The city of Oakland has long known about a serious health hazard that disproportionately affects Black and Latino residents. Lead, a toxic metal once used in plumbing infrastructure, paint and gas, persists in the environment at levels that put Oakland’s vulnerable communities at risk.
The persistence of lead is daunting: About 80% of Oakland’s rental housing likely contains lead-based paint. Approximately 30 Oakland Unified School District schools were found to have high levels of lead in their water in 2024. And Fruitvale, one of Oakland’s predominately Latino neighborhoods, is home to more lead-poisoned children than Flint, MI.
Yet reporters Jasmine Aguilera and Cassandra Garibay discovered a multimillion-dollar fund from a 2019 lead paint settlement remains untouched in a city account. Baffled by this, Aguilera and Garibay decided to investigate why Oakland officials had done little to address the issue.
Through a series of public records requests, interviews with Alameda County and Oakland city officials, and an analysis of public meetings dating back to 2017, they discovered a pattern of distrust, turnover and inaction contributed to the dangerous lead levels in the city.
This series, Poisoned pipes and painted walls: Oakland’s pervasive lead problem involved a multi-pronged approach to community engagement and investigative journalism to amplify the concerns of Latino and Mayan communities affected by lead exposure in Oakland. Typically, lead isn’t discovered in homes until irreparable damage has been done to residents’ health. El Tímpano partnered with the UC Berkeley East Bay Academy for Young Scientists (EBAYS) to host an educational workshop in Spanish on lead exposure and risk in the heart of one of Oakland’s lead hotspots. The partnership continued as reporters collected and gave soil samples from the community to the EBAYS lab for testing.
The impact of the story was immediate. Following the publication of Toxic Inaction, the Alameda County Lead Poisoning Prevention Program Joint Powers Authority—an intergovernmental lead hazard advisory agency with representatives from different Alameda County cities—discussed the findings from El Tímpano’s reporting in two separate convenings. In late November 2024, they sent a letter to Oakland city officials urging them to use the funds. The letter, sent exclusively to El Tímpano, urges the city of Oakland to use the settlement funds to address lead hazards in schools belonging to the Oakland Unified School District. The board members described Oakland’s inaction as a “dereliction of duty.”
Aguilera and Garibay have also shared information about lead exposure with thousands of Latino residents in Oakland by tabling at local libraries, door-knocking in areas with elevated lead exposure risks, and inviting our more than 5,000 SMS subscribers to provide soil or paint samples. The outreach also led the reporters to Yazmin Alvarez, the young mother with kidney failure featured in the story. Alvarez’s mother, Minerva Flores, was one of the dozens of SMS subscribers who responded to our callouts offering free lead testing.
