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For years, Terry Gonzalez-Cano encouraged her children to get outside and play in the dirt. “I grew up doing everything outside, and I encouraged my kids to do the same thing. We played in the backyard, we gardened,” she said. “I thought I was being a good mother by forcing them to spend time outside.”
Gonzalez-Cano, 48, didn’t know that, for decades, the Exide lead battery recycling plant in the neighboring Los Angeles-area city of Vernon had blanketed blue-collar Latino communities with layer after layer of lead and cancer-causing arsenic.
In June 2015, the soil on her property in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights was tested for lead by the California department of toxic substances control. Gonzalez-Cano said the results had come back in April 2016, 10 months after her property had been tested: her home had more than double the 80 parts per million (ppm) that California deems acceptable. At her father’s home a block away, where she and her brother spent countless hours playing in the backyard when they were children, the number averaged over 800ppm. One neighbor’s soil tested so high that it surpassed the 1,000ppm required to qualify as toxic waste.
“When I found out, I couldn’t breathe,” said Gonzalez-Cano. “I felt like I was the worst mother in the world. I felt that I had killed my children.”
Sitting next to her on the couch at her home recently, her brother Jose Gonzalez emptied a plastic bag full of bracelets from his dozens of trips to the hospital for sinus cancer on to the floor. “Here’s Exide’s legacy,” he said. “I thought I was staying fit when I used to play football in the mud. I didn’t know it, but I was poisoning myself.”
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
Gonzalez-Cano, 48, didn’t know that, for decades, the Exide lead battery recycling plant in the neighboring Los Angeles-area city of Vernon had blanketed blue-collar Latino communities with layer after layer of lead and cancer-causing arsenic.
In June 2015, the soil on her property in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights was tested for lead by the California department of toxic substances control. Gonzalez-Cano said the results had come back in April 2016, 10 months after her property had been tested: her home had more than double the 80 parts per million (ppm) that California deems acceptable. At her father’s home a block away, where she and her brother spent countless hours playing in the backyard when they were children, the number averaged over 800ppm. One neighbor’s soil tested so high that it surpassed the 1,000ppm required to qualify as toxic waste.
“When I found out, I couldn’t breathe,” said Gonzalez-Cano. “I felt like I was the worst mother in the world. I felt that I had killed my children.”
Sitting next to her on the couch at her home recently, her brother Jose Gonzalez emptied a plastic bag full of bracelets from his dozens of trips to the hospital for sinus cancer on to the floor. “Here’s Exide’s legacy,” he said. “I thought I was staying fit when I used to play football in the mud. I didn’t know it, but I was poisoning myself.”
Read more here. (The Guardian UK)
