San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
LAX ON LEAD
Many indoor gun ranges have exposed workers and the public to toxic lead. California has failed to keep them in check.
In June 2017, California health and safety officials acting on a tip from a concerned parent called up the Facebook page of a gun range in Grass Valley (Nevada County) operated by a local Boy Scout leader.
They found photos of about a dozen boys, some as young as 11, garbed in various pieces of illfitting protective equipment and inadequate masks, sifting through mounds of sand to dig out bits of spent ammunition: fragments of toxic lead left from rounds fired by patrons. Some Scouts’ uncovered shoes were immersed in the contaminated sand. Only specially trained and outfitted adult workers are allowed to do this job, according to state and federal laws.
The discovery of “lead mining” at the Range, owned by Boy Scout troop leader Jerod Johnson, should have prompted immediate action by state and county health authorities, several public health experts told The Chronicle.
But records obtained through public information requests from Nevada County and the California Department of Public Health show that for two months, no action was taken. And when state health officials finally spoke with Johnson, they apparently made no attempt to identify Scouts in the photos, and didn’t inform troop parents at the time that their children had been exposed to high concentrations of lead, a neurotoxin. High enough, lead-poisoning experts told The Chronicle, that the lead could have poisoned or even killed them had their makeshift personal protective equipment failed.
Johnson confirmed that his troop had done this numerous times, and said he’d used the proceeds from recycling the lead — tens of thousands of dollars — to pay for troop activities.
Still, Nevada County, in consultation with CDPH, waited six months to send a letter to
Scouts’ parents, and did so only after allowing Johnson to change the letter so it downplayed the need for medical attention, records show. The delay meant a crucial two-month window to effectively test the youngsters’ blood for lead poisoning had passed. The effects of lead can last for a lifetime, but signs of its presence in blood tests dissipate substantially over time.
Ultimately, Johnson was ordered by Nevada County officials and the state to “cease and desist” using children in leadmining operations and to clean up excessive lead that state health department inspectors found inside and outside the range. As recently as April 2021, however, nearly four years after the 2017 inspection, officials again found issues with the Range’s lead management and safety methods and imposed a $485 fine. Results of an April 2022 inspection prompted by a report of a lead-poisoned employee there are pending.
But Johnson was never fined or criminally charged for knowingly exposing children to lead, and his range continues to operate. Johnson remained a Scout leader until at least 2019. Boy Scouts of America did not respond to questions about whether he is still active.
The incident involving the Scouts is just one of dozens at indoor gun ranges in California where clear-cut lead hazards drew minimal response by health and safety authorities, a months-long investigation by The Chronicle and the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Health Journalism revealed.
Several public agencies are charged with overseeing the safety of the estimated 200 indoor gun ranges in California. Besides the Department of Public Health, the state’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, worker protection agency Cal/OSHA, and various county-level and regional environmental agencies regulate health hazards and their impacts on individuals and communities.
In the case of lead, such scrutiny is crucial. Lead poisoning can attack the reproductive, central nervous and cardiovascular systems in adults and harm children by eroding IQ and causing permanent developmental delay.
But gun ranges known to be exposing clients and the nearby environment to potentially harmful levels of lead have operated nearly free of meaningful regulation, documents from over a two-decade span reveal. CDPH health data shows hundreds of lead-poisoning cases tied directly to gun ranges, as well as exposure to unsafe levels of lead by hundreds of thousands of people who have visited ranges or lived near them.
Meanwhile, the public has largely been left in the dark: The Grass Valley incident, for one, would almost certainly have remained unknown to the public had it not been discovered by The Chronicle and the USC Annenberg Center through disclosures under the California Public Records Act.
Bill Allayaud, the California director of government affairs for the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization that has helped pass laws aimed at protecting Californians from lead poisoning, called the situation “untenable” and called for decisive action.
“The Legislature should hold an oversight hearing, call in the agencies that are responsible for this problem, identify the solutions, and, working with the governor, get immediate action,” Allayaud said.
BBB
The Chronicle and USC Annenberg Center investigation revealed a recurrent, yearslong pattern of problems and public health impacts involving indoor gun ranges:
Hundreds of indoor gun range employees over the past two decades have contracted lead poisoning, and at least a half-dozen minors appear to have been poisoned, often through “take-home” exposure from range workers’ clothing, court documents and state health department records show.
The health and safety agencies charged with regulating ranges routinely fail to follow through on violations and to communicate with each other, allowing unsafe conditions to persist.
While no public agency tracks lead-poisoning cases among customers of gun ranges, thousands of Californians who have patronized dangerous facilities have been exposed to potential harm. On numerous occasions, Cal/OSHA and CDPH have measured airborne lead levels inside ranges that far exceeded federal safety standards, yet allowed those ranges to continue operating.
Fines for health and safety violations are rarely assessed and are often drastically reduced.
County environmental safety agencies, to which state agencies can choose to defer, often appear either unclear on their role or lacking the expertise to deal with the potential toxic threat gun ranges pose.
In some cases, local officials have waived state-mandated environmental assessments of new ranges, exempting them from review by classifying them as recreational or entertainment facilities that pose no potential environmental issues.
There are no statewide regulations aimed directly at these facilities.
These failures are highlighted in a number of cases uncovered in our reporting:
At Jackson Arms, a South San Francisco gun range, three state agencies were aware of at least 85 lead poisoning cases among workers there between 2005 and 2018, yet the facility continued to operate. Its inadequate exhaust system spewed toxic lead dust outside the range, contaminating a creek leading to San Francisco Bay and spreading elsewhere into its neighborhood, which includes a children’s dance studio and airport hotels.
State health officials were aware of dozens of lead-poisoning cases at the Target Masters West range in Milpitas, which operated for nearly 30 years before being shut down in 2019. A faulty ventilation system spread lead dust into nearby buildings, including a children’s gymnastics center, where lead was measured at 270 micrograms per square foot in some areas, high enough to cause permanent harm. The situation inside the range, said Dr. David Teter, an expert involved in the cleanup, “was the worst thing I’ve dealt with in 30 years of this kind of work.” The cleanup took nearly three years.
In Riverside County, the Riverside Magnum Range admitted to disposing of lead waste in dumpsters and emitting lead into its working-class neighborhood. It was fined $1,000 and agreed to make repairs, and in 2013 the DTSC declared the problem fixed. Four years later, however, the state health department received numerous reports of lead-poisoned workers there. The range was fined again, but nearly five years later, the DTSC has yet to return to ensure that lead is not being emitted from the building.
The Mangan Rifle and Pistol Range, run by the city of Sacramento in a public park, operated for more than a decade after the state health department identified hazardous conditions inside and high levels of airborne lead outside. The range, which the city finally shut down in 2015, contaminated the popular neighborhood park, forcing a $1 million cleanup. In 2021, Sacramento settled a lawsuit with former instructors and the wife of an instructor, who said she had suffered a miscarriage, for more than $1.2 million.
None of the lead regulatory agencies agreed to an interview with The Chronicle, though some provided written statements. None of those responses specifically addressed oversight improvements.
Gov. Gavin Newsom was unavailable to comment, said spokesperson Daniel Lopez, who referred the inquiry to the DTSC, an agency that allowed the Exide Technologies battery recycling plant in Southern California to operate for decades, even as it contaminated thousands of nearby homes with lead. The homes are undergoing a $600 million taxpayer-funded cleanup.
A DTSC spokesperson did not address The Chronicle’s findings, but suggested that the agency recognized the concerns, saying: “The administration has made a bold commitment to comprehensive reform of DTSC, including the creation of a new governance structure and providing fiscal stability for the department.”
Cal/OSHA regulators have the most contact with problematic ranges, but the agency’s record on enforcement is inconsistent, documents show. It often imposes minimal fines to offending ranges and fails to pass along crucial information to other agencies. Current and former officials at Cal/OSHA contacted for this story acknowledged that the agency has been hamstrung by a shortage of inspectors and morale problems. A spokesperson told The Chronicle the agency was working to improve communication with other regulators and to hire more inspectors, but offered no specifics.
Amid these regulatory failures, gun ranges may be growing in popularity. In 2020 and 2021, the FBI performed 2.9 million background checks for new gun purchases in California, a 50% increase over the previous two years. These purchases almost certainly expanded the number of gun owners in the state, estimated at more than 4 million prior to the pandemic, and the number who practice shooting at ranges.
Nationally, indoor gun ranges were a nearly $4 billion business, according to a December 2020 report by the business analysis firm IBISWorld.
Yet documents show that California taxpayers are essentially subsidizing the industry, paying for millions of dollars in cleanups and underwriting an unknown amount of public health costs because most cases of elevated blood lead levels go undetected.
“There is no question we have a problem,” said a state official involved in the cleanups, whom The Chronicle agreed not to identify because they were not authorized to speak to the media. “There is no universal standard for gun ranges in California, and lead contamination sites just keep popping up.”
BBB
The debilitating and even deadly effects of lead have been known for centuries, and there have been efforts to mitigate its health impacts for almost as long.
In the past several decades, the U.S. and other nations have imposed ever-stricter lead abatement measures. The removal of lead from gasoline, which began in phases in 1976 and was completed by 1990, is considered among the public health triumphs of the 20th century. Between 1976 and 1994, the mean blood lead concentration in children dropped from 13.7 to 3.2 micrograms per deciliter, or mcg/dL. (A level of 5 mcg/dL indicates an unsafe level for children.) Some research suggests that the phaseout of lead from gasoline in the U.S. was responsible for a major decline in violent crime.
But despite these gains, lead continues to be a public health threat.
In California, despite its repeated air-quality and leadcontamination violations, the DTSC allowed the Exide battery recycling plant in Vernon (Los Angeles County) to operate with a temporary permit for 30 years. The DTSC also failed to require financial guarantees to clean up the contamination. The plant was closed by its operator in 2014 as part of a deal to avoid federal prosecution. Following the closure, DTSC discovered that Exide had contaminated more than 10,000 area homes with unsafe levels of lead. Cleanup costs will exceed $650 million, a 2020 state audi
“The Legislature should hold an oversight hearing, call in the agencies that are responsible for this problem, identify the solutions, and, working with the governor, get immediate action.”
Bill Allayaud, California director of government affairs for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group
tor report estimated.
Against this background, experts say, the lack of effective regulation of California gun ranges is perplexing at best.
Every time a gun with a lead bullet is fired, lead fragments and dust become airborne, posing a potential risk to anyone inside a gun range. A busy gun range can produce tons of lead waste in a year. If managed with a state-of-the-art ventilation system and cleaned properly, a range can operate safely.
Ventilation systems that remove lead dust through HEPA filtration systems and prevent the contaminant from escaping the building can cost about $25,000 per shooting lane. Multiple experts and organizations cite the importance of such systems, including the National Air Filtration Association. Yet California does not require them.
The Chronicle found numerous instances in which gun range owners were able to delay or reject pleas from regulators to improve their ventilation systems, allowing them to operate after faulty systems were discovered. In some cases, regulators have imposed fines on offending range operators. But documents show that fines are relatively rare and often minimal.
In 2013, the DTSC reduced an initial $119,900 fine assessed to the Riverside Magnum Range in Riverside County to $1,000, despite owners admitting to violations, including tossing lead waste into dumpsters and spreading lead into a nearby residential neighborhood. A DTSC spokesperson said the owner “received a credit” for repairing the range’s inadequate ventilation system. He added that the agency no longer reduces fines when an owner makes upgrades.
Yet problems at the Riverside range persisted. In 2017, the state health department received numerous reports of lead-poisoned workers there. In this instance, CDPH communicated with Cal/OSHA, alerting the agency in a letter: “We are referring Riverside Magnum Range to you for enforcement action due to ongoing and serious deficiencies in the employer’s lead safety and respiratory protection programs.” Cal/OSHA fined the range $25,950, but then cut the fine to $5,500.
Five years later, the DTSC has yet to return to the range to ensure that the building is not emitting lead.
In some cases, the consequences of California’s dysfunction in regulating gun ranges have been severe. Lead dust conclusively traced to gun ranges has contaminated homes, playgrounds and waterways, including, in one case, a stream that leads to San Francisco
Bay.
The range in that incident, Jackson Arms, operated at two South San Francisco locations over 30 years. At the range’s second location in a former flooring warehouse near San Francisco International Airport, chronic lead hazards lasted until owner Jason Remolona sold the building in 2018.
A review of hundreds of documents, along with interviews with former gun range employees and customers, found that CDPH and Cal/OSHA knew workers were continually becoming lead-poisoned and that the lead problem was worsened by an inadequate and dilapidated ventilation system. Meanwhile, local health officials responsible for monitoring hazardous waste in San Mateo County failed to inspect the range even once.
Cal/OSHA, which collected the most damning information about the range, declined The Chronicle’s interview request and did not answer questions about specific failures there. The worker protection agency said in an email that it was “committed to improving coordination on workplace lead exposures with local and state agencies” and that it had recently hired more industrial hygienists, who perform inspections.
The Chronicle left multiple voice mails and sent emails and text messages to Remolona, but received no response. An environmental consulting firm he hired to communicate with regulatory officials in San Mateo County also did not respond to requests to speak with him.
The problems at Jackson Arms began soon after South San Francisco’s planning department decided in 2005 that the conversion of the warehouse building to a firing range was exempt from environmental health review. Under state law, such exemptions are supposed to be allowed only if the project does not involve the “use of significant amounts of hazardous substances.”
But problems at Jackson Arms appeared quickly. That same year, CDPH traced a case of childhood lead poisoning to clothing worn home by a range worker. The child’s blood level was at least 20 mcg/dL, high enough to cause permanent brain damage and developmental delay. Following an investigation, CDPH told Remolona he must provide adequate protective work clothes and that “work clothes and shoes must remain at the range.”
Remolona responded in a fax: “I have spoken to each employee about having an extra change of clothes at work and the response was lukewarm at best.” Records reviewed by The Chronicle show that CDPH did not insist that Remolona immediately follow state regulations when it came to protecting workers.
Cal/OSHA began monitoring Jackson Arms in 2007, after receiving a referral from CDPH “due to serious concerns about adequacy of employer’s lead safety program.” The agency identified 25 hazardous conditions that needed to be corrected.
Yet on multiple occasions over the following years, air quality readings taken by Cal/ OSHA inside the range showed perilous levels of lead. On one visit, the worker protection agency found that airborne lead exceeded state and federal limits for exposure for an eighthour day in just 10 minutes.
Remolona was able to repeatedly delay taking action to address the safety issues, documents show. On multiple occasions, he told state officials he could not afford repairs on his ventilation system, once saying he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The range was allowed to continue operating without the repairs.