25 years after a major toxic lead cleanup, westside neighbors still don’t feel safe

(MIRROR INDY) — The first thing Patti Daviau sees when she opens the front door of her home on South Harris Avenue every morning is a thick bunch of weeds reaching through a 500-foot stretch of chain link fence across the street.

It’s difficult to see what’s beyond the fence in all but a few patches. But Daviau, 70, who has lived on the street since she was a child, says she knows what’s back there now — a looming threat.

The site was once a foundry, a lead smelter and a lead battery recycling operation. It was the center of a large lead contamination investigation and cleanup in the 1990s. It’s now known as the Avanti Superfund Remedial Site, an empty property covered with a large 2,500-square-foot concrete pad that covers tens of thousands of cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil.

The last owners of the Avanti site, which had changed hands many times over the years, essentially abandoned it. The site now belongs to the city of Indianapolis.

The property is top of mind again for neighbors with long memories who worry that more needs to be done to protect the people living nearby. They know that the presence of lead can damage the brains and kidneys of kids and adults and reduce the chance of successful births.

The EPA has started taking the presence of lead more seriously in recent years, too, adopting new rules to make it easier to launch investigations at hazardous sites. But that won’t help neighbors near the Avanti site.

The EPA’s new guidance only affects sites on the National Priorities List, the agency’s list of sites with known or threatened releases of hazardous substances throughout the country that currently threaten human health. The shuttered westside smelter isn’t on it.

Federal, state and local agencies, in fact, no longer see the Avanti site as a threat due to a 1999 cleanup of the site and hundreds of properties surrounding it. But soil testing done more than a decade after the cleanup found levels of lead both at the site and on nearby properties that would set off investigations under the new guidance.

Daviau and other neighbors want to be sure that their neighborhood is safe. They want their neighborhood tested again to find out if the threat of lead contamination is actually gone.

“We’re not trash. We’re working class people,” Daviau said. “We should be treated with the same dignity and respect as other people in the city.”

Decades of documented lead use

Daviau believes regulators should have known that she and her neighbors were being exposed to toxic lead for decades.

“It wasn’t this huge secret,” Daviau said.

She grew up in a house on the 300 block of South Harris Avenue, and when she got married in the 1970s, she and her husband bought a home just down the street for $9,000. Her home, like many of the houses on the street, was built in the early 1900s to house the workers at the American Stove Company plant.

By the time Daviau and her husband bought their home, the site across the street had changed hands and became the Oxide and Chemical Corp.

The plant turned bars of lead and other metals, called ingots, into pellets that could be melted down easily. Occasionally, residents would see yellow or white clouds of noxious dust drifting out of the plant.

“In the summer, I would have to mow our grass maybe once a month, because it didn’t grow,” she said. “We had bushes out front, but I never had to trim them because they didn’t grow. We didn’t have squirrels. We had no wildlife. You go out in your yard and there’s no worms in the grass.”

She said clouds of noxious lead dust from the plant would cover her entire neighborhood.

“The stuff would come out of the plant and it would go on your car,” Daviau remembered. “If you wiped the top of your car, you literally would wipe the finish off your car.”

Daviau would babysit kids from the neighborhood. She taught the kids to come inside her home if they ever saw the clouds. She remembers one particularly bad emission from the plant in 1976.

“One time they came running in the house, saying ‘They’re doing it again,’ so we came in, put the windows down, and we’d stay in the house until things settled down,” Daviau said.

Fighting contamination for decades

Concern about the plant’s pollution grew. Neighbors distributed flyers, warning them to call the plant or other agencies to report the dust. Daviau and other neighbors reported the company to the Indianapolis Air Control Board, which regulated air emissions locally until the state took over the responsibility during the Gov. Mitch Daniels administration.

Neighbors who lived along Warman Avenue, two blocks away from the plant, told the board that emissions were so thick neighbors called the fire department believing there was a fire.

“You can hardly breathe when the dust gets in your throat,” one neighbor, James Pickett, told the board in 1976.

The company admitted to the city that its pollution controls sometimes failed. The plant shut down the following year and moved to Brazil in western Indiana. Indianapolis officials then established its first air emissions limits on lead, but the contamination problems weren’t over.

Between 1978 and 1993, several light industrial businesses operated at the site. The site became an unofficial playground for bored kids whenever a business moved away.

David Alsup grew up next door to Daviau and remembers playing around loading docks on the south end of the site in the early 1980s. Now 46, he said he and his friends regularly came into contact with lead dust.

“I remember playing there and touching the door and having that yellow dust on my hand,” he said. “I had no idea what it was, but I probably ate some of it by biting on my nails as a kid.”

Finding evidence of a threat

Although it was a known source of lead, a widespread investigation of the site did not begin until the 1990s.

That happened after the Marion County Public Health Department discovered multiple chemical carcinogens and lead in the drinking water wells in a neighborhood to the south known as “The Bottoms.” Lead there was found in private wells at levels up to 8.7 times the amount allowed by law.

Officials, though, did not immediately suspect that contamination was coming from the nearby Avanti site.

“The problem is that there are several companies that could be considered responsible for contamination of the groundwater,” health department officials wrote in a letter to the mayor’s office March 10, 1992.

Besides the Avanti site, the Bottoms neighborhood was near a former Chrysler foundry and various junkyards. It was also downstream from other industrial sites across Eagle Creek.

The health department expanded the contamination investigation, and soil samples were taken from the Avanti site. Investigators had stumbled upon a major source of lead as well as evidence of arsenic, mercury and cadmium contamination.

Initial testing detected lead at the site at 180,000 parts per million, more than 200 times the amount set by the EPA for authorities to justify an investigation at an industrial site. Blood testing of 225 kids and adults near the site by the Indiana Department of Health found high levels of lead in people’s blood, including eight of 11 children tested along the road where Daviau lives.

As the agencies continued investigating, they found higher levels of lead on the site grounds and on the sidewalk outside the site. In a site assessment report, EPA investigators expressed concerns that children could be exposed to lead contamination and that runoff from the site could contaminate Eagle Creek and nearby homes.

By January 1994, the EPA ordered a cleanup of the site and in nearby yards under the federal Superfund law, which allows the federal government to pay for the cleanup and later recoup the money from responsible parties.

The agency estimated they would have to remove 10,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from the site and remove lead from soil in yards near the plant at the cost of $1.2 million.

“They told me they were gonna do this quickly and that the magnitude wasn’t going to be that big,” Daviau said. “It was much worse than they realized.”

A much larger problem than anticipated

The federally mandated cleanup would be split into two phases and take more than five years to accomplish, involve hundreds of homes and force agencies at all levels of the cleanup to deal with new problems.

The EPA began tracking down the companies believed to be responsible for the pollution.

By December 1994, the EPA had excavated and replaced the contaminated soil from 73 homes but kept finding more yards containing contaminated soil. Up to 300 more residences required cleanup.

“They were cleaning up and they had all these suits on. They looked like men from space. And my neighbor’s kids were running up and down the street in their bare feet, riding their bicycles,” Daviau said. “(The people cleaning) would ask us, ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ I said, ‘What can we do? You want to buy my house?’”

Eventually, more than 40 families sued 11 companies believed to be responsible for the contamination. They later settled the suit for $500,000 to be split among the families.

Daviau was part of the lawsuit and reluctantly agreed to the settlement.

“I said, ‘You guys, we don’t want to take this. You know, I really feel like there’s more to be had,’ but I was one piece of the huge puzzle,” Daviau said. “I knew what $10,000 meant to some of my neighbors. That was millions to them.”

By the end of the cleanup in September 1999, the price tag was $9 million, and tens of thousands of cubic yards of contaminated soil were removed and replaced with clean soil. Several companies that operated at the site agreed to pay for the cleanup without admitting they were responsible for the contamination.

About 15,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from nearby homes — enough to fill four and a half Olympic swimming pools — were taken to a hazardous waste landfill in Danville.

About 39,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from the industrial site grounds were buried, covered by 18 inches of clay and six inches of clean soil and surrounded by a second chain link fence within the property.

Continuing concerns

After the cleanup, questions still remained as to whether the site was free of contamination, so there was little interest in redeveloping it.

A site reuse investigation made by the EPA in 2006 found that the agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management still weren’t sure whether some parts of the site were cleaned up sufficiently.

The companies that owned the site, Avanti Development, Inc. — which owned three out of the four parcels of land on the site — and Harris Corner LLC — which owned the northeast corner of the site — essentially abandoned the site soon after and stopped paying taxes on it. There were no buyers when the properties were put up for auction in 2006 and 2007.

According to the Marion County Auditor’s Office, the companies together owe about $2.4 million in delinquent taxes and the site belongs to the city of Indianapolis.

Development options for the site are limited due to reuse restrictions. Potential developers wouldn’t be able to dig up the land due to potential contamination and would have to incorporate the concrete building pad into their plans.

IDEM reassessed the site in 2011, finding evidence of PCE, a carcinogenic chemical used as a degreaser, in groundwater under the concrete pad. Cadmium, pesticides, metals and other chemicals were also found in the soil.

Despite the findings, the department determined that the Avanti site “does not appear to be a significant potential for harm to human health or the environment through the ground water, surface water, or soil exposure pathways.”

But soil sampling in 2011 by then-IUPUI researchers found evidence that some remediated areas were actually getting worse.

Gabriel Filippelli, director of Indiana University Indianapolis’ Center for Urban Health and executive director of IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute, was part of some of those studies.

“That area still had really elevated blood lead levels in kids, so we took soil samples from a lot of those areas that were already cleaned up,” he said.

In the 2013 study that resulted from the 2011 sampling, researchers found that samples from some homes whose contaminated yard soil was replaced with clean soil more than a decade before were showing levels at 200 to 250 parts per million.

That’s nearly eight times the national average of lead found in soil naturally, at 26 parts per million, and even more than the national average when the most contaminated sites are factored in, at 185 parts per million. The formerly clean soil had been contaminated with lead from the site or, potentially, another source.

“They’d acquired a lot of lead since then, so clearly there were still some ongoing sources,” Filippelli said.

In 2015, Filippelli was part of another sampling session when the city demolished the buildings still standing at the Avanti site.

According to the cleanup plan, soil from the Avanti site that exceeded 1,000 parts per million was supposed to have been excavated and treated with chemicals to prevent them from migrating, a process known as stabilization. Filipelli said he witnessed soil samples at much greater levels than what was supposed to be there.

“They just had a chain link fence around the site that was broken in many places,” he remembered. “We saw kids playing there, and we took samples right at the fenceline and they were 7,000 parts per million. So, I think that plant was still a major source of lead.”

EPA rule doesn’t apply, but university offers testing

An EPA rule change earlier this year lowered the screening level for lead in soil at residential properties near Superfund sites and other active hazardous waste sites.

The lead threshold, or screening level, was 400 parts per million. It is now 200 parts per million — the amount detected in residential soil near the Avanti site in 2011.

Residential properties with multiple potential sources of lead have an even lower screen level of 100 parts per million.

With government agencies seemingly unwilling to help, the Harris Avenue residents’ best chance for testing in the short term is through IU Indianapolis’ Center for Urban Health, which studies lead and other contaminants.

Filippelli, the center’s director, said the center is willing and able to test soil samples that are gathered by residents and delivered to the center.

“You don’t know if you have a problem until you test,” Filippelli said. “Fortunately, lead is super easy to test for and super easy to fix once you find it.”

Daviau and Alsup said they would work to get their soil samples tested and convince others in the neighborhood to get it done, too.

“Something’s got to change,” Daviau said. “There’s no reason to leave this for a second and third generation farther down the road.”

Many are concerned about potential sources of contamination under a large concrete pad that covers most of the Avanti site. In the last two decades since the cleanup the pad has developed large cracks, especially at the edge of the property. It’s unclear how much contaminated soil is there and at what levels.

“My biggest concern is runoff,” Alsup said. “When it rains, all that rainwater goes up in those yards. I’d like to see some of those yards get tested again, especially in the 500 block.”

How to get your soil tested

Indianapolis residents can get their residential soil tested by IU Indianapolis’ Center for Urban Health. All that’s needed are three clear plastic Ziplock baggies, something to collect soil with, a marker for labeling the baggies and a small box or envelope to ship the samples in.

Collect the soil from three areas near your home:

• Somewhere near the street
• The middle of your yard
• Under the drip line, which is the two to three feet of yard closest to the foundation of your home

The full instructions on how to collect the soil samples and send them to the Center for Urban Health are at the center’s soil testing site. For more information, contact professor Gabriel Filippelli at gfilippe@iu.edu or earth sciences program manager Angela Herrmann at aherrman@iu.edu.

If the instructions are followed correctly, the center will send an email report of what they found.

Mirror Indy reporter Enrique Saenz covers west Indianapolis. Contact him at 317-983-4203 or enrique.saenz@mirrorindy.org. Follow him on X @heyEnriqueSaenz.