Improving Indoor Air Quality—Community Spotlight

L.E.A.D. Agency

What is the most important thing people should know about your organization or your work?
With a name like “L.E.A.D. Agency,” we want people to know we are serious about lead poisoning in our community, but we also want them to know we accept the responsibility to take a leadership role in our community in raising awareness for environmental justice. Our full name is Local Environmental Action Demanded, and we do demand it!

What do you value most about your partnership with NCHH and others in the healthy housing space? 
We have had many partners through the years, but the partnership with NCHH, focusing on healthy homes, is one we have needed, and we are so pleased to have that become more formal. We have learned from our investigative work that many of our homes have yet another pathway of exposure to lead, making our residents ever more at risk with every breath they take inside what they have believed is the safety of their homes.

Tell us about a current project that excites you. 
Our Flood Map resulted through an AGU Thriving Earth Exchange project. Through this project, our map is available to the public, allowing anyone to see the extent of flooding in our county, and the separate layers illustrate many of the other risks our residents have. We used the Flood Map as a tool to locate residents in the 100-year floodplain in the most populated part of Ottawa County, OK, and have them complete a flood survey we constructed. Using the data from these surveys, GIS professionals assisted LEAD in preparing a set of slides we were able to present to EPA Region 6 officials. These images showed the many risks residents face: homes in the survey built before 1978, those which have already flooded, those with people living with serious health issues, and those who have NOT either had their yards tested or remediated for lead by EPA’s Tar Creek Superfund Operable Unit 2. Our research continues as we are determining the number of homes in neighborhoods throughout the community that are at risk due to the home construction practice of burying contaminated mine waste beneath concrete slab floors and heating/air conditioning ductwork buried with it. We are investigating costs to fill the ducts with concrete and provide alternate safer HVAC components, interviewing contractors and allowing investigation of sites at risk. What excites us is having the funding to actually do pilot projects to begin protecting the people who live in homes.

How has your organization’s work made a difference for healthy housing in your community? 
LEAD Agency became a State of Oklahoma certified lead-based paint firm, preparing our organization to be able to bring on staff and begin the work of inspecting homes for lead-based paint. We have had a lead-based paint inspector/risk assessor for almost 20 years. Before the county health department had a staff member trained, we were called in to perform assessments for homes with lead-poisoned children. We partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health to assess risk inside homes of the children in our study, giving feedback to these families on exposure pathways and how to reduce risk. LEAD Agency partnered with another research project that empowered tribal elders to educate community members and children about how to reduce their risk to lead poisoning. We carried that hope forward after the research by continuing to educate lay-health advisors in these skills. We have provided “loaner” dehumidifiers after floods and given information on how to deal with the toxic molds that can occur after flooding. Our latest partnerships with first Buy-In on our flood survey and with Climigration for funding will help us to begin doing the pilot projects to mitigate some of the risk floods bring to home owners as well as to provide one home with alternate HVAC and deal with the indoor lead exposure from contaminated ducts.

Protecting our residents is our work.

What do you think is the most pressing challenge facing your organization and/or the community you serve? 
When a community is built downstream from what becomes one of the largest Superfund sites in the nation, there will be challenges, but when actual construction practices for several decades used the toxic waste materials from that Superfund site in ways that perpetuate risk and exposures to residents of homes or those who frequent additional types of structures also built with that material. What LEAD Agency is challenged with is making the case to EPA that Superfund law requires those toxic substances to be addressed where they have come to reside.

We believe the efforts to protect the residents in the Tar Creek Superfund site through the Operable Unit 2 Residential yards should also include addressing the indoor exposures of the same substance that is buried beneath the floors of these homes, not only addressing that which was found in the yard. This can be done, and we believe must be done to protect our children’s futures and the health of our community.

EPA is the only avenue to correcting the exposure risk we face. The cost per single home for private citizens is proving to be too high. Because of this, people continue to live in danger, knowingly or unknowingly. Our challenge is to get this done!

What is the most important lesson or piece of advice you would share with others doing this kind of work?
Keep records, keep asking questions, stay connected to the people who were harmed. Do not forget them, as they have wanted justice, they will propel you and your organizations to do more, work harder, and get this done in their honor. Make partnerships part of your work. Don’t just follow grant money, follow advocates, team up with passionate people, find the heart of the federal and state agencies and private funders, and continue to push forward. 

 

Latest page update: September 18, 2024.