Judging by the offerings of consumer magazines and comedians, Top-10 lists have limitless appeal. Residents of the Dominican Republic, however, can be pardoned for feeling less than enthused about a recent ranking—the New York-based Blacksmith Institute’s list of the top 10 most polluted sites in the world.

The nonprofit Blacksmith Institute, which plans and implements cleanup projects in developing countries, placed two Latin American sites on its list, issued last October.

One is La Oroya, Peru, where decades of emissions from a metals-smelting complex now owned by U.S.-based Doe Run are blamed for extensive public-health problems. La Oroya, however, has long been a high-profile case of Latin American industrial contamination.

Less well-known is Haina, a community in southeast Santo Domingo where a company called Metaloxa operated a plant that melted and resold lead from discarded car batteries over a two-decade span ending in 1997. Blacksmith says blood tests of residents in the area indicate that lead from residual slag and contaminated topsoil on the one-acre plant site has affected about 85,000 people. “There are many sites in the world with a lot of exposure to hazardous substances, but you often don’t see the disease clearly,” says Jack Caravanos, an environmental-health professor at Hunter College in New York and a consultant to Blacksmith. “Lead is easy to measure in blood, so we were able to confirm lead poisoning.”

Significant health impacts

In the first study of blood lead levels ever done in the community, chemists and environmental-health experts in 1997 found that 91% of the 146 children tested had concentrations above the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood (10 ug/dL). Nearly 30% of the children had to be treated for lead poisoning. Another study, by the Chemical Institute at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD), found some Haina children and adults with blood lead levels above 100 ug/dL.

According to Blacksmith, Haina residents have reported higher-than-usual incidences of birth deformities, eye damage, learning and personality disorders and in some cases death on account of contamination caused by the plant’s past operations. Conducting an initial site assessment in February 2006, Caravanos and Blacksmith Director Richard Fuller found that children in Haina are ingesting lead from the plant site through five pathways: inhaling airborne dust containing lead particles; ingesting lead-tainted dust hand to mouth; drinking water contaminated directly with lead or dust carrying the metal; eating locally grown vegetables contaminated with lead-tainted dust or water; and touching slag rocks and ingesting lead from them hand to mouth.

Though pathways abound, cleanup is straightforward. That’s because lead does not break down in soil and stays close to the surface. “The nice thing about lead is remediation is pretty simple,” Caravanos says. “You can excavate to a point and then carry the material away. It’s much easier than, say, pesticides.”

Resources a concern

That said, Caravanos worries that the Dominican Republic lacks the resources to carry out the remediation. Its Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat has existed only since 2000, and has little experience in such work. The agency took responsibility for the Metaloxa site in 2004 and since has contracted a Puerto Rican company to do the cleanup, says Felipe Ditren, the secretariat’s director of environmental quality. Says Ditren: “Inside the secretariat we don’t have many people with experience in remediation, so we are working with several outside experts.” He adds that while no decision has been made on what to do with the lead, the excavated material will likely be sent abroad for disposal.

Local pollution is by no means limited to the former Metaloxa plant. The environment secretariat in 2000 designated the Haina River basin, home to over 100 medium to large industrial plants, as a “national hotspot” on account of pollution and public-health impacts.

The former Metaloxa site, however, is a prime focus of concern. Though excavation of some contaminated soil has taken place, much remediation work remains to be done, according to Blacksmith. Ditren reports that the government is taking legal action against Metaloxa to ensure the company helps fund cleanup efforts. “Currently two legal proceedings against Metaloxa exist,” Ditren says. “One is civil, and the other is criminal...”

After closing the Haina plant, Metaloxa moved its operations to another site in the Haina basin. But that plant has been closed since October due to pollution-control problems, according to environmental officials.

Dominican authorities say they are committed to working with Blacksmith, UASD and other institutions to meet the lead-contamination challenge. Said Zoila González, the agency’s environmental-management undersecretary, in a prepared statement: “The most important point is the remediation of the polluted area.”