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I'm David Huizar.

A few years ago, we brought you the story and investigative report of thousands of East Los Angeles residents who for many years have been living in a dangerous lead contaminated part of L.A..

The largest lead contamination case in U.S. history.

The victims found themselves living in what they term a poisoned zone due to what now?

Shut down battery recycling plant known as Exide Technologies.

The shuttered plant is located about five miles from downtown Los Angeles, where there are over 10,000 affected homes.

And for the past decade, these residents say they've been in the fight of their life to once and for all rid the lead contamination that has polluted their community and poisoned their homes.

Now, as we continue to monitor the story, we ask, have things finally improved some years later?

Here is part two of our Los Angeles lead poisoning investigation.

The contamination here from Exide is ten times worse than of Flint, Michigan, and you can go anywhere in the country and everybody knows what happened in Flint, Michigan.

Over the years.

Lead contamination has been found all throughout the United States, everywhere from Flint, Michigan, to Southern California and beyond.

In this case, Los Angeles, more specifically, neighborhoods of East L.A. What contamination?

Lead poisoning is a serious situation that, if left untreated, can be potentially fatal.

Lead is neurotoxin, that, when ingested, can cause severe physical and mental health damage.

That's why cities and counties throughout the U.S. when there's a suspicion of this danger.

Tests for lead and arsenic, a precautionary measure to make sure these toxic metals don't seep into the groundwater.

The soil, the air, because of neighborhoods are not tested, these toxins can ultimately seep into your nasal passages, your lungs, your system.

Boyle Heights resident Terry Gonzalez Cano knows about this.

Ten years ago, we already knew that there was there was something wrong with the air that we breathed.

All the people that are close to me in my life my parents, my siblings, my children, my neighbors.

We were all sick.

My neighbors either passed away.

You know, just from some health issue that is not genetic in their in their family.

We have cancer in my household on each house on either side of me.

Our family, friends that lived across the street, both parents had cancer.

Terry explains her own health issues from what she says was all the lead ingestion over the years in this East Los Angeles neighborhood lab that was in the air and allowed that had also seeped into the grass and soil of her family home where Terry, her siblings and parents lived.

I've had several strokes.

I have the beginning stages of early, early cancer.

My bones are deteriorating.

My spine is deteriorating.

I've had to have a hysterectomy, asthma.

I have such a long list of nerve damage.

All of these are a direct side effect from the can, all the contaminants that we were exposed to.

Terry says despite her own personal health problems which have destroyed her, her greatest life challenge, her most trying ordeal is simply getting through each and every day without her parents, who passed away over ten years ago from the lead poisoning.

She insists, My parents were two of the most amazing people to ever walk this planet.

They were beautiful inside and out, kind, loving, super compassionate.

And I love them dearly.

So exactly what happened over the years here in the East Los Angeles neighborhoods that me, Terry, and so many other people sick.

With an estimated 10,000 homes contaminated from the lead emissions in this community, a led crisis that has affected some 100,000 people with a portion of them getting ill like Terry.

The saga all began with a disgraced now shut down battery recycling plant known as Exide Technologies, and then a series of events to follow that, according to neighbors, involved lies, neglect and deceit from many guilty parties, government agencies.

They claim the city and county of Los Angeles, the state of California, the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

We begin with the historical context.

Exide is located in the city of Vernon, next to East L.A. in South L.A., where there are some of the poorest neighborhoods in the nation.

This community where Terri and her neighbors live borders the 15 acre former Exide battery recycling plant.

The facility had been operating in this area for nearly a century.

In later years, recycling anywhere from 20000 to 40000 lead acid, car batteries and other types of batteries a day.

And despite the fact that the state of California and other regulators like the South Coast Air Quality Management District had this toxic battery plant on their radar for years, and according to many court documents, knew Exide was a primary lead polluter in the region.

Exide somehow escaped the scrutiny and was still allowed to stay in business, polluting and poisoning.

However, things were about to change in 2015 for the better or so it seemed.

That's when, in part the state of California and their Department of Toxic Substances Control, or DTC.

After years of neglect and mismanagement, finally stepped in and finally began the overdue clean up of the contaminated soil.

The lead pollution was off the charts and Exide was forced to close permanently.

The company signed an agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office to shut down their business.

The federal government allowed Exide and its employees to avoid prosecution for what was there all the years of committing environmental crimes, crimes that included things like illegal storage, disposal and shipment of hazardous waste.

The same ways that has made so many neighbors sick.

The company also had to agree to pay about $50 million to help demolish and clean the plant and the surrounding communities.

Scientists say this colossal project to rid the lead in a nearly two mile radius of the plant is going to take years, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Environmental impact is overwhelming.

Neighbors say the discredited Exide Corporation did not take responsibility, did not remain neighborhood, according to court records.

Ashamed battery plant filed for bankruptcy and ran away, leaving these low income neighbors to fend for themselves.

Today, years later, the company is not talking.

Still running.

Still baffling.

Well, neighbors are talking and they say things have changed somewhat over the years.

Changed in a sense that now their battle is not with Exide anymore.

They tell me their battle.

Now a war is with the state of California and the Department of Toxic Substances Control, DTC.

They say the buck must stop with the state.

No excuses anymore.

But at no point has the state acted like this is an emergency.

Mark Lopez has lived here in East L.A. his entire life.

Mark is a neighborhood activist fighting for what he terms justice for the community.

He is the East Side community organizer and special projects coordinator for the organization East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

And Mark, like Terry, has dedicated his life this past decade to speak on behalf of the thousands of angry East L.A. neighbors who claim they're invisible and ignored while their homes and backyards remain drenched in lead.

The state doesn't care that they're not prioritizing the health of our community members.

In your opinion, why is the state not prioritizing the health of the residents out here?

Can you explain what's going on?

I've been out here ten years ago.

Then a couple of years ago.

Now, today, nothing has changed.

Or it seems that way, according to all of you.

Yeah.

I mean, every step of the way we've had to fight, right?

When the state first started sampling homes, they wanted to limit how much they were going to clean up.

And we had to push them every step of the way to expand and expand and expand up to the point that they're at now, which still isn't enough.

Right.

But we've had to fight every step of the way.

They haven't even adequately profiled the contamination.

They don't know how far it goes.

They don't know how wide it is.

They have an initial clean up area, but they haven't done enough to actually fully profile.

And if we don't fully profile the contamination, I fear that eventually the state will finish cleaning up that initial area and say that they're done.

Where do you go from here?

Well, we want every home cleaned up.

And what they've told us is, well, that's not really realistic.

And so we're like, okay, let's talk to our academic partners.

What would be a representative sample?

So there's now 6000 that are within the cleanup area.

We think that the sample area should be expanded from 1.7 miles to 4.5 miles.

Dr. Meredith Williams is the director of DTC, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, which is part of the California Environmental Protection Agency.

Dr. Williams is a scientist.

Williams says her department works towards environmental justice in what she terms fair and equitable enforcement of California's environmental laws.

We visited via Zoom with Dr. Williams to discuss Exide DTC, the neighbors, the lead contamination.

Dr. Williams, what exactly is the state specifically your department, Etsy doing now to put an end to the lab contamination situation?

Ever since the legislature first appropriated funds in 2016 to remove lead from properties that were contaminated by Exide, DTC has been working with urgency to clean as many homes as possible, as efficiently and effectively as possible.

We've prioritized that work based on the levels of contamination and the risk of exposure and is more funding has become available by the legislature.

We've expanded the clean up to more homes.

We have about 300 people working on this project.

That includes DTC staff, contractors, consultants and subcontractors.

As of last month, we cleaned up, cleaned up nearly 5000 parcels within what we call the preliminary investigation area, including all of the impacted schools, parks and daycare.

We're also working closely with U.S. EPA on our request to list the cleanup as a Superfund site.

We are regularly engaging with them to ensure that they have all the necessary data and information to make their determination.

Such a listing would add important funds and resources to aid in this cleanup effort.

And as you know, Dr. Williams, many of the neighbors tell me Dtsc has not done a proper profile on the area.

With that said, should the area be expanded from, let's say, the 1.7 miles to the 4.5 miles?

Yeah.

Thank you for that question.

Yes, we've we feel as though we've characterized the area adequately.

And to answer this question, it helps to take a minute to think about how lead travels through the environment.

Any releases from a facility, both at ground level or through smokestack would travel through the air and fall onto soils.

And then once those contaminants are at the surface of the soil, unique conditions at any given property, any given location, including things like the irrigation methods, will determine how whether the lead stays at the surface or whether it migrates down into the soil.

Our job was to define the extent of any contamination from the facility.

And to accomplish this, we conducted sampling along the dominant wind directions and we went out to the 4.5 miles, as you referenced, from the former Exide facility.

The data, the statistical analysis and information available at that time, including the soil.

Some soil samples taken by Exide indicated that lead emissions from the former Exide facility may have contaminated soil from between 1.3 miles to 1.7 miles from this.

The facility, depending on the wind direction.

And so we wanted to take the more conservative approach, and we established the 1.7 mile radius as the preliminary investigation area.

And we do consider that a well characterized conservative definition of the area.

Terry Gonzalez, Kono and Mark Lopez acknowledge that Dr. Williams is trying her best with the resources she has to run her California state agency and rid the neighborhood of the lead.

Unfortunately, Terry Marks say that effort is no consolation and not good enough for the thousands of people who are severely ill from the toxic poisons that have infiltrated their homes and have overtaken their communities.

The people who were firstly primarily responsible Exide DTIC and the government let them off the hook.

Why?

I don't know.

I I'm.

I ask myself that every day.

How do these people live with themselves?

If somebody else were to go someplace and commit murder, there's no question there.

They're going to get charged with murder and they're going to go to jail.

They're going to pay the consequences.

These people murdered thousands of people in this community and the surrounding communities that they contaminated at, and nobody went to jail.

The state agency that was supposed to prevent them from doing this is a state agency that's in charge of the clean up and holding them responsible.

Department of Toxic Substances Control, They held their permits.

They were the ones that Exide went to go get their permit from.

However, Exide operated for 30 years on a temporary permit, which meant that they didn't have to meet all the standards that they should if they had a permanent permit.

And they let it happen.

State has lied to us.

They've held withheld information for us.

Why did it take us to find out on accident how bad Exide was contaminating the air and the ground?

And when we asked after we found out about the air quality standards, when we asked to get our soils sampled, they said no.

They said, Oh, well, we don't do that.

And we had so many different answers from, Oh, we don't have to worry because it's in the air, but you don't have to be a rocket scientist or or a chemist to know that heavy metals in the air are heavy.

They're going to fall to the ground.

Every single year Exide was in existence.

Every year they had a violation and DTIC did not notify the public at all.

They knew how bad their contamination was and they they never notified us.

So they're just as guilty as Exide.

We would like to see them held accountable as well.

That isn't something that we forget about those.

Some of those people are still working at the state agency.

Some of those people are working at different state agencies, probably making equally terrible decisions that compromise the health of other communities like ours or our community.

So, no, we haven't lost sight of that.

Could your department, Dr. Williams, could DTC, let's say, have had better oversight of Exide, including the permitting process, the enforcement process?

It's very important context to understand that battery recycling and associated led emissions into the air began on this property in the late twenties and 1920s, 2020s, and continued without stopping until Exide shut down in 2015.

Rick Ross The law under which Dtsc regulates facilities like lead acid battery facility didn't even come into existence until the late seventies, so DTIC didn't even exist back then.

The facility emitted lead into the air for 50 years, generally with very few limits, particularly in the from the 1920s to to 1950 before laws and dtsc were in place to try to limit those emissions.

So that's important context.

Exide was a terrible actor.

They shirked their environmental protection laws.

They exposed workers and this entire communities to toxic contamination.

And then they went on to manipulate bankruptcy laws and walk away from their obligations to clean it up.

These actions revealed some deep holes in federal bankruptcy law, which failed to adequately prioritize environmental protection and polluters obligations under environmental cleanup.

And yes, it also revealed some holes in the state's regulatory processes and structures with respect to our permitting and resources for enforcement and for financial assurance mechanisms, which is why the state has implemented very important, meaningful improvements in all of that and our oversight.

I hear you.

I appreciate that.

Thank you for that answer.

And what about said Dtsc?

Did your department, Dr. Williams, sufficiently sufficiently notify residents about the toxicity of the Exide plant over the years?

Over the years you mentioned.

We communicated regularly with the community over the years, dating back to before 2014.

And certainly once we were aware of the impact to residential properties, we issued plenty of public notices, had public meetings knocked on doors.

We held extensive public comment periods for the development of the Removal Action Plan.

Since remediation began, we've held regular meetings with the community and community leaders to provide updates and to receive feedback.

Has there been enough, I guess you could say, accountability on the part of the city?

Sarah Gonzalez, Connell.

Mark Lopez Some of the folks I interviewed there even saying some people within your department should have responded or Dr. Williams.

Certainly under my watch and under the watch of this administration stands ready and willing to be held accountable for our decisions.

We admit when we make mistakes and we work toward process changes to prevent them from reoccurring.

We've fostered a culture of continuous improvement across the department.

We can always do our work smarter and more effectively.

And my expectation is that we carry that mindset into everything that we do.

When can we expect that this Herculean project finally, finally gets completed?

That's what the neighbors want to know.

That's what everyone's asking.

Though it took time to build all the process things and the capacity to get this work done correctly and expeditiously.

We now have the capacity to clean approximately 80 properties per month when we're in full mode and the weather cooperates.

And this is optimal.

In light of the recent limitations identified in terms of the impacts to the community.

We don't necessarily want more trucks going in and out of the community.

We really have to operate within some constraints.

So the current cleanup takes into account those kinds of impacts and parking issues.

And with the funding made available to date by the California legislature, we're on track to clean almost 6000 homes, 5942 properties by 2025.

If more funding becomes available, we'll keep going.

We'll just continue to make sure that properties get cleaned until everyone can feel safe in their homes where they live.

I'm furious.

I'm frustrated, and sometimes I'm just numb.

If I hear the word Exide or DTC, I blame them for the death of my parents and the people that I love.

In Flint, Michigan, we know that people went to jail.

We know people were fired.

There was some accountability that was taken there.

Here, no one's taking any responsibility.

It's of critical importance that the state gets this cleanup right.

And so a few things to discuss before we sign off.

For the record, I greatly respect the fact that Dr. Meredith Williams with the California Department of Toxic Substances Control DTC, agreed to the interview.

This is obviously a very complicated and very controversial story with a lot of history and with emotions running high.

Anger, sadness, frustration.

It's been a tough decade for the many folks involved with the lead contamination for the victims, certainly, as well as some of the folks like Dr. Williams who are trying to remedy this tragic situation as they are met with roadblocks and many roadblocks.

Truth be told, from the state of California and others, and for years, DTC and Dr. Williams have been blamed for a lot of the collateral damage from the Exide led contamination.

Some of the blame was definitely deserved.

Some not so have a lot of respect for people who answer my tough questions on this broadcast and do not run away from the camera, which Dr. Williams did not do.

She met the challenge, which is a lot different from many California state officials who I contact on controversial stories, whether with the governor's office, state Senate office, Los Angeles County officials, L.A. city officials who for the most part have been silent about this story, about this tragedy.

And these folks.

Yeah, they know who they are.

And if you're a fan of this broadcast and follow our investigative reports, you know, many officials definitely run from the camera and refuse my requests for an interview so they don't have to answer tough questions about the issues that affect all of you, whether about crime, homelessness, the economy, bad public policy, what have you.

Some officials, not all.

Some here in the state of California, and especially with the city of Los Angeles, they have a bad habit of only agreeing to interviews with, quote unquote, friendly reporters, so to speak.

And they shy away from reporters who challenge their narrative, challenge their status quo, reporters who ask tough questions.

So, again, thank you, Dr. Meredith Williams, for allowing me to challenge you and for not running away from this tragic lead contamination, lead poisoning case.

We're going to follow this case until this is resolved.

Now, a final message to our viewers, something I'm also relaying in part from the East L.A. neighbors who are the victims here?

How ironic that the largest lead contamination case in the United States is in Los Angeles, Southern California, home to ground zero for environmentalists, climate scientists, environmental causes, liberal Hollywood, progressive Democrat politicians, the same people who constantly talk about saving the environment and climate change and the existential threat and how we must have clean air and water at any cost.

Yet where are all these liberals?

Two Los Angeles leaders, state politicians, the liberal California governor, the liberal agencies and the organizations who have run from this story?

Because these are the same people who constantly are shouting out to the world that we must be environmentally friendly, we must take environmental issues seriously.

Where is the outrage here?

The hypocrisy from some of the progressives and liberals in the state of California, where this case is concerned speaks volumes.

Their silence speaks volumes.

The victims of East L.A. deserve better.

Now, for more information about our program, just click on Cox dot org and then click Contact us to send us your questions, your comments, or even your story ideas so we can hear from you or you can contact me at David.

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David is our news on YouTube.

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You know, I'll get back with you and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS.

Thanks so much for joining us.

I'm David Huizar.

For decades, I've taught you everything I know how to safely build a fire, how to control the flames in the classroom, and what to do with hot coals, how to secure your change.

No sparks.

But I can only teach wildfire prevention.

Only you can prevent wildfires.