Lead in the water, the walls, and the soil: Takeaways from the Lead Listening Session at the East Trenton Collaborative
Recently EPA officials alongside Mayor Reed Gusciora announced that the soil for Ulysses S. Grant Intermediate School’s playground tested positive for high lead levels. Students, staff, and local community members will have an opportunity to be tested soon while the EPA cleans up the school grounds. A meeting will be held Feb 21st at 6:30 pm at Ulysses S. Grant Intermediate School for parents and other community members to ask questions about what’s next.
But this is not the first time in recent weeks people voiced their concerns about lead in our community.
In January, two dozen community members and government officials — from new County Executive Dan Benson to EPA region 2 employees – gathered in the warmth of the East Trenton Collaborative community center on North Clinton. They gathered to talk about water, specifically lead in our water.
Lead Jeapordizes Children’s Success in School
East Trenton Collaborative community coordinator, Shereyl Snider, opened the evening’s Lead Listening Session with a powerful remark: “I always believed that man had the ability to make his own decisions and he would have to live with the consequences of his own decision. But now, I know that is not true. I know that toxins can reduce brain functioning in little children.” She was referring to the historic study published in 1979 by the late -Professor Herbert L. Needleman, M.D. in the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “Deficits in Psychologic and Classroom Performance of Children with Elevated Dentine [Teeth] Lead Levels”.
“In his study, [Needleman] found that children with more lead in their bodies were more easily distracted, less independent, more easily frustrated, and struggled to sit still…they became classroom disruptors,” Snider continued.
Exposure to lead can have life-long consequences on the academic careers of Black youth. A study published in the journal American Psychologist in 2021 found that 26 percent of a sample of Black youth received at least one suspension in a three-year period, typically for minor classroom infractions. Students who were suspended had significantly lower grades for years to come than students who were not suspended. Ultimately, because of their classroom behavior, suspension records, and poor grades, Black youth were generally labeled as more aggressive than White youths, which can derail their trajectory along the academic pipeline.
To protect the future of Black youth in Trenton, Snider thus felt it was important to prioritize getting the lead out of our communities. Snider has been working on getting the lead out of Trenton since 2019 as an east Trenton community organizer after volunteering in 2018. In March 2022, the East Trenton Collaborative (ETC) was recognized as a lead-free hub. ETC is one of four lead-free hubs in the entire state of New Jersey. The center collaborates with New Jersey Future and Lead-Free NJ to get the word out about the danger of lead to Trenton community members. Together with Princeton undergraduate Amy Aririguzoh, ETC organized the listening session to learn how they can best serve the community.
Aririguzoh is in her final year at Princeton, majoring in Public Health and working on her thesis, The Intergenerational Impacts of Lead on Communities in Trenton. “Public health was always a motivation for me and [being from Trenton and] seeing the lack of medical services in Trenton – I used to always drive down Bellevue Avenue and see the Capital Health emergency room that closed – I knew I was going to do [my work] here in Trenton, it was just a matter of how.”
Old Developments Responsible for Trenton’s Current Lead Struggles
Aririguzoh helped bring in six experts to speak to community members about the state of lead in Trenton.
The first expert speaker was Johnathan Byk, an on-scene coordinator for EPA Region 2, who has worked in Trenton since 2018 when the EPA was notified of a former soldering manufacturing facility with high lead levels.
Historically, lead has been an issue in East Trenton. The neighborhood was once one of the world’s largest pottery manufacturers. According to the Potteries of Trenton, NJ Society, around 1850 there was only one pottery manufacturing facility in Trenton’s rapidly growing urban center, but by the turn of the century, close to 50 facilities were manufacturing ceramic products. Ceramic products, however, contain or are coated with lead, which can flake off over time.
In 2018, Bic led efforts to initiate a study to connect the soil lead levels to historic pottery manufacturing in East Trenton. Since the start of the study, the EPA has sampled soils at over 100 properties. The next steps for Bic’s team are to conduct an integrated assessment to determine whether lead contamination is high enough to require funding for the Superfund process (a long-term thorough clean-up of heavily contaminated sites) and reach out to coordinate with homeowners what that cleaning task will entail.
The EPA released an update on their regional soil lead-screening level to have a lower acceptable threshold of soil lead contamination. This threshold is even lower if an additional source of lead (i.e., lead water service lines and lead paint) is identified.
“I was initially interested in looking into the water because of Flint,” Aririguzoh explained. “But I spoke with a former employee of Trenton Water Works, and they told me water is an issue, but lead paint is the biggest problem.”
Getting lead paint out of Trenton residents’ homes has been a focus of Andre Thomas’ since 2009. He is the training manager for Isles’ Center for Energy and Environmental Training. He works on making sure that homes are efficient and weatherized (weatherization can disturb lead paint), but his primary focus is lead. When he first started this work in 2009, he told the audience he interacted with many “Angry contractors because it was the recession and [people] were worried about their bottom lines, not the babies.”
Empowering the Community to Get the Lead out of Trenton
He brought messages of community empowerment and workforce development: “When consumers know what contractors [are doing] then that can bring great change…Since Flint happened, there’s been a lot more energy around these programs, [so] more people are coming in [for training] now because they can’t get jobs without these certifications…And I tell people coming in looking for jobs, ‘You get this [lead] certification and I’ll get you a job.’”
Rutgers Ph.D. student, Sean Stratton, also works with community organizers like Shereyl Snider to conduct lead tests across Trenton. For his research, he developed a project to figure out if there is lead in Trenton and how we might get it out. In addition to Snider, he works with six citizen scientists to take soil and blood samples.
With help from citizen scientists, he collected two samples from 125 homes. Stratton said 96 percent of those homes are above EPA’s new recommended screening levels. For his next steps, Stratton is going to revisit some homes to measure indoor sources of lead, including dust, water, and paint, to help develop intervention strategies to reduce lead exposure.
The fourth expert speaker, Deandrah Cameron, policy manager for NJ Future, focused on lead in drinking water. She told the audience the best thing that we can do is help establish ordinances to institutionalize those intervention strategies, and it’s better if you can get an ordinance that says the water system will do it for free. If you establish an ordinance for free replacements, you’ll get more funds for support since your utilities will not charge residents to replace the lead line
Cameron’s primary responsibility (since 2022) is to convene a task force, which consists of state and federal agencies, water utilities, community organizers, and community members, to gather information that will help draft legislation about lead. She represents New Jersey Future as a partner with the EPA Lead Accelerator Program, which works across four states, including New Jersey, to help identify and develop lead service-line replacement programs such as technical (i.e., funding application and research) assistance. However, to identify lead-service lines that need to be replaced, the water system will need to come into your home.
For renters, this can be problematic if you don’t even know if you have lead in your water. To address this, Cameron drafted legislation that would require landlords to inform renters of lead service line statusCameron is still waiting for the bill to pass the legislature.
According to Cameron, other than knowing what’s in the water, it’s important to cultivate trust in public officials so that when people come into your home you can be sure they’ll be performing for the right service.
Darlene Medley joined the listening session over Zoom, calling in from Syracuse. Her twin children were affected by lead in the soil when they were 19 months old. She said they didn’t get assistance for her children’s health, instead, “they called child protective services and the police on us,” Medley confirmed. “We have a lead ordinance here [in Syracuse], but it’s not enforced,” she continued.
“And y’all have the mayor here!” Medley exclaimed. Indeed, Mayor Gusciora was in attendance along with Councilwoman Jennifer Williams. “For the first time in Trenton, we’ve had this many partners,” said Gusciora. The Mayor emphasized that people should get in touch with City Hall to get testing done. Also, Isles will be training all inspectors to test for lead, which has not been made the standard up to this point, so “all apartments should be tested in the next couple of years,” Gusciora said.
The Pitfalls of Protecting Ourselves from Lead
In the meantime, Micah Freeman, Nurse Supervisor for Trenton, noted that it is important to keep washing our hands and feeding our kids healthy foods. “Making sure our children wash their hands is important because they’re touching dust and then putting their hands in their mouth,” Freeman told the audience. Eating iron and calcium rich foods like leafy vegetables—at home and in school—are also important because they fill our bones with healthy metals as opposed to lead.
Heather Sorge, program manager for Lead-Free NJ, mentioned that getting your children tested earlier is best, especially around one or two years old. Children under six are the most vulnerable because their brains are rapidly developing. Exposure to lead can stunt that development. “I know it hurts to see, but it can protect them in the long-run,” said Sorge.
Two Trenton community members whose children were affected by lead spoke on a panel moderated by Aririguzoh. They shared that their children, who were once bright and promising, have struggled post-lead exposure which occurred in public and/or older housing developments. While their experiences were not as antagonistic as Medley’s, they received minimal to no assistance after their children were diagnosed with lead poisoning. Their children were left to struggle in silence.
“There’s a lack of children’s voices in my field and that was most important to me,” said Aririguzoh. “And it doesn’t just go away as you get older. There’s a lot of people living with this lead still. I wanted to look at how it affected older people as well because those [mitigation] tactics [like eating healthy are good, but that can’t be it,” she continued.
It’s not easy to get lead out of your body. Chelation therapy has long been used to treat lead poisoning. “It uses molecules to stick to and get metals out of your body,” says Rutgers Professor Dr. Brian Buckley. “But it gets all the metals out of your body, even the good ones, [namely] calcium,” Dr. Buckley explained, “So it’s usually only used in life-threatening situations.”
Dr. Buckley ended the session by asking how the Rutgers Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, where he serves as faculty, and others might be most helpful.
“We need soil remediation. We go outside with our children and the wind blows and we’re breathing in the lead in the soil,” said community member, Ms. Fairweather.
“We need up-to-date housing. If we can update our housing, we can save our kids,” said Snider.
Many people felt we needed more support from community organizers like Snider. Aririguzhoh shared that sentiment when I asked her about her future endeavors after Princeton, “I know I’m going to stay close to the people. I don’t think I can get too far without community input.”
One attendee noted that one way that community input can be invaluable for getting the lead out of Trenton, one attendee noted was by pushing the City Council and the city of Trenton to hire a lead inspector through the Housing Authority.
An earlier version of this story mispelled Deandrah Cameron’s name and the year that she has been convening a task force is 2022, not 2019 as previously published. John Byk’s name was also mispelled in an earlier version of this article.
