Man: Get from the big pile.

Woman: That's true.

There's some wet soil.

Man: Yeah.

Woman: I feel like, yeah, the trench.

The trench should be good.

Jones: My name's Malcolm Jones.

I'm a PhD student studying physiology at the University of Southern California.

I'm a first-generation American.

My parents are from West Africa, Liberia, and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia.

I was born there, and that's where I grew up.

Woman: Yeah.

Just set it down here.

My name is Danielle Hoague.

I am a third-year PhD student at UCLA at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, and I grew up in Altadena, California.

According to CalEnviroScreen from the Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment, Watts is in the 95th percentile of most polluted communities in California...

Letting it go.

and there are areas in Watts that are actually census tracts in Watts labeled as being in the 100th percentile.

♪ Jones: A lot of the homes in Watts are still serviced with lead pipes.

Lead pipes were outlawed in California in the late 1900s.

Hoague: There was a lead smelting facility that was built right next to Jordan Downs, and when the facility was torn away, there was a reading of 22,000 parts per million of lead.

What is legal in California is 80 parts per million.

That's 275 times the actionable level, actionable.

There's no amount of lead that is safe for the human body, none.

Jones: What should it say, like, zero or undetectable?

Hoague: It should say zero.

Jones: Lead does all these terrible things to the body physically and cognitively.

It halts neurobiological development.

Hoague: When a child is exposed to even a lead paint chip no larger than a fingernail, it's enough to lower their IQ for life.

The same size paint chip if ingested by an infant is enough to put them into a coma or induce death.

Mr. Watkins.

Watkins: Yes.

Hi.

How are you?

Jones: What's up, Mr. Watkins?

I originally met Mr. Watkins, like, two years ago just to support him as a physiologist in an event that they were doing during COVID, and he started to tell me about other things, other problems in Watts, and how I could be helpful in other ways, and I would tell him, "Mr. Watkins, I'm not a activist.

I'm a scientist.

I don't know how to get in front of people and make them do these things, but I can write this paper for you," and he shifted my mindset in that anything that you do when you're fighting for the rights of people makes you an activist.

Hoague: There's a quote by Andrew Highsmith that America is a thousand Flint, Michigans, and it's very true.

What happens in Flint happens everywhere.

It's just that not all communities have the same visibility, and Flint really had to fight for that, and we're willing to fight for Watts in the same way.