More than 100 people gathered at a southeast-side community center Thursday evening to hear city and federal officials talk about manganese pollution recently discovered near an industrial storage facility owned by the S.H. Bell Company. The city’s Department of Public Health presented data from soil sampling conduced at 27 addresses; some samples revealed concentrations of the neurotoxic heavy metal that exceeds thresholds for emergency removal. Representatives from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the CDC were also present to outline next steps in analyzing the soil at homes near S.H. Bell. Though the meeting was meant to educate residents about what’s currently known about manganese contamination in the area, the officials were quickly schooled by organized and vocal East Siders, who had little patience for bureaucratic lingo and ambiguous explanations.
After these presentations dozens of residents peppered officials with questions, demanding to know why the city and the EPA hadn’t been sounding the alarm about manganese sooner.
“None of you have respected any of us,” said Jade Mazon—cofounder of the Rebel Bells, a social-justice-oriented girls’ collective on the southeast side—to the panelists. “We’ve been living with this since before we were born, we’ve been invisible, and no, you don’t know what it’s like to be in our shoes. Come live here, next door to me for 20 years and raise your children on half-assed everything. Half-assed everything, that’s what we get: half-assed schools, sidewalks, streets, whatever it is, we are invisible.”
“One of the hardest parts for me is that no one can tell us what the health impacts may be from the manganese exposure,” she said. “We are asking the city to issue a moratorium on manganese handling here on the southeast side.” She also chastised Mayor Rahm Emanuel for spending millions on redeveloping former industrial sites along the Chicago River on the north side while ignoring redevelopment and cleanup in the Calumet River area. “It is so unfair. We can see right through what the priorities of the city have been.”
