Info

I recently came across this story via twitter and much of it reminds me of the communities that we focused on in Toxic Soup. I got the below text / information from the Justice for Ujima website.

A civil lawsuit was filed on Friday, April 9th, 2010 in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The lawsuit alleges that contamination at the 300-unit Ujima Village complex built on a former oil tank storage site caused 38 deaths and hundreds of cases of cancer, leukemia, miscarriages, respiratory distress, chronic infections, asthma, anemia and cognitive and neurological issues.

For decades, low-income, hard-working citizens of Los Angeles, mostly African American, raised their families in a government-run housing complex that made them sick. The air, the soil and the water at the site gave them cancer.

It gave them emphysema and anemia. It gave them asthma. It caused an unusually high number of miscarriages. It caused inexplicable itchy sores on their bodies. Although the housing development has been closed, it still causes people to lie awake at night wondering, “Are my children safe? Am I going to die?”

And every time the residents asked if they were safe, if the water was drinkable, if the air was clean enough to breathe, they were told by government officials that nothing was wrong.

But those officials were lying. The government knew the area was filled with deadly toxins, but it never told the people who lived there. Instead, it ignored the advice of every expert who tested the air and soil and concluded it was unsafe, and relied on the findings of the one company the said it was safe. But that company was bought and paid for by Exxon, the world’s largest oil company who originally polluted the soil.

Instead of acting to protect the residents, government officials denied the health hazards existed and neglected the residents. The agencies that could have provided oversight and protection came onto the scene far too late to be effective.

The agencies who oversaw the housing complex could have prevented the death and illnesses that resulted. Their responses to the problem were ineffective.

This is a tragic story of environmental injustice ignored by the governments that could have protected their citizens.