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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (April 8, 2016)
Page 4 News of these presentations around the country where I show the preview screening of my film, I bring lead blood testing (a limited number), I bring free lead paint test kits. I realized, I could answer people’s questions in Flint I can give them unbiased information that they are looking for. S.Z.: You recently traveled to Flint and were on a panel with Sen. Bernie Sanders. T.R.: In January, in the first six weeks of the year, I went to Flint three times. The last time, I had a Lead Safe America event where I invited all of the (presidential) candidates and Bernie was the only one who said he would come. What I said in my introduction speech is that we need to stop blaming the citizens, the state government, the local government We need to blame the lead industry because they are the perpetrators of this crime. And nobody is blaming them. I got a large applause at the event but the media doesn’t seize on that. Street Roots • April 8-14, 2016 micrograms per deciliter as the toxic blood level in children). S.Z.: It’s been 10 years since then. How are the boys doing today? T.R.: They have permanent brain damage. My 11-year-old has a documented, significant permanent brain damage from lead exposure. My 13-year-old, there is a little more grey area. He has a whole lot of issues that correlate with lead exposure. It’s not as black and white as my other son’s brain injury. My youngest, it turned out, ended up testing positive for lead even' though we thought we were doing everything we could. We (made our house) lead safe, but everybody in the neighborhood is doing demolition or renovation. That is part of the S.Z.: The media does seem to seize on your story, though. 88 been poisoned; outreach and intervention and education for childhood lead poisoning prevention and parent-advocate support. ive years ago, Tamara Rubin founded The idea is to help more parents to become Lead Safe America Foundation, a advocates, to feel empowered to tell their nonprofit organization that offers stories, and reach out to more parents of education, support and advocacy for families lead poisoned children. The ultimate goal of poisoned children. would be to hold the lead industry In those few years, Rubin would never responsible for releasing the poison into our have guessed how her work, spurred by the environment for decades. poisoning of three of her children, would This summer, Rubin hopes to connect become so important to tens of thousands with many more of the nation’s lead of people across the United States. Two of poisoned families with the release of her Rubin’s children were poisoned by improper film: MisLEAD: America’s Secret Epidemic. practices of a contractor who was hired to There is a public screening of the film renovate her family’s home. A third child (maybe the last one until it is released this was poisoned by the renovations happening summer) on Monday, April 11, at the in her neighborhood. Clinton Theater in Southeast Portland at The award-winning organization works 6:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the with young mothers and families across the public, and will be followed by a discussion nation, many of whom Rubin has connected with members of the Eastside Portland Air with on social media, mostly Facebook and Coalition (EPAC) - the group organized of Twitter. Last year Lead Safe America neighbor activists after the news of connected with 25,000 families. concerning levels of heavy metals emissions Rubin will talk to anybody about lead in a number of Portland neighborhoods. poisoning from presidential candidates to a mom in Nowhere, Ark., or Flint, Mich. Suzanne Zalokar: Though you were Recently, the drummer of the band Phish, raised in Massachusetts, you were bom in Jon Fishman, and his wife reached out to Saginaw, Mich., just 37 miles from Flint. LSA. Their child suffered lead poisoning and When you became aware of the lead poisoning they made a donation to the Portland-based there, what was your first thought? nonprofit In fact, Rubin’s foundation is Tamara Rubin: There’s like 100,000 funded nearly entirely by donations received people poisoned. What can I do? I’m a low- from parents of lead poisoned children. income mom in Oregon running this The group has three goals: emergency nonprofit intervention and support if your kids have Then I realized that I have done about 85 BY SUZANNE ZALOKAR STAFF WRITER F T.R.: My kids were poisoned in Irvington. We actually moved to Portland in 2001 and our house burnt down and we lost everything. We had a two-year protracted lawsuit with the insurance company. We were on the verge of homelessness the entire time. My family stepped up and helped us out and we ended up buying the house in Irvington. We thought, “Okay, we’re going to start over again.” We planned to live our lives (in the Irvington house). We got back on our feet after the fire and were going to get our home in Irvington into our own name, finally. In order to do that, we needed a new appraisal, so we needed a new mortgage in order to get the new appraisal. Our mortgage broker told us we should get the house repainted (as a part of) a new appraisal. So we got the house repainted and refinanced in our own name and then we were told we had to move out of the house immediately because our kids had lead poisoning from the repaint job. S.Z.: My god. T.R.: We tried to sue the contractor, but there was no recourse, essentially. The law was an administrative law that had no enforcement and no fine. So basically, if you poison someone with arsenic or any other kind of poison, you’d go to jail, but if you poison someone by using unsafe work practices and poison a whole family with lead, (nothing happens). Our contractor had used an open flame torch to bum the paint off the exterior of our house. My baby, seven months old, inhaled the fumes. Because we were ostensibly white and middle income - from looking at you, your doctors make . assumptions - they didn’t test us for lead. They never even suggested it. So for two months my kids were violently ill. Finally, I said, “Have them tested for everything.” My older son was positive for lead. They didn’t want to test the baby because he was only 9 months old, but I insisted. He was sick too and we needed to know what was going on. He was acutely blood poisoned with a blood level of 16 micrograms per deciliter. (Since 1995, the Center for Disease Control has set 10 COURTESY OF TAMARA RUBIN Tamara Rubin in a scene from the documentary MisLEAD, due out this summer. hazard of living in the city, I tell parents. I tested positive for lead with a blood lead level (BLL) of 1.0. My doctor recently did a study that shows that 0.4 - 0.5 level can cause low birth weight in newborns and other birth complications. S.Z.: So is everyone living in urban areas probably lead poisoned just because we live in the city? T.R.: Oh yeah. Depending on where you lived between your birth and 1996, depends on the level of your lead exposure. We were lead poisoned. Some people say, “Well it didn’t hurt me!” So I ask, do you have thyroid disorder? Weight issues? Kidney issues? Who has diabetes? Who has headaches? There are all of these symptoms that are collectively (more pervasive) health impairments over the last 100 years since we aggressively introduced lead into our environment. S.Z.: What is Lead Safe America Foundation involved with today? T.R.: Right now, it’s tipping the scales with the air quality issue, so usually I’d say 20-35 percent of the families that we help are in Portland. Right now it’s probably closer to 50-60 percent. We’ve got all this soil testing to do. We have 190 test kit requests that we have to fulfill. That’s a lot We used to get 10 to 20 a month. Just this month, we have 193 requests. My original goal was to help 100 the first year, help 500 the second year and maybe 2,000 the third year. In reality, our third year was 6,000, our fourth year was 16,000, and then this year we helped 25,000 families. See LEAD, page 5
