The Healthy Children Organizing Project was successful in gaining the San Francisco City Attorney's help in protecting children from lead poisoning. San Francisco and Oakland have signed on to a lawsuit aimed at forcing the nation's chemical companies to pay for decades of health problems and pollution they allegedly caused by peddling poisonous lead paint to the American public. Lead-based house paints have been banned since 1978. But scientific studies have shown that cities with old housing stock, such as San Francisco and Oakland, continue to be subject to the paints' long-lasting toxic effects. They include severe mental and physical problems requiring taxpayer-funded assistance from schools and health clinics.
Young children are especially susceptible.
The companies deny wrongdoing. Attorneys for two of them downplayed the legal significance of the move by San Francisco and Oakland in interviews Friday. He cited Judge Gregory Ward's decision Dec. 8 to dismiss most of the causes of action in the case, while giving the local governments the right to modify their claims and refile them. Other counties suing the companies, besides Santa Clara, are Alameda, Solano, Santa Cruz and Kern. Moellenberg and Tim Hardy of Washington, D.C., attorney for NL, said the decision of San Francisco and Oakland to enlist in the action would make no difference.