Company cited for lead in tainted NWI areas
Places in Whiting, Hammond see over twice legal limit
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency digs lead-contaminated soil out of dozens of yards in Hammond and Whiting, authorities recently discovered the Northwest Indiana cities are being polluted again by a factory releasing alarming concentrations of the braindamaging metal into the air.
Citing three months of air quality testing near Whiting Metals, the EPA and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management accused the company on Thursday of repeatedly violating federal health standards.
Monitors installed just north of the company’s facility at 2230 Indianapolis Blvd. found that average lead levels in the air between August and October were more than twice the legal limit of 0.15 parts per billion. On several days when winds blew pollution from the factory toward the monitoring equipment, lead concentrations spiked up to 1,200 times higher.
The crackdown on Whiting Metals comes less than a year after Indiana officials renewed the company’s air pollution permit, despite objections from neighbors and the former regional director of the state’s environmental agency. Company officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
At the same time Indiana gave the company permission to emit more lead into the air, federal officials were discovering that surrounding neighborhoods already were contaminated with high levels of the toxic metal deposited by the original occupant of the Whiting Metals site.
Soil samples collected by the EPA during late 2017 identified more than two dozen contaminated yards in Hammond and Whiting. The agency has since excavated tainted soil from 25 properties where lead levels were at least three times the federal limit.
Results are still being analyzed for another 229 properties sampled after the federal agency held a public forum in May.
EPA scientists traced the contamination to Federated Metals, a smelter that operated at the Indianapolis Boulevard site from 1937 to 1983. The history of Federated Metals appears to have been all but forgotten until 2016, when career employees at the EPA’s Chicago office began digging through files on polluted sites in northwest Indiana that either haven’t been cleaned up or weren’t scoured thoroughly enough years ago.
While federal and state officials oversaw a cleanup of the Federated Metals site during the 1980s, they did not test surrounding neighborhoods. The situation is eerily similar to the leadcontamination crisis still unfolding in nearby East Chicago, where authorities failed for decades to test residential areas near other smelters that were abandoned long ago.
Lead is unsafe at any level, according to the EPA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ingesting tiny concentrations can perma- nently damage the developing brains of children and contribute to heart disease, kidney failure and other health problems later in life. In March, a peer-reviewed study estimated that more than 400,000 deaths a year in the U.S. are linked to lead exposure — or 18 percent of all deaths.
David Dabertin, a Hammond attorney and former regional director of the Indiana environmental agency, confronted Gov. Eric Holcomb in April and asked why federal and state officials have allowed other lead-processing companies to operate on the Federated Metals site in Whiting.
“You are telling these people there is lead in their backyard, but (the state environmental agency) just permitted that facility to produce lead,” Dabertin says to Holcomb in a Facebook video. “That’s a disconnect.”
Holcomb nodded toward Whiting Metals and promised Dabertin he would look into the matter. Four months later, air monitors went up next to the site.