This past July, the Wall Street Journal published a multi-part series on toxic lead cables running across communities, businesses, and homes throughout the country.
The majority of our members worked with these lead lines during parts of their career. In fact, many of our members were the ones who laid the cabling and maintained them for years.
In the first half of 2023, your Association worked closely with this Pulitzer Prize winning team of Wall Street Journal reporters to make sure the voices of our retirees were recognized.
This includes a 30-minute audio podcast interview with our Chairman, Thomas Steed, who spoke on his own personal experiences with the company following his significant lead exposure and ensuing serious illness, along with the experiences of his fellow workers.
Steed told the Journal, “The removal of these cables that were now porous from being out in the weather for 50 years, hot and cold, snow, rain, sun, that’s when they really started deteriorating. It was the removal of these lead cables that I feel was the most dangerous part of our jobs because it created dust that we had to breathe.”
He also told reporters, “I found out I had lead poisoning, from the New York State Department of Health. Now, by this time … I wasn’t ill anymore, and I still had lead poisoning, but I didn’t know.”