ReturnOfJudah
Veteran
Spinoff from this thread
Louisiana looking like a straight up pro slavery state
The Poisoned Generation
Too Long to post entire article
The Poisoned Generation
The story of a decades-long lead-poisoning lawsuit in New Orleans illustrates how the toxin destroys black families and communities alike.
Casey billieson was fighting against the world.
Hers was a charge carried by many mothers: moving mountains to make the best future for her two sons. But the mountains she faced were taller than most. To start, she had to raise her boys in the Lafitte housing projects in Treme, near the epicenter of a crime wave in New Orleans. In the spring of 1994, like mothers in violent cities the world over, Billieson anticipated the bloom in murders the thaw would bring. Fueled by the drug trade and a rising scourge of police corruption and brutality, violence rose to unseen levels that year, and the city’s murder rate surged to the highest in the country.
Four hundred and twenty four people were slain in New Orleans in 1994, a murder rate that may have been the highest ever in any American city. Rival drug dealers killed each other while cops killed witnesses and whistleblowers in plain sight. Almost 1 percent of all young black men in the city were killed that year. Many of those murders were committed in the yards and units near where her sons, Ryan and Ronnie—then aged 5 and 3 years old—played or stayed with relatives and friends. Even as a Bill Clinton-led federal government used popular fears of “superpredators” to redouble the nation’s commitment to mass incarceration, Billieson attempted the superhuman task of trying to provide her children with a way out of Lafitte.
But the obstacles for a young mother and her two children ran deeper than the onslaught in the streets. “They played inside a lot,” Billieson said, “and we thought they’d be safe that way, but then we learned even that was bad for them.”
Inside the apartment, her boys were insulated from the crossfire outside. But like thousands of others seeking shelter behind the peeling walls muffling the bubbling bass dripping from Crown Vic speakers, the poison of lead would find a way into her sons’ bodies all the same. Ryan and Ronnie, along with thousands of other poor children in New Orleans whose parents believed they could shelter their children from the violence outside, would become an entire poisoned generation.
Lead was only one of many ecological risks her family faced. The playgrounds where Ryan and Ronnie played often brimmed with pools of fetid, standing water—owing to New Orleans’s fabled and constant flooding—that were sometimes tainted with battery acid. Billieson had heard tell about the regurgitated sewage and chemical waste from Louisiana’s booming petrochemical operations that flowed back into dirt common spaces where her children learned to walk, all while they breathed in the emissions from the nearby roads and highways.
Some other kids across the virtually all-black New Orleans housing projects had it even worse. That year, the Press Park section of the Desire projects and its nearby elementary school were declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency for a concoction of known contaminants leaching from a closed landfill.
Billieson did her best to protect her boys, and she certainly wasn’t naive about the sicknesses that dogged her neighborhoods. People in the projects were well aware that their environments weren’t healthy, and she went the extra mile; researching the specific risks her kids faced, including those from lead, at the public library. But what do you do when everything is contaminated?
Around the time Ryan was entering kindergarten and Ronnie was supposed to be learning how to count to 10, the boys began struggling with the childhood learning goals Billieson set for them. “They had learning disabilities, and when I say disabilities, I mean learning at a slower pace,” Billieson told me. But black kids in the projects were written off and diagnosed with learning disabilities all the time, and good, affordable doctors were scarce. There still wasn’t much even the most diligent parents could do.
One afternoon word spread around Lafitte that a group of white folks—a rarity in any of the projects outside of the occasional housing authority official or police officer—was asking around about lead poisoning. “A lawyer and his team were in the area doing testing on the soil, and I was on my way to the doctor’s office with my kids,” Billieson said. “So I stopped and had a conversation with them about lead poisoning. A suggestion from them was to have the kids tested.”
When the blood came back, Billieson found out that both of her children were poisoned and likely had been for years. In a panic, she called the lawyer who’d left his card with her. That phone call began a legal war of attrition that spanned more than two decades, three presidents, and one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history.
Gary gambel was a young man in 1994. Just a few years past the Louisiana state bar exam, he’d recently helped start the law firm that now sits in the heart of the business district and boasts his name across the front door. He was known among friends and law school classmates for his activist leanings, and those leanings had turned into full-blown fever by the time he met Casey Billieson that spring day and told her to get her kids tested for lead poisoning.
Gambel had been trying to find a way to investigate the lead-poisoning issue in New Orleans housing developments ever since an old associate of his uncovered several positive lead-poisoning tests while working a different case involving public-housing residents.
“He called, and he said we had a doctor who works for a medical program in the projects and all these kids are coming in lead poisoned,” Gambel told me. “So I went to go meet them, and I met one mom and then her neighbor.”
His plan was originally to take some cases on a pro-bono basis, helping families move out of lead-contaminated homes and pressuring the housing authority into providing them abated or renovated units. But he soon found that just about all the families he spoke to had kids who tested positive for lead poisoning, and the city hadn’t abated any units across its developments. Gambel’s response when he realized he’d stumbled onto one of the worst public-health crises in America was one of awe: “I said, ‘God, we need to do something.’”
Even then, dozens of positive blood tests later, Gambel—a business lawyer by training—and his small start-up firm didn’t quite realize the nature of the leviathan they hunted. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) had been labeled as a “troubled” housing authority by the federal office of Housing and Urban Development since 1979, and by 1994, HANO housing was among the most miserable places to live in the country.
HANO was once the crown jewel of the mid-20th-century program of federally funded public housing. Even at the height of Jim Crow, the well-built HANO projects anchored mixed-class, inner-city black neighborhoods. But the projects had deteriorated since then, aided by white flight, reductions in services, and a backlash against black political power. By the time Billieson was entering adulthood in the late ’80s, the big projects—Calliope, Magnolia, Florida, Lafitte, and Desire—that had once been known as brick bastions of the black working class, were known through hip-hop for bleakness and toughness.
HANO authorities simply didn’t respond to thousands of complaints or keep buildings up to code. In 1994, 15 years after HANO was labeled a “troubled” development, HUD inspectors visited 150 units in the neighborhood and found that all 150 units failed to meet standards—with problems including peeling lead paint, asbestos exposure, and massive roach infestations—and that none of the units had been updated at all in 10 years. HUD rates housing authorities on a 100-point quality scale, with a score below 60 indicating a “troubled” development. In 1994, Billieson was raising her boys in a project that had just received a score of 26.
There is no safe level of lead in the human body. Even at low levels, chronic exposure can damage the brain and the central nervous system, and can cause symptoms from hearing loss to IQ deterioration to lack of impulse control. Over time, lead gets absorbed into the bones, making them brittle and stunted, and causes teeth to crack and rot. Exposure in young children with developing minds and growing bones is most destructive, and in times of serious stress and trauma—common in places like the New Orleans projects in the 1990s—those effects are magnified. Each poisoned child in HANO dealt with at least some of those issues, many or most of them for life.
The first sign of lead trouble in HANO came in 1985, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set the standard for lead-poisoning intervention at 25 micrograms of metal per deciliter of blood. Kids were regularly testing at levels well above that across New Orleans in 1985, even more so in the projects. In 1987, a group of residents in the St. Thomas housing development, led by resident Virginia Mitchell, filed a lead-poisoning lawsuit against HANO that was eventually settled with a consent decree demanding HANO take action to abate lead in its units.
HANO did nothing, and the trickle of complaints became a deluge in 1991, after the CDC decreased its actionable guidelines for lead exposure from 25 to 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood. According to a 1993 Government Accountability Office report, “during 1991 the New Orleans Housing Authority settled over 60 lawsuits that cost over $1 million in claims and attorneys’ fees.”
The onslaught of lawsuits was such that HANO lost its ability to secure commercial liability insurance. HUD forced the city to cede control over the HANO developments to a succession of private third-party managers who still couldn’t get a handle on lead poisoning. The city-appointed board and the managers squabbled constantly, according to federal oversight reports.
While Gambel was looking for potential plaintiffs, HUD declared HANO in breach of its contract and stepped in to create an oversight agreement. The scandals regularly made national news outlets. A Washington Post article from April 1994 quoted the former HANO managing director Shelia Danzey: "I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel for at least five or six years, and that's a light that is pretty dim.”
There were Billieson and her two sons. There was Sheila Green in Lafitte, whose twin sons, Ronald and Donald, tested well over the 1991 lead guidelines, with one son receiving almost four times the legally actionable amount and exhibiting hyperactivity and multiple learning disorders. There was Joyce Galmon in C.J. Peete Housing, whose four kids had speech problems. There was Detress Lewis, also in C.J. Peete, whose two children had blood-lead levels twice as high as even the looser 1985 guidelines, and whose complications were so severe that they had to be hospitalized.
Hundreds of women who’d been born in the projects and poisoned with lead their whole lives passed metals in utero to their children, whose first breaths took in clouds of white leaden dust. Lead levels per deciliter of blood among the plaintiffs regularly measured in the 20- to 40-microgram range, with spikes above 50 micrograms. (The water-contamination crisis that began in Flint, Michigan, in 2014 was triggered by blood-lead levels over the current upper limit of five micrograms per deciliter.)
“I had to get involved,” Billieson told me. “When I looked at the flyers and the books, I knew it was life or death.”
New orleans probably won’t ever face a lead-poisoning crisis nearly as bad as the HANO episodes of the ’90s. But an understanding of just how toxic the substance is has risen over the past few years, even as science has revealed the sheer ubiquity of its remnants in places as disparate as Los Angeles, Flint, and Baltimore.
Louisiana looking like a straight up pro slavery state
The Poisoned Generation
Too Long to post entire article
The Poisoned Generation
The story of a decades-long lead-poisoning lawsuit in New Orleans illustrates how the toxin destroys black families and communities alike.
Casey billieson was fighting against the world.
Hers was a charge carried by many mothers: moving mountains to make the best future for her two sons. But the mountains she faced were taller than most. To start, she had to raise her boys in the Lafitte housing projects in Treme, near the epicenter of a crime wave in New Orleans. In the spring of 1994, like mothers in violent cities the world over, Billieson anticipated the bloom in murders the thaw would bring. Fueled by the drug trade and a rising scourge of police corruption and brutality, violence rose to unseen levels that year, and the city’s murder rate surged to the highest in the country.
Four hundred and twenty four people were slain in New Orleans in 1994, a murder rate that may have been the highest ever in any American city. Rival drug dealers killed each other while cops killed witnesses and whistleblowers in plain sight. Almost 1 percent of all young black men in the city were killed that year. Many of those murders were committed in the yards and units near where her sons, Ryan and Ronnie—then aged 5 and 3 years old—played or stayed with relatives and friends. Even as a Bill Clinton-led federal government used popular fears of “superpredators” to redouble the nation’s commitment to mass incarceration, Billieson attempted the superhuman task of trying to provide her children with a way out of Lafitte.
But the obstacles for a young mother and her two children ran deeper than the onslaught in the streets. “They played inside a lot,” Billieson said, “and we thought they’d be safe that way, but then we learned even that was bad for them.”
Inside the apartment, her boys were insulated from the crossfire outside. But like thousands of others seeking shelter behind the peeling walls muffling the bubbling bass dripping from Crown Vic speakers, the poison of lead would find a way into her sons’ bodies all the same. Ryan and Ronnie, along with thousands of other poor children in New Orleans whose parents believed they could shelter their children from the violence outside, would become an entire poisoned generation.
Lead was only one of many ecological risks her family faced. The playgrounds where Ryan and Ronnie played often brimmed with pools of fetid, standing water—owing to New Orleans’s fabled and constant flooding—that were sometimes tainted with battery acid. Billieson had heard tell about the regurgitated sewage and chemical waste from Louisiana’s booming petrochemical operations that flowed back into dirt common spaces where her children learned to walk, all while they breathed in the emissions from the nearby roads and highways.
Some other kids across the virtually all-black New Orleans housing projects had it even worse. That year, the Press Park section of the Desire projects and its nearby elementary school were declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency for a concoction of known contaminants leaching from a closed landfill.
Billieson did her best to protect her boys, and she certainly wasn’t naive about the sicknesses that dogged her neighborhoods. People in the projects were well aware that their environments weren’t healthy, and she went the extra mile; researching the specific risks her kids faced, including those from lead, at the public library. But what do you do when everything is contaminated?
Around the time Ryan was entering kindergarten and Ronnie was supposed to be learning how to count to 10, the boys began struggling with the childhood learning goals Billieson set for them. “They had learning disabilities, and when I say disabilities, I mean learning at a slower pace,” Billieson told me. But black kids in the projects were written off and diagnosed with learning disabilities all the time, and good, affordable doctors were scarce. There still wasn’t much even the most diligent parents could do.
One afternoon word spread around Lafitte that a group of white folks—a rarity in any of the projects outside of the occasional housing authority official or police officer—was asking around about lead poisoning. “A lawyer and his team were in the area doing testing on the soil, and I was on my way to the doctor’s office with my kids,” Billieson said. “So I stopped and had a conversation with them about lead poisoning. A suggestion from them was to have the kids tested.”
When the blood came back, Billieson found out that both of her children were poisoned and likely had been for years. In a panic, she called the lawyer who’d left his card with her. That phone call began a legal war of attrition that spanned more than two decades, three presidents, and one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history.
Gary gambel was a young man in 1994. Just a few years past the Louisiana state bar exam, he’d recently helped start the law firm that now sits in the heart of the business district and boasts his name across the front door. He was known among friends and law school classmates for his activist leanings, and those leanings had turned into full-blown fever by the time he met Casey Billieson that spring day and told her to get her kids tested for lead poisoning.
Gambel had been trying to find a way to investigate the lead-poisoning issue in New Orleans housing developments ever since an old associate of his uncovered several positive lead-poisoning tests while working a different case involving public-housing residents.
“He called, and he said we had a doctor who works for a medical program in the projects and all these kids are coming in lead poisoned,” Gambel told me. “So I went to go meet them, and I met one mom and then her neighbor.”
His plan was originally to take some cases on a pro-bono basis, helping families move out of lead-contaminated homes and pressuring the housing authority into providing them abated or renovated units. But he soon found that just about all the families he spoke to had kids who tested positive for lead poisoning, and the city hadn’t abated any units across its developments. Gambel’s response when he realized he’d stumbled onto one of the worst public-health crises in America was one of awe: “I said, ‘God, we need to do something.’”
Even then, dozens of positive blood tests later, Gambel—a business lawyer by training—and his small start-up firm didn’t quite realize the nature of the leviathan they hunted. The Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO) had been labeled as a “troubled” housing authority by the federal office of Housing and Urban Development since 1979, and by 1994, HANO housing was among the most miserable places to live in the country.
HANO was once the crown jewel of the mid-20th-century program of federally funded public housing. Even at the height of Jim Crow, the well-built HANO projects anchored mixed-class, inner-city black neighborhoods. But the projects had deteriorated since then, aided by white flight, reductions in services, and a backlash against black political power. By the time Billieson was entering adulthood in the late ’80s, the big projects—Calliope, Magnolia, Florida, Lafitte, and Desire—that had once been known as brick bastions of the black working class, were known through hip-hop for bleakness and toughness.
HANO authorities simply didn’t respond to thousands of complaints or keep buildings up to code. In 1994, 15 years after HANO was labeled a “troubled” development, HUD inspectors visited 150 units in the neighborhood and found that all 150 units failed to meet standards—with problems including peeling lead paint, asbestos exposure, and massive roach infestations—and that none of the units had been updated at all in 10 years. HUD rates housing authorities on a 100-point quality scale, with a score below 60 indicating a “troubled” development. In 1994, Billieson was raising her boys in a project that had just received a score of 26.
There is no safe level of lead in the human body. Even at low levels, chronic exposure can damage the brain and the central nervous system, and can cause symptoms from hearing loss to IQ deterioration to lack of impulse control. Over time, lead gets absorbed into the bones, making them brittle and stunted, and causes teeth to crack and rot. Exposure in young children with developing minds and growing bones is most destructive, and in times of serious stress and trauma—common in places like the New Orleans projects in the 1990s—those effects are magnified. Each poisoned child in HANO dealt with at least some of those issues, many or most of them for life.
The first sign of lead trouble in HANO came in 1985, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set the standard for lead-poisoning intervention at 25 micrograms of metal per deciliter of blood. Kids were regularly testing at levels well above that across New Orleans in 1985, even more so in the projects. In 1987, a group of residents in the St. Thomas housing development, led by resident Virginia Mitchell, filed a lead-poisoning lawsuit against HANO that was eventually settled with a consent decree demanding HANO take action to abate lead in its units.
HANO did nothing, and the trickle of complaints became a deluge in 1991, after the CDC decreased its actionable guidelines for lead exposure from 25 to 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood. According to a 1993 Government Accountability Office report, “during 1991 the New Orleans Housing Authority settled over 60 lawsuits that cost over $1 million in claims and attorneys’ fees.”
The onslaught of lawsuits was such that HANO lost its ability to secure commercial liability insurance. HUD forced the city to cede control over the HANO developments to a succession of private third-party managers who still couldn’t get a handle on lead poisoning. The city-appointed board and the managers squabbled constantly, according to federal oversight reports.
While Gambel was looking for potential plaintiffs, HUD declared HANO in breach of its contract and stepped in to create an oversight agreement. The scandals regularly made national news outlets. A Washington Post article from April 1994 quoted the former HANO managing director Shelia Danzey: "I don't see the light at the end of the tunnel for at least five or six years, and that's a light that is pretty dim.”
There were Billieson and her two sons. There was Sheila Green in Lafitte, whose twin sons, Ronald and Donald, tested well over the 1991 lead guidelines, with one son receiving almost four times the legally actionable amount and exhibiting hyperactivity and multiple learning disorders. There was Joyce Galmon in C.J. Peete Housing, whose four kids had speech problems. There was Detress Lewis, also in C.J. Peete, whose two children had blood-lead levels twice as high as even the looser 1985 guidelines, and whose complications were so severe that they had to be hospitalized.
Hundreds of women who’d been born in the projects and poisoned with lead their whole lives passed metals in utero to their children, whose first breaths took in clouds of white leaden dust. Lead levels per deciliter of blood among the plaintiffs regularly measured in the 20- to 40-microgram range, with spikes above 50 micrograms. (The water-contamination crisis that began in Flint, Michigan, in 2014 was triggered by blood-lead levels over the current upper limit of five micrograms per deciliter.)
“I had to get involved,” Billieson told me. “When I looked at the flyers and the books, I knew it was life or death.”
New orleans probably won’t ever face a lead-poisoning crisis nearly as bad as the HANO episodes of the ’90s. But an understanding of just how toxic the substance is has risen over the past few years, even as science has revealed the sheer ubiquity of its remnants in places as disparate as Los Angeles, Flint, and Baltimore.
