PHI’s Anne Kelsey Lamb Discusses Potential Health Impacts of Oakland-Based Metal Recycling Fire

“The engine from Oakland Fire Department’s Station Number 2 had rolled out to Schnitzer Steel before, but this call was different.

It wasn’t the typical smoldering nugget of debris. Instead, smoke was billowing from a massive pile of scrap as flames shot outward from an orange glow deep within.

Lt. Eduardo Ibarra was on that engine, the first to respond to the metal shredder’s bayside yard that night in August 2023. He guessed the burning pile was close to the size of a football field, 50 to 70 feet high in places.

The glowing core — the seat, the origin of the fire — proved hard to reach, with the scrap piled up near the back fence. Fire crews struggled to maneuver their trucks and hoses around the mound, and it soon became clear that something inside was volatile.

Hours after the first fire truck arrived, repeated explosions sent hot metal sizzling through the air. At one point, an oval piece of metal about two feet long and four feet wide flew over the heads of Ibarra and his crew, landing on a discarded Bay Area Rapid Transit car, where it burned through the roof and started another fire.

“The explosions [are] not something that we deal with all the time,” Ibarra later told Public Health Watch. “We do deal with explosions from, like propane tanks and things like that, RV fires and things of that nature. But we never deal with explosions of this caliber on a regular basis.”

About 23,000 people live in West Oakland within a mile of the Schnitzer site, and thousands more live downwind.

‘Hard to breathe’

Smoke was detected in communities as far away as Livermore and San Jose. Even though winds initially had carried pollution south of the facility, people who lived and worked in West Oakland opted to shelter in place. A small survey from the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project found that more than half of residents had health impacts from the fire. Only one reported receiving an alert, but didn’t indicate whether it was by phone, social media or email.

Metal shredding is far from the only hazard in West Oakland, a community designated as overburdened by pollution using the state’s environmental assessment tool. Located on a bulbous nub of land, hemmed in by freeways, the neighborhood is surrounded by infrastructure for moving goods. Trucks and ships spew pollution on the way to and from the Port of Oakland, and the landscape is decidedly industrial.

Schnitzer/Radius is part of that cumulative burden, according to Anne Kelsey Lamb, who runs a program focused on asthma for the Oakland-based nonprofit Public Health Institute.

Lamb testified before the grand jury about sampling data that local air officials gathered before, during and after the fire. The air sampling showed elevated levels of heavy metals, including zinc, lead, bromine, chlorine and copper. That data, she said, shows that West Oakland absolutely suffered health consequences from the incident.

Referring to a research article estimating premature deaths attributable to California wildfires, Lamb testified that “we could deduce that a fire of the magnitude that the Schnitzer fire was, would contribute to some premature deaths.”

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Originally published by Public Health Watch