When investigative journalist Corey G. Johnson started working at the Tampa Bay Times in 2017, he had been following national news coverage of lead poisoning the public water supply in Flint, Michigan, where he spent summers as a kid visiting family.
After some digging, Johnson identified the recycler as the last lead smelter operating in the state. He also learned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had cited its owner, Gopher Resource, as a significant lead polluter.
“It turns out the EPA had issued a report looking at all the places in the country that were out of compliance with the Clean Air Act, the federal act on pollution,” Johnson says. “In the report, there was one place in Florida that was in violation for lead and that one place was in Hillsborough County.”
Johnson teamed up with two other journalists at the news outlet — investigative reporter Rebecca Woolington and data reporter Eli Murray — to find out what was going on there. Their 18-month investigation, chronicled in a three-part series published last year, exposes a host of serious problems at the factory and in the surrounding community.
What the journalists uncovered
The plant employs more than 300 people and recycles about 50,000 used car batteries a day. The lead they contain is toxic to humans and, at high levels, can cause kidney and brain damage and even death. It’s especially dangerous for children because their bodies are more sensitive to its effects. Even low levels of lead in their blood can result in lower IQ scores, learning difficulties, hyperactivity and developmental delays, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Johnson, Woolington and Murray’s series, “Poisoned,” reveals workers were exposed to airborne lead at levels hundreds of times higher than the federal government allows, and some inadvertently took lead dust home and exposed their children. And while officials at Gopher Resource knew the plant had too much lead dust, key features of its ventilation system had been dismantled or turned off, the journalists reported. Respirators issued to workers did not provide sufficient protection for the levels of lead circulating inside the factory.
Some of the other main findings:
- “Eight out of 10 workers from 2014 to 2018 had enough lead in their blood to put them at risk of increased blood pressure, kidney dysfunction or cardiovascular disease,” they write. “In the past five years, at least 14 current and former workers have had heart attacks or strokes, some after working in the most contaminated areas of the plant. One employee spent more than three decades around the poison before dying of heart and kidney disease at 56.”
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in charge of workplace health and safety, “has repeatedly bungled the job at Gopher, allowing hazardous conditions to persist for years,” the journalists write. “OSHA gave Gopher ample warning before site visits, which meant the company had time to deep-clean a factory coated with lead. The agency sent inspectors who missed evidence of dangerous levels of lead in the air, or who made other critical errors, including testing for the wrong chemical after workers complained about high gas exposure.” They note that OSHA stopped inspecting Gopher altogether five years before Johnson, Woolington and Murray began investigating.
- The factory polluted the air and water outside its walls. “In the past six years, Gopher repeatedly discharged polluted water into the Palm River, sent too many chemicals into Tampa’s sewer system, and mishandled hazardous waste,” according to the series. “It erroneously shipped tons of a dangerous material to a landfill near a residential community in Polk County at least twice. Gopher reported the error, and state regulators forced the company to dig up the waste.”
In spring 2021, in response to the Tampa Bay Times investigation, two members of Congress from the Tampa area asked the U.S. Department of Labor to look into the plant’s practices. Shortly afterward, OSHA launched a six-month inspection and ultimately cited Gopher for 44 violations, including one for willfully exposing workers to high levels of lead.
In the midst of that review, the global credit-rating agency Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Gopher’s credit rating to “very high credit risk,” potentially making it more difficult and expensive for the company to borrow money.
Meanwhile, county regulators conducted their own inspection and found more than two dozen possible violations. OSHA and Hillsborough County’s Environmental Protection Commission levied a total of $837,000 in fines.
The series prompted other changes as well.