Life of Lead

La Oroya, Peru is a city of about 33,000 people on the River Mantaro in central Peru. La Oroya is the location of a smelting operation that earned the town a place on many lists, “The World’s Worst Polluted Places”.

2 million pounds of lead contamination come out of Doe Run stacks daily. Because of its toxicity, lead has lost many of its traditional markets such as paint, solder, tetraethyl lead (an additive to petrol/gasoline) and piping.

The contaminants hang like a pall overhead, billowing across the city and falling on everything.

Plumes of contaminants hover over the city like deadly clouds unescapable. A gradual improvement of the conditions have not yet been confirmed by any independent Institution.

The people of La Oroya are exposed to lead day by day, minute by minute. It permeates everything.

The contamination gets trapped between steep walls creating a gas chamber that holds the contaminants in.

Until 1997 the smelter had been run without any concern for the environment with the result that the hills around the smelter had been reduced to a moonscape by sulfur dioxide from the smelters; the already polluted river had been made even more polluted by untreated process water; the soil in the city and surroundings had become contaminated with lead; the people in the city, especially the young, had dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

Children play in a park near the Doe Run smelting facility.

Due to the amount of contamination coming from the Doe Run facility over 99% percent of the cities twelve thousand children have lead levels many times greater than U.S. standards.

The lead falls in a fine unseen mist contaminating everything, homes, streets, clothing, toys…

Many experts believe that when a child’s blood lead level exceeds 10 mg/dL -a relatively low level of exposure – there is a high probability of permanent neurological damage.

Most of the children of La Oroya were exposed to exceedingly dangerous levels of lead even before they were born. A 2007 study of newborn babies in La Oroya by neurologist Dr Hugo Villa showed a quarter of those tested had dangerously high lead levels in their blood. According to another study, 67 percent of children in La Oroya had lead levels so high that they should have been medically treated.

In children, exposure at this level can lead to decreased intelligence, short-term memory loss, reading under-achievement, impairment of visual-motor function, loss of auditory memory, poor perceptual integration, poor classroom behavior, and impaired reaction time.