.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Map: Panhandle Health District</p></div><div><p>More
than 7,100 yards and public spaces have been cleaned up and 581 roadway
segments recently paved at the Bunker Hill site, work that an EPA
spokesperson described as “dramatically reducing people’s exposure to
lead and other metals.” But other goals remain unmet. And at least two
of them — the cleanup threshold for soil and the children’s blood levels
noted in the site’s “remedial action objective” — are dangerously out
of date. In 2012, the CDC lowered the blood lead “level of concern”
nationally from 10 to 5 micrograms per deciliter. But the Bunker Hill
site has yet to update its objectives to meet those standards. Instead,
the EPA’s official “remedial action objective” for the site, which was
created in 1991, requires that less than 5 percent of children tested
for lead have blood lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter
without specifying how many children overall should be tested.</p>
<p>The National Academy of Sciences committee recommended universal
blood lead screening of children between ages 1 and 4 on the Bunker Hill
site. But that hasn’t happened. While there is no question that
children’s blood lead levels have steadily fallen in the area since the
worst of the pollution crisis, lead exposure persists and some children
are still falling through the cracks.</p>
<p>In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, only 169
children under 6 living within the bounds of the original site had their
blood tested for lead, according to the Panhandle Health District.
Eighty-two of these children were found to have lead in their blood; 23
of them had blood lead levels above 5 micrograms per deciliter — the
current level of concern identified by the CDC. Eight children had blood
levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter. And two had levels above 20, a
level at which children begin to experience irritability and loss of
appetite.</p>
<p>Lasting neurological damage can occur at levels well below the 5
micrograms per deciliter set by the CDC or even the 10 micrograms per
deciliter used in Bunker Hill. An increase in children’s blood lead
level from less than 1 to 10 micrograms per deciliter was associated
with a 6-point drop in IQ score, according to a 2005 <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257652/">study</a>
in Environmental Health Perspectives. But it’s impossible to know how
many children living on the Bunker Hill site are exposed or had lasting
neurological damage because some aren’t tested.</p>
<p>In 2016, 2017, and 2018, fewer than 150 children in the center of the
site had their blood tested for lead each year. Among those who were
tested, a significant minority had blood levels above the current safety
threshold. The 125 children under 6 tested in the box in 2017 likely
represented about half of the children in the area, said Andy Helkey,
Kellogg Remediation Program Manager at the Idaho Department of
Environmental Quality.</p>
<p>Helkey said that the blood testing results showed that Bunker Hill
technically met the EPA’s objective for the site of having less than 5
percent of children with blood lead levels above 10 micrograms per
deciliter. But he acknowledged that some individual communities within
the Superfund site didn’t meet that almost 30-year-old goal. And many
children in the area still haven’t been tested.</p></div><div><div><p><img alt="" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/120_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill__MG_3390-1000x1250.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="339" height="424"></p><p><img alt="116_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill_DSCF0196" src="https://theintercept.com/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/116_Rstumpf_TheIntercept_BunkerHill_DSCF0196-1000x1250.jpg" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="339" height="424"></p></div><p><span>The
Lower Burke Canyon Repository is a waste repository of the Bunker Hill
Superfund site, located next to public housing. Many residents have been
exposed to toxic levels of lead through mine tailings and water runoff
in Wallace, Idaho, seen on Jan. 5, 2021.</span><span>Photo: Rebecca Stumpf for The Intercept</span></p></div><div><p>Though
the EPA and companies responsible for the pollution in Bunker Hill have
already spent more than $1 billion cleaning up the site, the health
department lacks the money to determine how many children live in the
epicenter of the Superfund site and to test them, Helkey said.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the level of lead that triggers remediation at the
Superfund site — 1,000 parts per million, which was set in 1991 — is
more than twice the level that the EPA set for residential soil in the
rest of the country: 400 ppm. So when local health officials found lead
present at 401 parts per million on the decking of the playground at the
Canyonside complex, they weren’t legally bound to remove it. Asked
about the discrepancy, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email that the
agency “is considering various options to accelerate protective and
efficient Superfund residential lead cleanups.” The spokesperson
also acknowledged that individual sites may have different cleanup
levels for lead that depend on “site-specific conditions, such as the
degree to which lead is bioavailable.”</p>
<p>There’s little question that many people living on Bunker Hill are
suffering from lead exposure. “Pretty much everyone I talked to in a
long-term family had long-term health problems,” said Sue Moodie, an
epidemiologist and health researcher who spent several months
interviewing residents in 2008 and 2009. “There were a lot of reports of
children getting really frustrated in school and having behavioral
problems and breaking things.”</p>
<p>For Kimball, the revelations about the likely sources of the lead in
his son’s blood haven’t helped him prevent further exposure. After he
received the test results from the health department, Kimball said he
asked the building management to address the problem, but no action was
taken. “I talked to everyone I could possibly talk to, but nobody seemed
to want to do anything,” said Kimball, who keeps a thick file of his
letters seeking help about lead.</p>
<p>The local health department was also of little help. Valerie Wade, an
environmental health specialist with the agency, suggested that
Canyonside Townhouses install additional play areas on site so that the
children in the apartments would be less likely to go to the highly
contaminated lot across the street, according to a health district
spokesperson, who said that “the apartment complex said they did not
have funding to do so.”</p>
<p>Wade explained the situation this way to Kimball in an August 2019
email: “Unfortunately, we cannot force them to do anything,” she wrote,
going on to encourage Kimball to “steer clear of the contaminated areas
and get inventive with things to do with” your son.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/pizza-party.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=540&h=698" alt="pizza-party" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="328" height="424"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Although
the local health department did not remove lead from the apartment
complex, it did hold a pizza party at which children were encouraged to
wash their hands.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Flyer: Panhandle Health District</p></div><div><p>A
few days after sending Kimball the lead test results, the health
department did hold a pizza party at Canyonside at which Wade spoke
about the dangers of lead and encouraged children to wash their hands.
In an email, a spokesperson wrote that the health department also works
to protect children from lead by providing blood lead screening;
bodysuits, respirators and other protective equipment to people exposed
to lead dust; and free disposal sites for contaminated material. Syringa
Property Management, which manages the Canyonside and Amy Lyn
apartments, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.</p>
<p>While the local health department didn’t substantively address the
immediate lead threat facing Steve Kimball at Canyonside, federal
agencies were aware that something could and should be done to address
the environmental risks facing residents of subsidized housing on Bunker
Hill. At a November 2017 meeting between HUD and EPA officials, Bunker
Hill was one of the first sites mentioned, with at least one meeting
attendee noting that human exposure was not under control at the site.
At the meeting, the agency staffers spoke hopefully about future
conversations about Bunker Hill and their plans to share maps and other
information with other agencies.</p>
<p>But three years later, the lead contamination persists. Kimball is
still waiting for help, and his son, now 4 years old, still hasn’t begun
to speak.</p>
<p>While the area seems to have faded from the EPA’s attention, Kimball
thinks about the pollution he and his son must confront every day. “It
pops into my head every time I go outside,” he said.</p></div><div><p><img src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2021/01/SF_BHM_ENV-34.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1000&h=667" alt="SF_BHM_ENV-34" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="283"></p><p class="gmail-caption">Five
decades ago, city planners noted that “smoke, noise, and fumes from
heavy industries and railroad operations and truck traffic permeate the
area” around the Collegeville Center. The same conditions exist today in
North Birmingham, Ala.</p>
<p class="gmail-caption">
Photo: Andi Rice for The Intercept</p></div><div><h3>A Legacy of Activism</h3>
<p>On a recent afternoon, a team of scientists and environmental
activists met around the corner from the Collegeville Center in North
Birmingham to hang air monitors that will gather independent evidence
about what exactly residents are still being exposed to.</p>
<p>GASP, the local environmental justice organization spearheading the
effort, already conducted one round of testing, in 2020, that found
concentrations of naphthalene, a carcinogen produced in coal and
petroleum processing, at up to 50 times the EPA’s cancer risk level.
They also found concentrations of benzene, another known carcinogen, up
to 29 times the EPA’s cancer risk level.</p>
<p>The group plans to use the data from air monitoring to continue
pressing the EPA to place the 35th Avenue Superfund site on the National
Priorities List, which would bring additional funds for testing and
cleanup.</p>
<p>GASP’s attorney Colson Lewis said the group is motivated in large
part by the children always playing outside at the public housing
complexes oblivious to the risks they’re being exposed to. “It just
makes you want to keep advocating for what’s best for everyone’s
health,” she said, “especially the children who can’t do it for
themselves.”</p>
<p>There’s a rich history of activism in the area. The Collegeville
housing complex sits just down the block from the famed Bethel Baptist
Church, where Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a co-founder of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, was the longtime pastor.</p>
<p>There’s a plaque hanging on an overpass at the Collegeville Center
commemorating the area as the cradle of the civil rights movement. The
plaque is next to a drainage ditch, out of sight. Some advocates say
it’s emblematic of how this community has been treated over the years
and that more activism is needed.</p>
<p>Cammack’s grandfather followed in a long tradition of men before him
who, despite the power of the community, faced continued obstacles.
After he worked for years in a local quarry, his health began to fail.
He was compensated, and the family used the money as a down payment on a
house. While home ownership became a point of pride for the family,
Cammack said, “he paid with his life.”</p>
<p>So she’s taking extra precautions to protect her daughter. Cammack
takes her to play at a park farther from their apartment complex, but
the smoke plumes and foul smell tend to migrate, and she often cuts the
trips short.</p>
<p>“It’s alarming,” Cammack said. “You can see it and smell it, but it’s hard to know how it affects you.”</p>
<p>Local environmental activists continue to push for federal oversight
through the Superfund program, which would bring more money to repair
the community. And they’re optimistic that incoming leaders at the EPA
and HUD will make oversight a priority.</p>
<p>How much of a priority remains to be seen. “Everything is a balancing
act,” Goldfarb, the retired HUD official, said. With resources scarce
and the federal deficit growing, he said, “The question is what are we
going to spend money on?”</p>
<p><em>Will Craft contributed reporting and data analysis for this story. </em></p>
<p><em>Support for this project was provided by the University of Southern California’s Center for Health Journalism.</em></p></div></div></div></div>
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