Facing toxic lead contamination, a California barrio continues its long struggle for justice

Table Of Content

• Beer Fest Request
• How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil
• Grist House Review – A Wide Array of Beer Styles in Millvale
• Lawn equipment spews ‘shocking’ amount of air pollution, new data shows
• Levity Brewing Review – Beer, Food, & Trail Access in Indiana, PA
• How the legacy of former industrial sites pollutes American cities today
• Even Texas and Wyoming do a better job protecting communities from oil and gas drilling.

To the south is Atlas Iron and Metal, a 72-year-old industrial site that is now part of the federal Superfund program to clean up sites of large-scale hazardous contamination. There, 25-foot mounds of shredded metals tower over a wall shared with the local public high school, and sharp metal scraps are known to rain down on students. A nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.

Grist House craft brewery to expand into South Hills - PGH City Paper

Grist House craft brewery to expand into South Hills.

Posted: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Beer Fest Request

More than 3,400 onshore wells have been drilled in the field since oil was first discovered there in 1932; today, the site pumps out 46,000 barrels per day from 1,550 active wells. Wilmington is also home to more than 50,000 residents, more than 90 percent of whom are people of color. Due to the impact of the oil and gas drilling and refining, census tracts in Wilmington are exposed to more pollution than 80 to 90 percent of the state of California. Meanwhile, predominantly white Palos Verdes — some 12 miles west of Wilmington, on the other side of Interstate 110 — is exposed to less pollution than 85 percent of the state. The soil samples were collected in public spaces such as sidewalks and parks, community gardens, and residential yards with verbal consent from the occupant.

Stay Toasty at the Grist House Fire Fest! - Made In PGH - Made in PGH

Stay Toasty at the Grist House Fire Fest! - Made In PGH.

Posted: Fri, 09 Dec 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]

How to investigate toxic lead lurking in your community’s soil

The private backing of the redevelopment project is at the root of this concern. In partnership with the BRIDGE Housing Corporation and The Michaels Organization, the city of Los Angeles first embarked on the billion-dollar plan to redevelop the 700-unit public housing complex into a 1,400-unit “mixed-income” community in 2008. Since 2017, the partners have received more than $70 million in grants from the state and federal agencies such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, plus more than $100 million in loans from major banks. The project, which first broke ground in 2018, is transforming a majority of the publicly-owned and subsidized housing into housing that is privately-owned — but still publicly subsidized. The area’s poverty rate has ballooned to 2.5 times higher than the national average, and life expectancy is 10 years shorter than it is in the affluent enclaves of West LA. On top of all that, no other place in California suffers more cumulative environmental burdens, according to the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

Grist House Review – A Wide Array of Beer Styles in Millvale

The wells are loud and emit noxious odors — sometimes the smells evoke rotten eggs, she explained, other times they’re sickly sweet. “A lot of our experiences on the front line are a physical attack on our body,” said Hernandez. The Logan that Andrade sees today is not the Logan that he or his sister, Cecelia Andrade Rodriguez, remember from childhood. Andrade Rodriguez, now 71, lives nearby in the city of Garden Grove but still helps organize the annual Logan reunion. At 42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which her doctor told her was likely due to environmental causes.

Now, in a throwback to the sort of massive public-works projects built during his father’s governorship, Brown envisions a bold, silver-bullet solution to the state’s water crisis. He recently unveiled a $15 billion plan to construct two 40-foot-wide tunnels that could carry 67,000 gallons of water per second from the Sacramento River to the Central Valley. The tunnels would completely bypass the ecologically sensitive Delta, eliminating much of the smelt-endangering pumping — and, by extension, many of the restrictions on Delta water diversions that have crimped the Resnicks’ supply. If you’ve watched Chinatown or read Cadillac Desert, you know something about California’s complicated and often corrupt 100-year-old fight over water rights. The state’s laws were designed to settle the frontier, and under the “first in time, first in right” rule, the most “senior” water claims are the last to be restricted in times of drought.

Levity Brewing Review – Beer, Food, & Trail Access in Indiana, PA

Sam Romero said the proposed road extension opened residents’ eyes to just how little regard the city had for the neighborhood. Santa Ana planning commission records show that the commissioners were strategically approving and denying zone changes that placed a heavier industrial burden on eastside barrios that were near the downtown central core. In 1929, records show that the commission was pressured by the Santa Fe Railroad and Richfield Oil companies to consider zoning a portion of the Logan barrio for heavy industrial use.

How the legacy of former industrial sites pollutes American cities today

Early oil development in Los Angeles was “incredibly chaotic, very dangerous, very destructive,” said Elkind. Oil fires, explosions, and hot oil gushing from the earth onto residential property were not uncommon. As the dangers of oil development became more apparent, public opposition to drilling in dense urban areas grew. In response to the war, the federal government put pressure on Los Angeles to permit drilling throughout the city.

Company

The clinics have a full-time, bilingual doctor, health coaches, and prescription medications — all free of charge. “There are all sorts of costs related to poor health,” Stewart Resnick said at the Aspen Institute in July. “My hope is that this really doesn’t become a charity, but rather works, and that we will get a payback” — both in terms of productivity and reduced health care costs. The chef in the employee cafeteria made us adobo-chicken lettuce wraps — part of a healthy menu intended to combat diabetes and obesity. The company’s new, far-reaching health initiative also includes free exercise classes in the employee gym, a weekly on-site farmers market, and a program that pays people up to $2,700 a year to lose weight and keep it off. Since the program began in January 2015, the Wonderful workforce has shed 4,000 pounds.

Even Texas and Wyoming do a better job protecting communities from oil and gas drilling.

Nevertheless, the barrios were essentially abandoned in terms of urban development, she noted. Landmarks may be lost over time, and memories can fade, but for people like Andrade, whose family history is intertwined with protecting the barrio, the battle scars remain. The few, dedicated families of Logan who persisted are a story of a people who paid the cost of modernization while being segregated from the very progress that Santa Ana hoped to achieve.

The idea is that if enough homeowners construct tiny houses in their backyards, it could increase supply in neighborhoods dominated by single-family homes. The concept is particularly appealing in increasingly expensive, lower-density cities like Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles. “History shows us that when a housing project gets ‘revitalized,’ it’s never for the community that has called it home for generations,” said Timothy Watkins, a neighborhood resident of 50 years and the president of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee.

They moved to New York for some time to work on their documentary, and eventually broke up. Smith moved to Los Angeles, intermittently transporting the tiny house around rural properties in Colorado and Montana. The cost and ordeal of moving it became too onerous, and he eventually sold it in 2020. But the rise of Airbnb offered a “guaranteed business model” for people who wanted to make a tiny house into a legitimately profitable investment, said Zach Milburn, a real estate developer. In 2005, when the sustainable-housing developer and writer Lloyd Alter first laid eyes on a sleek, solar- and wind-powered tiny house on wheels, designed by the architect Andy Thomson, he fell completely in love with it.

This means some farmers are still able to flood their fields to grow cattle feed, even as residents of towns such as Okieville and East Porterville have to truck in water and shower using buckets. Such an incredible stockpiling of the state’s most precious natural resource might have attracted more criticism were it not for the Resnicks’ progressive bona fides. They’ve spent $15 million on the 2,500 residents of Lost Hills — roughly 600 of whom work for the couple — funding everything from sidewalks, parks, and playing fields to affordable housing, a preschool, and a health clinic. Many states and municipalities offer rebates on battery-powered lawn equipment, and more people are making the switch. That’s true even in the commercial lawn-care sector, which is responsible for the bulk of emissions but is more difficult to electrify because companies often need more powerful machines, with longer runtimes, than residential users. Mueller and Smith didn’t live in the tiny house they built together for more than a couple of months.