I’ve got lead in the brain.
That’s what they say.
We all live out here we got lead in the brain.
More than 1,000 people in East Chicago, Indiana,
are scrambling to find new homes.
Their entire neighborhood is contaminated
with lead and arsenic.
First, high lead levels in the soil, and now
in the water.
Residents in East Chicago
can’t seem to catch a break.
I moved here in May.
And June came and EPA came in
and informed all the residents that the soil
and the water
were highly contaminated with lead and arsenic.
I spend at least three to four hundred dollars a month
in water purchases from the store.
I use the water that I buy for everything,
for cooking, for bathing, for everything.
When the Flint, Michigan situation happened
I was buying cases and cases of water to take
to my daughter’s school
so that it could be donated to Flint.
It’s like deja-vu.
When I moved here in May,
no one told me about
the lead and the arsenic contamination.
If I had have known
I would never have moved over here.
They didn’t disclose that.
And yet, they called me for this apartment
to move over here.
Why do that?
If you knew that this area was highly contaminated?
I’ve been living in East Chicago, West Calumet area,
all my life.
This is where I was born and raised right here.
Our house used to be right there.
I love Calumet, I have Calumet in my heart
and everybody that knows me knows that.
Everybody get along, you don’t see too many
communities like our community.
It doesn’t even look like a housing complex,
you know, as they call it, a “project.”
It looks like a subdivision.
We have refinery companies right around us,
we surrounded by lead plants, USS Lead, Dupont,
Anaconda, Eagle Picher.
We never knew the harm that the lead
would cause people.
All our families worked at these places.
That’s the way we looked at it, you know,
is putting food on the table.
East Chicago is a low-income community of color
that has disproportionately been exposed
to environmental harm.
The West Calumet Housing Complex was built
on top of a former lead smelter that had not
been properly cleaned up.
That’s public housing.
Officials knew about this contamination
as early as 1985
when the last lead smelter closed.
Nothing happened at the site until 2009
when the site was finally listed under Superfund
which is a federal law that provides for the cleanup of
the most contaminated sites in the country.
And it really wasn’t until it began undertaking
more serious testing between 2014 and 2016
that EPA realized
just how contaminated the soil was.
It discovered that there were properties that
were hundreds of times greater than the level
that it would normally use
as an action level for cleanup.
Hold your hands over there.
Here you are.
They sent everybody letters
and told us where they were moving us to.
I have an account with
every apartment website that you could think of.
When I find apartments I call
and it’s always the same thing.
They don’t accept Section 8.
You know I know I can’t stay here,
and who would want to stay here with
everything that’s going on now?
But the only thing that I’m asking is,
allow me to find somewhere to go one,
and allow my kids to finish school.
I am afraid that I’m going to be evicted.
They want everybody out.
East Chicago, unfortunately, is a representation
of a number of communities across the country.
We would never allow these types of situations
to happen in Beverly Hills.
We should use examples like Flint,
and examples like East Chicago,
as something that never will happen again.
We should make sure that planners are thinking
more strategically about where we place things
and whose lives might be impacted by that.
We have to make sure that we are truly valuing
the lives of communities of color
and low-income communities.
Because their lives matter
and their futures matter.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency
visits East Chicago where people have been
living on toxic land for decades.
We are here because 90 percent of the homes
in East Chicago have lead-contaminated water.
That’s right.
We are here because thousands of families’
lives are at risk.
We stand, we fight!
Water is a human right!
We’re going to be outside those doors,
media, podium.
The podium’s this way.
There are 1,322 Superfund sites across the country.
This is my first visit to a Superfund site in East Chicago.
And the reason I’m here is because
it’s important that we restore confidence to the
people here in this community.
Please know, that it’s the EPA’s objective,
my objective as Administrator of the EPA,
to come in and make sure that people’s health
is protected here in East Chicago.
We’re committed to doing that, doing it
in a very efficient and effective way,
so that we can get back
and see progress in this community.
Thank you for the time and Governor again,
thank you for bringing this team together.
Mr. Pruitt will you take some questions?
Will you take some questions?
I’m absolutely exhausted.
It’s on my mind every day what I have had to endure.
You know, I want a normal life for my kids,
this is, this hasn’t been normal.
It used to be my home.
Now, you know, I just
I feel trapped.
It happened in Flint, what, last year?
And now it’s here?
Where’s it going to now?
And it has to all do with poor black people.
I want my home back, I want my surroundings back,
I want my neighborhood back.
I want the people from my neighborhood to stay.
But we know that won’t happen.
But it sure would be nice if they could.