Terry Gonzalez-Cano thought she was doing the right thing as a mother by insisting her children play outdoors when they were younger, rather than spend all their time glued to the television set inside.
Instead, the Los Angeles resident now wrestles with guilt. She had no idea at the time, she said, that her Boyle Heights neighborhood had been contaminated with lead and other dangerous pollutants produced by the former Exide Technologies battery recycling plant less than two miles away in Vernon. So she and other parents took their then-young children to the park, where they would play, unknowingly, among contaminated soil.
“I know it’s not my fault, but as a mom, you take everything as your fault, and that tears me up — that I feel in some way that I was responsible for my kids getting sick – because I wanted them to play,” she said of her children, now ages 32 and 18.
About eight years after Exide shuttered its facility, federal and state lawmakers representing the L.A. area gathered in Boyle Heights on Friday, June 9, to visit a home undergoing remediation. They called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to designate the affected area a Superfund site – a move that would trigger the flow of federal dollars and additional assistance to help with cleanup efforts.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, from the San Fernando Valley, said during a press conference that elected officials also are calling on the EPA to “hurry up,” noting that the families in this mainly Latino working-class neighborhood have waited far too long for justice.
He and other elected officials blamed the Trump administration. In 2020, a federal judge allowed Exide, after the company filed for bankruptcy, to abandon its Vernon facility and walk away without making good on a previous agreement the company had reached with the U.S. Department of Justice during the Obama administration to pay to clean up neighboring homes. That left California taxpayers to foot the bill for the…
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