POISONED

Part 1: THE FACTORY

Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.

By COREY G. JOHNSON, REBECCA WOOLINGTON and ELI MURRAYTimes Staff WritersMar. 24, 2021

Plumes of dust, laced with lead, blow across the factory like a sandstorm. The poison hangs so thick in the air, sometimes the only thing visible is the warm, orange glow from the furnace.

Workers, hundreds of them, sweat through 12-hour shifts at Gopher Resource in Tampa. They extract lead from used car batteries, melt it down and turn it into blocks of metal to resell.

Eric Autery, 43, came to the plant in the summer of 2017 looking for a fresh start. An Army vet from Virginia, he dodged bullets and mine explosions in Afghanistan and Iraq but faced new dangers inside Florida’s lone lead smelter.

He worked in the furnace department, skimming impurities off the top of gleaming, molten lead. He moved fast in suffocating heat against a steady mist of fumes. He’d feel his respirator slide on his face, the seal separating from his pooling sweat. He’d smell the metallic stench, like old coins, creeping in.

His complexion turned gray. His body felt heavy. His head pounded.

The level of lead in his blood shot up weeks after he started. Co-workers and supervisors told him he needed to wash better before breaks, or after his shift.

But the poison was bound to enter his body. The amount of lead in the air was seven times what Autery’s company-issued respirator could handle.

Autery is among hundreds of workers at Gopher who have been exposed to extreme amounts of lead.

They've inhaled it, been burned by it, been covered in it.

And no one has stopped it.

Tampa Bay Times reporters spent 18 months examining thousands of pages of regulatory reports and company documents, including data tracking the amount of lead in the air and in workers’ blood. They interviewed more than 80 current and former workers, 20 of whom shared their medical records.

The following investigative findings will be detailed in a series of stories starting today:

• Gopher exposed workers for years to levels of lead in the air that were hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. At times, the concentration was considered life-threatening. Workers described regular tasks that left them caked with dust, as though they’d been dunked in powdered sugar.
• 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. 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.
• Gopher knew its factory had too much lead dust, but the company disabled ventilation features that captured fumes and moved slowly to fix faulty mechanical systems. Workers were left vulnerable, wearing respirators that couldn’t protect them when poison levels spiked. In 2019, one employee faced an air-lead concentration 15 times beyond what his respirator could guard against.
• Federal rules required that Gopher provide regular checkups, but the company-contracted doctor didn’t tell workers their blood-lead levels put them in danger. When employees had health problems that could be tied to lead exposure, he cleared them to work.
• Gopher rewarded employees with bonuses if they kept the amount of lead in their blood down and punished those who couldn’t, a practice that alarmed medical experts and ethicists. Workers took desperate measures to strip metals from their bodies, including undergoing dangerous medical procedures. In the most extreme cases, some donated contaminated blood.
• Dust from the plant has been the suspected cause of lead exposure in at least 16 children — the sons and daughters of employees who unwittingly carried the poison home in their cars or on the soles of their shoes. A baby girl tested so high for the neurotoxin that her pediatrician recommended she be monitored weekly.
• Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulators haven’t inspected the factory for lead contamination since 2014 and missed critical problems in previous visits. Even when top regional safety officials ordered increased inspections of lead businesses across the Southeast, no one came to the only place in Florida that produces the metal.

This story is part of a collaboration with FRONTLINE, the PBS series, through its Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Company officials would not agree to an interview. Gopher’s Chief Operating Officer Eric Robinson issued a statement to the Times and answered some questions in writing.

He said Gopher has cut average employee blood-lead levels in half since acquiring the plant in 2006 and has invested $140 million to make the factory safer. He also said the company devotes thousands of hours a year to safety training.

“Our people and the communities we serve are the most important part of our work, and that is why our overriding core value is to protect people and communities,” Robinson said. “We go to significant lengths to keep our employees safe.”

In the last decade, more than a third of the lead battery-recycling factories in the United States have gone out of business, including one in South Carolina that shut down this week. Only 10 such factories remain. Minnesota-based Gopher Resource owns two of them.

The company, founded 75 years ago, generates hundreds of millions in annual revenue, according to one financial analyst. Its clients have included the U.S. military, battery makers and ammunition suppliers.

More than 300 people work at the Tampa location. Many are Black or immigrants. Some came to the plant without a diploma or straight from high school, others as they restarted their lives after arrests or time in prison.

The job offered roughly $20 an hour with sizable bonuses — more money than some workers believed their circumstances would allow.

The factory is about 6 miles east of downtown Tampa, next to a CSX rail yard and a half mile from Kenly Elementary. Its smokestacks tower above the community of small residential homes, auto-repair shops and places of worship.

Gopher touts green manufacturing that helps keep 13 million batteries out of landfills each year. But over the last decade, the plant has been a key reason why Hillsborough has had more adult lead poisoning cases than any other county in Florida, according to health department reports.

Since 2010, the county has recorded more than 2,400 lead poisoning cases among children and adults, surpassing even Miami-Dade County, which has almost twice as many residents.

Lead wreaks havoc on nearly every system in the body. The health effects are so wide-ranging, they can be blamed entirely on other causes.

Gopher workers have no definitive way to identify if any of their health problems were caused by lead. But many medical conditions could be made worse by repeated and prolonged exposure, especially at the levels found inside the plant.

Ten medical and industrial experts told the Times that Gopher clearly needed to lower the contamination levels — some so high, they’re typically seen only in developing countries.

Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, an expert in heavy metal toxicity at Columbia University, called worker exposures at Gopher “totally unacceptable.”

Inside the factory, the sight of dust alone could be unsettling.

Autery, the Army vet, spent just over a year at Gopher. He remembered the first time he walked inside.

“What’s all this dust here on the ground?” Autery asked the worker who showed him around.

Lead particles.

“What?” Autery responded. “This isn’t dirt?”

No, it’s lead.

Eric Autery saw his blood-lead levels jump soon after he began work at Gopher. [ MARTHA ASENCIO-RHINE | Times ]

Inside the dust storm

Production runs day and night. Dozens of workers clock in at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. A tangle of pipes, hissing hoses and clanking conveyor belts awaits them in a searing heat.

They feed used car batteries into machinery that crushes them, drains the acid and separates the lead from plastic shells. The lead is scooped with loader trucks and fed into furnaces that burn at around 1,500 degrees. The metal liquefies there.

It’s not unusual for water to hit liquid lead, triggering violent explosions that send molten metal flying. Scars from lead splashes are so common workers refer to them as “tattoos” and consider them a rite of passage.

The lead slides down chutes, making its way into kettles, where it glows like lava against the darkened refinery. Workers sprinkle in chemicals to purify it then pour it into molds, branded with the company’s name.

Most of the factory isn’t air-conditioned, and the furnaces rarely switch off. Firefighters have responded to workers overexposed to chemicals and others who were dizzy, struggling to breathe or dehydrated.

Some left the plant on stretchers, as their heart raced or consciousness faded.

Kevin Lewis’ heart pounded so hard and fast while he worked in the furnace department, the 26-year-old couldn’t catch his breath. He was whisked away by ambulance.

Kevin Lewis, a former furnace worker at Gopher, left the factory in an ambulance after his heart started pounding. [ MARTHA ASENCIO-RHINE | Times ]

Larry Wheeler became disoriented and fainted while working in one of the dustier areas of the plant. An ambulance rushed the 39-year-old to the hospital, where medical staff told him to limit his exposure to lead.

James Pitts, 49, blacked out with an erratic heart rate as he walked from the locker room to start his maintenance shift. He was taken by paramedics to the hospital.

Robinson, the Gopher executive, declined to answer questions about specific worker exposures or injuries, citing health privacy laws.

All three men had histories of elevated levels of lead in their bodies while working at Gopher.

Poisons are everywhere inside the factory, including sulfur dioxide, and cancer-causing cadmium and arsenic.

Lead is the most prevalent.

OSHA rules require companies to measure the amount of lead in the air by hooking up monitors to workers.

The rules limit worker exposure to an average of 50 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air over an eight-hour shift. That’s roughly equivalent to a pile of lead dust 1 millimeter wide, long and tall. About the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.

In the factory, lead-infused dust blankets the concrete floors. It is piled in corners and coats the cabs of forklifts and loader trucks. Some areas are so dusty and dim, they look like the gray aftermath of a bomb.

The company built a new plant on the property in 2012 and announced it would quadruple production while operating more safely. A sophisticated ventilation system was supposed to capture the dangerous dust. But it has not worked properly, according to interviews and internal studies from 2012, 2013 and 2017.

As a result, lead in the plant’s air routinely has been hundreds of times above the federal limit, lab reports show.

The Times obtained and analyzed more than 300 air samples collected by the company from monitors attached to workers from 2007 to 2019. Lead levels exceeded the protection capabilities of the respirators issued to most workers 16 percent of the time plantwide and 26 percent of the time in the furnace department.

Gopher leaders knew lower numbers were achievable. They had to look no further than their other plant in Eagan, Minn.

Tampa employees who traveled to Eagan for meetings or training sessions were stunned by what they saw. The floors were so clean, they joked, you could eat off them.

From 2013 to 2014, the average air-lead reading in Tampa’s furnace department was six times higher than Eagan’s, according to data submitted to Minnesota regulators and other company records.

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The highest air reading anywhere inside the Eagan factory was 2,537 micrograms of lead per cubic meter. That’s dozens of times above the federal limit but nowhere near Tampa’s highest reading. In Tampa, it was 78,729 — or more than 1,500 times the federal limit.

In June 2014, a Tampa employee was exposed to 172,655 micrograms of lead per cubic meter while working in the baghouse, where dust gets routed from other parts of the plant. The next year, an air monitor recorded a lead concentration surpassing 200,000.

Those readings were well above the level federal officials consider life-threatening.

Video taken by a worker from the baghouse in 2014 showed dust billowing through a pipe, a gray-brown cloud painting a haze across the workspace. Equipment buzzed and whistled as workers drove small forklift trucks, without windshields.

Workers described pausing their loader trucks in parts of the plant because it became too dusty to see. They tried to clean the floor with push-brooms and shovels, only to toss more dust into the air.

By the end of some shifts, the poisonous dust stuck to their sweaty skin like sand.