LOS ANGELES — Piles of scrap metal stacked high next door to Jordan High School in Watts have been the norm for decades, but senior Genesis Cruz says she stopped noticing the loud noise, dust and odors over time. “I was pretty much just used to this like all my years and then last fall, was like, oh my God, this is not good.”
The high school was established in 1923 and a metal recycling plant called Atlas Iron & Metal Company opened up next door in 1949. But over the past few years, community members and school officials started expressing concern about a potential connection between toxic lead contamination at the school and the scrap metal piles next door. “When I began to think about what lead does to the body, I began to think, I have been at Jordan for…it’s going to be four years already,” she said. “I am concerned for my health.”
Lead concentrations were found 75 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s hazardous threshold, according to testing commissioned by the Los Angeles Unified School District. Carlos Torres, with LAUSD’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety, said, “We’ve cleaned our softball field a number of times, due to contamination. That contamination could be coming either from storm runoff or very well just from storm particulates in the air,” he said. “We know there is contamination. We’ve had to have clean-ups that had oversight by the Department of Toxic Substances Control.”
Torres says the school district filed a lawsuit against Atlas Metal in 2020, alleging the company is responsible for the contamination, toxic emissions and metal projectiles that have landed on campus and the legal action is still ongoing. Atlas Metal did not respond to Spectrum News 1’s request for an interview.
However, the company has made efforts to prevent metal objects and dust from impacting the school, by setting up a net and barrier using shipping containers, according to Torres, but he says it’s not enough. “I understand this is someone’s private property, but I think they should be held accountable,” he said. “I think the agencies, whether they are the state or local agencies, they need to do their enforcement actions.” The City of LA also filed a civil lawsuit against Atlas Metal, claiming it violated California’s public nuisance law and health and safety codes.
The Environmental Protection Agency told Spectrum News 1 that the “EPA has an investigation underway regarding potential risks from Atlas Iron & Metal Co. operations to the surrounding watts community. EPA has conducted inspections of the atlas facility pursuant to the clean water act and the resource conservation and recovery act and we continue to coordinate our efforts with CalEPA.”
Advocates for environmental justice, including Tim Watkins with the Watts Labor Community Action Committee and Coalition for Healthy Families, say disenfranchised areas don’t often have a voice or political power to fix environmental problems. “This is unheard of, in my opinion, in places like Torrance, Rolling Hills, Ladera Heights, Palos Verdes,” he said. “You go to affluent communities and before it even becomes a community concern, the legislative bodies take action and resist fracking and resist these kinds of operations that would threaten the integrity of either the peace or the environmental condition in those places.”
Lead contamination is especially worrisome in a community such as Watts, which already faces other hazards, says Danielle Hoague, who is researching environmental and health inequities in the area through the Better Watts Initiative. “There is no safe amount of lead for the human body and there is especially no safe amount of lead for children,” she said. “So when you find any amount of lead, especially at a place like a high school, it is something that is deeply concerning,” she said.
It’s concerning enough that Cruz started advocated for environmental justice at the school and plans to pursue a career in law, hoping to work in her hometown of Watts one day. “So I can still come back to my community and advocate for my community and not just leave and forget,” she said.