For decades, East Palo Alto community organizers have had every reason to focus their activism on a contaminated site owned by Romic Environmental Technologies Corp., pushing the company to clean up its act.
Violations and accidents peppered its decades of operations. In 2006, the plant released a mist of 4,000 gallons of toxic solvents into the surrounding neighborhood and locals had to seek shelter, prompting a state investigation that resulted in the facility shuttering in 2008. Local advocates are still fighting to clean up the contaminated property.
But a new tool is leading organizers to consider refocusing their advocacy to another dangerous site that had escaped their attention for years.
The tool assesses the community’s toxic sites using state and national agency data, then scores them based on factors like their proximity to homes and what contaminants they contain. To community advocates’ surprise, the tool gave five other sites in the area higher hazard scores than the Romic site. Now activists are refocusing their efforts on the worst of those, a former pesticide manufacturing plant. It’s likely that the soil under the building has quietly been exposing nearby residents to harmful toxins since the facility ceased operations in 1971.
Read also: Sea Level Rise in S.F. Will Affect More Than the Waterfront
There are high stakes to how local groups direct their precious attention and resources, said Shirletha Boxx-Holmes, a community organizer and policy advocate with the environmental justice organization Greenaction.
“You’re talking about people’s lives when you’re making these decisions,” Boxx-Holmes said.
The new tool could also help other communities, where advocacy groups might lack the resources to analyze mountains of haphazardly organized government records.
Polluted sites inundate neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area, said Phoenix Armenta, senior manager for climate equity and community engagement at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, a regional agency that develops shoreline land-use policy.
“It’s hard to think of any environmental justice community that doesn’t have this problem,” Armenta said, referring to neighborhoods overburdened with pollution. In the Bay Area and nationwide, those communities are disproportionately low-income and home to people of color.
Revealing hidden threats
The City of East Palo Alto fits those criteria. The median household income was $71,075 last year, less than half of San Mateo County’s $151,485 median, according to U.S. Census data. The generally working-class population is 66% Latino, with white, Black and Pacific Islander residents making up the next-largest groups. The city’s 62-year average life expectancy is 13 years less than the county average, the city’s 2017 general plan found.
The prioritization tool clocked the former pesticide plant at a hazard score of 12.5 — highest of the sites surveyed and greater than the Romic site’s 12.1. The facility, previously owned by the French chemical and pharmaceutical company Rhone-Poulenc, had polluted the soil with toxic chemicals that included arsenic, DDT, insecticides, pesticides, herbicides and fumigants, federal and state records show. Long-term exposure to those substances can lead to a litany of illnesses, including cancers, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease and compromised brain development in children.
The Rhone-Poulenc site was among 26 that the tool gave high threat scores. But for many reasons, it stood out as the best target for environmental activism.
Sign up for our free weekly newsletter for local journalism on environmental issues.
Perhaps most important, there are reasons to think the site is exposing the nearby community to harmful chemicals, said Cade Cannedy, program director at the environmental justice organization Climate Resilient Communities. It floods during storms and, because it’s on the shoreline, is vulnerable to sea level and groundwater rise. That water infiltration can spread toxins.
It’s also next to a business district that draws visitors, and advocates worry about the cumulative exposure they might face. The property’s owner is interested in turning it into a mixed-use development, which could drive even more foot traffic. Many of the locals frequenting the area are children, whose smaller bodies make them more vulnerable than adults to toxic poisoning. A youth arts center was recently built across the street. Two elementary schools and a high school are within a few blocks.
And the site is at a phase of its ongoing cleanup during which officials are likely to convene public meetings about it, giving advocates opportunities to influence remediation. Other sites the tool surfaced, though concerning, weren’t at similar phases, so they would have been harder to affect.
Now that Cannedy and his peers know the Rhone-Poulenc site could be dangerous, they are taking a closer look. A group of local organizations is applying for state funding to pay for further analysis, which could clarify the exposure local people face and how to treat the area, Cannedy said.
Other local community groups also are considering the tool’s findings. Youth United for Community Action, which has organized against the Romic site for decades, will incorporate the information into its organizing plans at its next youth summit, said Ofelia Bello, the nonprofit’s executive director.
Problems with assessing by hand
Environmental justice communities are used to being overlooked, with a dearth of quality research and official documentation of the pollution burdening residents. Though there are copious government records about toxic sites, they can be incomplete and disorganized. That’s why communities and groups across the Bay Area have resorted to tracking hazards themselves. The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project started collecting its own data on that neighborhood’s polluted air because no one else was, said Margaret Gordon, the nonprofit’s executive director.
People frequently get exposed to toxic substances without their knowledge, Armenta said.
That has been the norm in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, where toxic sites are inconsistently labeled, often with small signs that are easy to miss, said Arieann Harrison, founder and executive director of the Marie Harrison Community Foundation, named after Arieann’s late mother, a dogged environmental justice activist.
Up to now, the Rhone-Poulenc plant’s danger wasn’t easily detectable either.
“It’s kind of unassuming,” said Cannedy. “It looks like a couple of warehouses and a concrete parking lot.”
Unlike the Romic site, it lacked an extensive history of labor violations and visible pollution. It blended in with 427 other toxic sites, in a five-square-mile area encompassing East Palo Alto, Belle Haven and North Fair Oaks, according to the organization’s recent count.
With thousands of government records tied to those sites — too many to review by hand — environmental justice advocates long struggled to get a full picture of the area’s pollution. That made it difficult to triage local activism, Armenta said.
Tool enables comprehensive review
The new prioritization tool cut through the chaos. It systematically analyzed site data, making it finally possible for the team to evaluate and compare all potential threats.
Preparing the analysis by cataloging the area’s many sites took about two months, said Cannedy, whose organization created the tool with consulting help from engineering company Arcadis. Because three government agencies oversee cleanups, records were scattered across databases in a variety of formats.
The team programmed the tool’s 13 risk factors with input from subject-matter experts and local residents. One factor, for example, was a site’s proximity to others — UC Berkeley associate professor Kristina Hill, a scholar on environmental factors affecting toxic sites, advised the tool’s creators that this could heighten the risk of contaminants mixing and reacting with one another. And after hearing residents’ concerns about site proximity to schools and homes, the team weighted those factors more heavily.
Limits of government data
The tool is far from a silver bullet. At times organizations might want to tackle relatively simple cleanups that would take little time. The tool wouldn’t help with that, said Sarah Atkinson, hazard resilience senior policy manager at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, the nonprofit think tank commonly known as SPUR.
Moreover, there is information that the tool would not capture, said Bradley Angel, Greenaction’s executive director. The tool scrapes government data, which is often missing information and sometimes missing entire toxic sites. Tapping community knowledge and observations is still critical, he said.
Consider the falsified soil tests at the radioactive Bayview-Hunters Point Shipyard, he said. Were it not for a whistleblower and persistent local activism, no one would have known the test results were false, he said. In another example, heavy storms regularly overwhelmed Marin City’s sewer system and pushed raw sewage up into the street, community organizers told Angel. But that contamination was never documented in a regulatory agency’s database.
“If we left it up to the government, we’d miss stuff,” Angel said.
