OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing a pipe fitting factory in East Oakland, accusing it of illegally emitting carcinogenic toxins into the community around it.
The state’s lawsuit was filed Wednesday in Alameda County Superior Court and accuses the AB&I Foundry, a subsidiary of McWane, Inc., of failing to provide state-required warnings of the release of hexavalent chromium, a toxin that can cause lung and other forms of cancer. The suit also says AB&I did not take required steps to reduce the emission of the carcinogen from its facility.
Representatives from McWane did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
It’s the second time in the last three months McWane has been hit with a lawsuit over emissions from the AB&I Foundry. In December, resident-led environmental justice group Communities for a Better Environment sued the company. Like the Attorney General’s lawsuit, the group has accused the pipe fitting factory of flouting California law requiring it to notify the community when emissions of the toxin rise above a certain threshold. That lawsuit is ongoing.
The two lawsuits come after the Bay Area Air Quality Management District released a draft Health Risk Assessment last year, identifying AB&I Foundry has having “twenty operations at this facility that emit one or more toxic air contaminants.” The assessment found the cancer risk for workers at the facility was four times what the air district considers acceptable, and that the cancer risk for residents in the neighborhood was twice as high as what is considered acceptable by the air district.
Residents reported to the air district symptoms such as headaches from the odors emitted by the factory. The air district found that toxic metal emissions were the biggest risk to health. About 81% of the cancer risk they identified was due to hexavalant chromium emissions, although the emissions of toxins including benzene and cadmium also add to the risk of cancer.
The foundry, located on San Leandro Street in a densely populated area near the Oakland Coliseum, is within a mile of about 10 schools. The Attorney General’s office found that about 85% of the households in the community are living under the poverty line and are mostly Latino and Black residents. The office, citing a state mapping tool used to identify populations most affected by pollution, found that the communities near the foundry experience some of the highest pollution burdens in the state and have more asthma-related emergency department visits than any other census tract in the state.
Last March, AB&I Foundry said it would reduce emissions in Oakland by shifting about half its 200 positions to Texas in 2022. Executives there complained of “ever increasing regulatory standards” in an announcement about the shift.
The jobs moving to Texas are related to a sand casting system for molding the cast iron pipes and pipe fittings it makes from recycled scrap metal. It said at the time it would continue with non-molding operations in Oakland.
The lawsuit by the state seeks an unspecified amount of civil penalties as well as injunctive orders to prevent the foundry from continuing to emit the toxins at the level they have.
