By Enrique Saenz for Mirror Indy.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Mirror Indy-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.

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.




Enrique Saenz wrote this article for Mirror Indy.


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Indiana environmental advocates are facing uncertainties following the election.

Changes in federal leadership could shift key environmental protections, creating questions for state policies on coal ash and water quality.

Sam Carpenter, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, noted federal regulations, like those from the Environmental Protection Agency, have helped Indiana manage environmental challenges, including addressing unlined coal ash pits contaminating groundwater. With shifting federal priorities, there is a question of what will happen to the protections.

"The EPA had recently come out with guidelines that require those to be cleaned up," Carpenter pointed out. "There are similar things with coal-fired power plants where we still rely quite a bit on our coal power generation which is dirty."

Carpenter argued the plants are costly and harmful to health and the climate. Supporters of reduced regulation argue scaling back federal oversight could ease economic pressures on Indiana's coal industry and reduce costs for energy providers.

Carpenter expressed concern over Indiana's legislative stance, emphasizing a need for strong regulations to protect the well-being of Hoosiers and natural resources in the state amid increased development.

"What we need to think about is protection of our health, protection of our water, of our natural assets," Carpenter emphasized. "In our statehouse there is a real concern about regulation. We rely on some protection for natural resources."

Despite the challenges, Carpenter urged residents to stay hopeful and engaged, stressing involvement is a powerful antidote to despair. He assured supporters the council would keep pushing for clean energy, water quality improvements and partnerships across political lines to secure a healthier environment.


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Hispanic families who fish to put food on the table are disproportionately affected by mercury, which accumulates in seafood in Southern California.

Surveys at 10 piers in Los Angeles and Orange counties found 60% of the anglers were Latino and native Spanish speakers, and 78% of them were fishing to feed their families.

Sofia Barboza, ocean manager for the Hispanic Access Foundation, said the families are exposed to toxins in fish from polluted waters.

"We found that Hispanic anglers in California are actually ingesting an average of 13.9 micrograms of mercury per day via fish consumption that they had caught in local waters," Barboza reported. "This is double the amount of mercury that has been determined as safe by the EPA."

Fish with high mercury levels have also been found in the Bay Area, the Central Coast near Humboldt and Deer Creek. A newly-released report from the foundation about Latinos in U.S. fisheries found 5% of Latinos in California, or about 785,000 people, work in the agricultural, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining sectors. But no research yet exists to determine how many Latinos are in commercial fishing.

Barboza suggested the warning signs about pollution at the piers, as well as government websites, should be translated into Spanish.

"Even though 28% of the California population speaks Spanish, the California Fish and Wildlife Department fishing regulations are not provided in Spanish on their website," Barboza pointed out. "Something we would like to see moving forward."

The report also recommends stronger oversight of commercial fishing companies hiring Hispanic migrant workers on H2B visas to ensure they receive fair wages, safe working conditions and access to safe housing.

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By Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney for Capital B News.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Robert Thomas' home is still standing after the coffee-colored floodwaters of Hurricane Helene rushed through his community, but everything that made up his life has been swept away.

Thirteen days after Helene first made landfall in the U.S., it is known that at least 230 people died during the storm's surge, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately sent out more than 7,000 employees and thousands of volunteers poured into the region with tons of food, clothes, water, and other supplies, it still took days for aid to reach some people - particularly Black low-income people, the elderly, and those living with disabilities.

"There's always a major disparity," said Thomas, who remains without electricity or clean water, but has already been denied aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because his home didn't receive any physical flood or wind damage.

"You see which communities get up and running quicker," he said. Within two days of the catastrophic storm, he said he noticed utility workers restoring power in the majority white and wealthy areas of Asheville.

He, like most people who've been on social media over the past two weeks, quickly saw conspiracy theories about how the federal government was planning, or not planning, to respond to the storm.

Helene's devastation far exceeded most people's predictions, pointing to why it took FEMA time to get to some of the hardest hit areas such as western North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Most residents Capital B spoke to ultimately applauded the federal response to the storm. Yet, it is in those long days between the storm's destruction and when people can get back to their lives where stories that fuel political discontent - and in Hurricane Helene's case, political disinformation - can take root.

The social media platform X has helped fuel a firestorm of conspiracies and politically charged lies, which may have severe implications for the election. Some conspiracy theories, mainly pushed by right-wing actors, claim that FEMA abandoned some parts of North Carolina so that the Biden administration could mine lithium there for electric vehicles; that FEMA ran out of money because the Biden administration has diverted disaster funds to new arriving migrants; and that the government was bulldozing communities to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. Even North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson - the current Republican gubernatorial nominee - pushed disinformation online about recovery efforts and days later skipped a vote on hurricane relief support for a second time.

Some Black residents in Asheville and Augusta told Capital B that they don't have electricity and elections are the last thing on their minds. Asheville is about 11.2% Black and Augusta is 60% Black. In Georgia, the voter registration deadline has already passed, and in North Carolina, it is just a day away, on Oct. 11. After storms, communities usually have fewer in-person voting polls, and more mail-in ballots are lost or destroyed. And those who originally planned to vote feel like they won't have enough time or access to information to cast an educated vote.

"It is absolutely a reality that voter turnout is going to decline because at this point, everybody is so discombobulated and distracted, who is really going to want to go to a damn poll at this point when you don't have a house?" said Falasha Talbert, a mother of 10 and small-business owner in Augusta.

Typically, Black voter participation in North Carolina and Georgia is above the national average for Black voters, but based on a series of studies, there is an expectation that voting in the impacted regions will decline by around 10%. Augusta's Richmond County was just one of two eastern Georgia counties impacted by the storm that turned blue in 2020. Likewise, Asheville's Buncombe County was the only storm-impacted western North Carolina county outside Charlotte that went Democrat.

As Hurricane Milton causes destruction across Florida, advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to heed what has already been seen across the region. "It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc," a coalition of community groups wrote to DeSantis.

"People are tired"

However, as right-wing talking points have infiltrated the disaster recovery ecosystem, it may be backfiring for Republicans - particularly because of Project 2025's vision to "defund" FEMA. After storms, elections can become more competitive if a candidate leans more anti-environment.

"FEMA has helped some people, even if they didn't help me," said Thomas, who has been assisting in relief efforts as well as voter registration in Asheville.

"But I wouldn't say that they need to be disbanded just because I didn't get what I needed from them, and [Hurricane Helene] shows the need of FEMA. So, [former President Donald Trump] talking about disbanding FEMA, and me being in a situation where I need FEMA, pushes him further away."

Thomas, 37, is a staunch supporter of Black reparations - the need for which he said has been made only more clear after Hurricane Helene's impact, but has also contributed to a lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming election because no major candidate has a reparations plan.

In Asheville, immediately after the storm hit, Keynon Lake turned his nonprofit group's headquarters into a resource distribution center. Over the week since, he and other community activists have distributed 10 to 15 passenger vans worth of water, food, and cleaning supplies every day to Black and brown victims, including those in nursing homes.

"We are still digging through the rubble and trying to find a way out," said Lake, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That. Other places routinely hit by hurricanes like Florida and Louisiana have well-oiled response ecosystems, he said, but North Carolina's has been piecemeal.

"Everyone is in survival mode and a mental lull to where it's like, 'I can't even take a shower today, so why would I be talking about next month, about politics. I don't know if people will get back there before the election."

Tomiko Ambrose Murray, a political organizer in Asheville, laid it out plainly.

"We are trying to figure out how to get Black folks to participate in the election; I think there can be a narrative that Black people don't care about climate change, and that's just false," she said.

But, "people here are sleep-deprived, aren't able to work their jobs, don't have money, or maybe possibly having been denied by FEMA, No electricity, no water, you know, those kinds of things, not being able to shower."

"And so people are on the front lines trying to support their communities. Connect people with what they need, and they're exhausted, and it's been like day after day after day. People are tired."

The exhaustion and fatigue last long after the storm and can shape how people view the government for the rest of their lives. Just ask Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Talbert says the fallout of Helene has also made racial inequities more prominent in eastern Georgia. The day after the storm, she said she had to wait hours just to get snacks from the gas station because there were no full service grocery stores within accessible distance of her majority-Black community. As people struggled to get food and gas because of price-gouging, chaos ensued. She witnessed a shooting, as well as a woman that was beginning to give birth in a car because the hospital was inaccessible.

"There was no plan in place for this, and it was obvious," she said. Talbert said she believes the aftermath of the storm, in addition to both Democrats and Republicans not being proactive in the community before the storm, will make it easy to ignore the election.

The false promise of a "climate haven"

As much of western North Carolina slept in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene had done the unimaginable by overtopping rivers in the mountain region.

Last year, Asheville ranked second in the country for the most move-ins from new residents compared with residents moving out. A lot of the growth, residents and researchers have explained, was due to the city's designation as a "climate haven" for its mild temperatures, low wildfire and drought risk, and its distance - 300 miles - from the coast, and the storms and sea level rise that brings.

In the area around Asheville, rain swelled the watershed that twists and turns for almost 1,000 square miles, running water off the natural mountainous terrain into the paved and quickly growing city of 95,000. Because the situation developed overnight, Lisa Whittenburg, a mother of three, had no time to evacuate. At more than 400 miles wide, Helene was the third-widest storm in recorded history. Even as the storm battered Florida and Georgia the night before, most residents in the area had no idea of the storm's historic length and ability to turn Asheville into a raging river. There was nowhere for the water to go but up.

After watching the floodwaters rise and swallow the first two floors of her apartment complex in the early hours of Hurricane Helene, Whittenburg accepted her fate: "It got to the point where I had just accepted it, like, 'God it is your will. If I'm not supposed to be here, I won't be.'"

So, by early morning, the family and more than a dozen other residents sat trapped on the third floor of their subsidized housing complex. There wasn't much up there with them outside of an inflatable air mattress that the family brought up in their quick thinking as they evacuated their apartment. One issue: there wasn't a pump. It did not stop Whittenburg's adult daughter Cynia from using all her might to blow up the mattress with her mouth.

"'Mama, we getting out of here,'" Whittenburg recalled her daughter saying.

But Whittenburg wanted to take her chances on the roof. She didn't know what was in the floodwaters, which are known to be full of toxins, sewage, and bacteria, and she thought to herself, "I'm gonna sink, right?" So, she waited, even as the waters threw a tractor-trailer into her apartment complex and the stilts it stood on began to crack.

Two weeks later, she is still fighting for more concrete answers from FEMA. She applied for funding and said she was approved, but the total amount and details have been confusing. Whittenburg said she no longer has anywhere to stay with electricity in the area. Sleeping or staying in her apartment, filled with muck and debris, is akin to staying in "quick sand."

"I just need to be somewhere where things are functioning," Whittenburg explained as she was packing up to leave Asheville to stay with her sister in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. "People like me don't have anything. ... I've never had to do nothing like this before."


This story was originally produced by Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney of Capital B News as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.

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