Indiana Neighborhood Destroyed By Lead Poisoning (WITH VIDEO)

Workers putting mulch around contaminated soil at West Calumet (image courtesy Environmental Protection Agency, part of public domain)
Workers putting mulch around contaminated soil at West Calumet (image courtesy Environmental Protection Agency, part of public domain)

By now, you’ve heard about the horrific tragedy playing out in Flint, Michigan. The city may take years to recover after thousands of its children were sickened by lead-tainted water. Well, a similar horror is playing out in East Chicago, Indiana. The soil at a housing complex is so contaminated with toxic levels of lead and arsenic that the city has ordered it leveled.

In late July, residents of the West Calumet Housing Complex got an unpleasant surprise on their doors. The federal Environmental Protection Agency notified them that samples of the soil around their homes contained staggering levels of lead–in some cases, 30 times the limit that is safe for children. Soil tests also found toxic levels of arsenic as well. A few days later, Mayor Anthony Copeland announced that West Calumet’s residents would be relocated, and the complex and a nearby school would be demolished.

Watch The Young Turks’ coverage of this tragedy here.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSpk99bLYITfOjUr3SL73G4UgTt5QyPC

It turns out that West Calumet residents have been complaining about their kids having to deal with mysterious illnesses and developmental problems as early as 2004. However, East Chicago city attorney Carla Morgan told Think Progress that city officials didn’t know how severe the problem was until this spring. In May, officials from the EPA and Department of Housing and Urban Development revealed that West Calumet’s soil had lead levels of over 91,000 parts per million–more than 200 times the legal limit.

The EPA offered to remove the contaminated soil. However, Copeland thought it would merely aggravate the problem, and decided the safest way forward would be to raze the complex to the ground. However, it took another three months to secure housing vouchers for West Calumet’s 1,100 residents.

It turns out that the problem dates back to the 1920s, when Anaconda Lead Products opened a lead smelter a few blocks north of U. S. Steel’s giant lead smelter. Anaconda closed in 1936, and West Calumet was built on top of the former site in 1972. U. S. Steel shuttered its smelter in 1985, prompting Indiana officials to test soil in nearby areas. Six of the sample sites on Anaconda’s former property had lead levels of over 11,000 ppm.

Thomas Frank of the Dunelands Environmental Justice Alliance noted that as early as 1995, the former U. S. Lead site was enclosed in a Corrective Action Management Unit (CAMU), a lined mound of dirt to contain the lead. He thinks that around that time, someone should have at least asked if there was “something wrong” at West Calumet. Despite this, it took more than a decade and a half of lobbying for the entire Calumet neighborhood–including the West Calumet complex–to be deemed a Superfund site in 2009.

City officials say that the EPA never investigated beyond the nine sites it tested in 2009. However, Robert Kaplan, the acting EPA regional administrator for the Great Lakes, told The New York Times that it didn’t know “exactly where” the contamination was until May, in part because of concerns about the quality of the data they’d acquired. Before then, while tests over the years revealed some “hot spots,” they also revealed that for the most part, the lead levels didn’t raise red flags. Once they knew about it, however, Kaplan said that “our first priority” was keeping residents safe. Since then, the EPA has been covering bare soil with mulch, and warning residents not to play around it.

With all due respect, this should have happened in 2009, when the entire neighborhood was declared a Superfund site. You can make a pretty good argument that as early as 1985, someone in Indianapolis should have let city officials know that West Calumet was sitting on the equivalent of a time bomb. And if Frank is to be believed, at the earliest something should have been done in 1995.

Regardless of who is responsible and why nothing was done, a lot of people have some explaining to do. And a lot of people need to be fired.

Darrell is a 30-something graduate of the University of North Carolina who considers himself a journalist of the old school. An attempt to turn him into a member of the religious right in college only succeeded in turning him into the religious right's worst nightmare--a charismatic Christian who is an unapologetic liberal. His desire to stand up for those who have been scared into silence only increased when he survived an abusive three-year marriage. You may know him on Daily Kos as Christian Dem in NC. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook. Click here to buy Darrell a Mello Yello.