Will COVID-19 give Santa Ana officials an excuse to ignore the city’s lead crisis?

Will COVID-19 give Santa Ana officials an excuse to ignore the city’s lead crisis?

Shahir Masri, one of the study’s lead co-authors, told Grist that the Santa Ana study shows that communities burdened by lead contamination are being left behind — particularly those without the financial means to address lead contamination in their soil themselves. “We have communities that are exceeding what EPA has decided is too high a risk, too high a concentration in the soil, and those communities aren’t being served,” said Masri, an assistant specialist in air pollution exposure assessment and epidemiology at the University of California, Irvine.