Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray of the Tampa Bay Times

Hundreds of workers at a Tampa lead smelter have been exposed to dangerous levels of the neurotoxin. The consequences have been profound.

By Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray

Plumes of dust, laced with lead, blow across the factory like a sandstorm. The poison hangs so thick in the air, sometimes the only thing visible is the warm, orange glow from the furnace.

Workers, hundreds of them, sweat through 12-hour shifts at Gopher Resource in Tampa. They extract lead from used car batteries, melt it down and turn it into blocks of metal to resell.

Eric Autery, 43, came to the plant in the summer of 2017 looking for a fresh start. An Army vet from Virginia, he dodged bullets and mine explosions in Afghanistan and Iraq but faced new dangers inside Florida’s lone lead smelter.

He worked in the furnace department, skimming impurities off the top of gleaming, molten lead. He moved fast in suffocating heat against a steady mist of fumes. He’d feel his respirator slide on his face, the seal separating from his pooling sweat. He’d smell the metallic stench, like old coins, creeping in.

His complexion turned gray. His body felt heavy. His head pounded.

The level of lead in his blood shot up weeks after he started. Co-workers and supervisors told him he needed to wash better before breaks, or after his shift.

But the poison was bound to enter his body. The amount of lead in the air was seven times what Autery’s company-issued respirator could handle.

Autery is among hundreds of workers at Gopher who have been exposed to extreme amounts of lead.

They've inhaled it, been burned by it, been covered in it.

And no one has stopped it.

Tampa Bay Times reporters spent 18 months examining thousands of pages of regulatory reports and company documents, including data tracking the amount of lead in the air and in workers’ blood. They interviewed more than 80 current and former workers, 20 of whom shared their medical records.

The following investigative findings will be detailed in a series of stories starting today:

• Gopher exposed workers for years to levels of lead in the air that were hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. At times, the concentration was considered life-threatening. Workers described regular tasks that left them caked with dust, as though they’d been dunked in powdered sugar.
• Eight out of 10 workers from 2014 to 2018 had enough lead in their blood to put them at risk of increased blood pressure, kidney dysfunction or cardiovascular disease. In the past five years, at least 14 current and former workers have had heart attacks or strokes, some after working in the most contaminated areas of the plant. One employee spent more than three decades around the poison before dying of heart and kidney disease at 56.
• Gopher knew its factory had too much lead dust, but the company disabled ventilation features that captured fumes and moved slowly to fix faulty mechanical systems. Workers were left vulnerable, wearing respirators that couldn’t protect them when poison levels spiked. In 2019, one employee faced an air-lead concentration 15 times beyond what his respirator could guard against.
• Federal rules required that Gopher provide regular checkups, but the company-contracted doctor didn’t tell workers their blood-lead levels put them in danger. When employees had health problems that could be tied to lead exposure, he cleared them to work.
• Gopher rewarded employees with bonuses if they kept the amount of lead in their blood down and punished those who couldn’t, a practice that alarmed medical experts and ethicists. Workers took desperate measures to strip metals from their bodies, including undergoing dangerous medical procedures. In the most extreme cases, some donated contaminated blood.
• Dust from the plant has been the suspected cause of lead exposure in at least 16 children — the sons and daughters of employees who unwittingly carried the poison home in their cars or on the soles of their shoes. A baby girl tested so high for the neurotoxin that her pediatrician recommended she be monitored weekly.
• Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulators haven’t inspected the factory for lead contamination since 2014 and missed critical problems in previous visits. Even when top regional safety officials ordered increased inspections of lead businesses across the Southeast, no one came to the only place in Florida that produces the metal.

Company officials would not agree to an interview. Gopher’s Chief Operating Officer Eric Robinson issued a statement to the Times and answered some questions in writing.

He said Gopher has cut average employee blood-lead levels in half since acquiring the plant in 2006 and has invested $140 million to make the factory safer. He also said the company devotes thousands of hours a year to safety training.

“Our people and the communities we serve are the most important part of our work, and that is why our overriding core value is to protect people and communities,” Robinson said. “We go to significant lengths to keep our employees safe.”

In the last decade, more than a third of the lead battery-recycling factories in the United States have gone out of business, including one in South Carolina that shut down this week. Only 10 such factories remain. Minnesota-based Gopher Resource owns two of them.

The company, founded 75 years ago, generates hundreds of millions in annual revenue, according to one financial analyst. Its clients have included the U.S. military, battery makers and ammunition suppliers.

More than 300 people work at the Tampa location. Many are Black or immigrants. Some came to the plant without a diploma or straight from high school, others as they restarted their lives after arrests or time in prison.

The job offered roughly $20 an hour with sizable bonuses — more money than some workers believed their circumstances would allow.

The factory is about 6 miles east of downtown Tampa, next to a CSX rail yard and a half mile from Kenly Elementary. Its smokestacks tower above the community of small residential homes, auto-repair shops and places of worship.

Gopher touts green manufacturing that helps keep 13 million batteries out of landfills each year. But over the last decade, the plant has been a key reason why Hillsborough has had more adult lead poisoning cases than any other county in Florida, according to health department reports.

Since 2010, the county has recorded more than 2,400 lead poisoning cases among children and adults, surpassing even Miami-Dade County, which has almost twice as many residents.

Lead wreaks havoc on nearly every system in the body. The health effects are so wide-ranging, they can be blamed entirely on other causes.

Gopher workers have no definitive way to identify if any of their health problems were caused by lead. But many medical conditions could be made worse by repeated and prolonged exposure, especially at the levels found inside the plant.

Ten medical and industrial experts told the Times that Gopher clearly needed to lower the contamination levels — some so high, they’re typically seen only in developing countries.

Dr. Ana Navas-Acien, an expert in heavy metal toxicity at Columbia University, called worker exposures at Gopher “totally unacceptable.”

Inside the factory, the sight of dust alone could be unsettling.

Autery, the Army vet, spent just over a year at Gopher. He remembered the first time he walked inside.

“What’s all this dust here on the ground?” Autery asked the worker who showed him around.

Lead particles.

“What?” Autery responded. “This isn’t dirt?”

No, it’s lead.

Inside the dust storm

Production runs day and night. Dozens of workers clock in at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. A tangle of pipes, hissing hoses and clanking conveyor belts awaits them in a searing heat.

They feed used car batteries into machinery that crushes them, drains the acid and separates the lead from plastic shells. The lead is scooped with loader trucks and fed into furnaces that burn at around 1,500 degrees. The metal liquefies there.

It’s not unusual for water to hit liquid lead, triggering violent explosions that send molten metal flying. Scars from lead splashes are so common workers refer to them as “tattoos” and consider them a rite of passage.

The lead slides down chutes, making its way into kettles, where it glows like lava against the darkened refinery. Workers sprinkle in chemicals to purify it then pour it into molds, branded with the company’s name.

Most of the factory isn’t air-conditioned, and the furnaces rarely switch off. Firefighters have responded to workers overexposed to chemicals and others who were dizzy, struggling to breathe or dehydrated.

Some left the plant on stretchers, as their heart raced or consciousness faded.

Kevin Lewis’ heart pounded so hard and fast while he worked in the furnace department, the 26-year-old couldn’t catch his breath. He was whisked away by ambulance.

Larry Wheeler became disoriented and fainted while working in one of the dustier areas of the plant. An ambulance rushed the 39-year-old to the hospital, where medical staff told him to limit his exposure to lead.

James Pitts, 49, blacked out with an erratic heart rate as he walked from the locker room to start his maintenance shift. He was taken by paramedics to the hospital.

Robinson, the Gopher executive, declined to answer questions about specific worker exposures or injuries, citing health privacy laws.

All three men had histories of elevated levels of lead in their bodies while working at Gopher.

Poisons are everywhere inside the factory, including sulfur dioxide, and cancer-causing cadmium and arsenic.

Lead is the most prevalent.

OSHA rules require companies to measure the amount of lead in the air by hooking up monitors to workers.

The rules limit worker exposure to an average of 50 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air over an eight-hour shift. That’s roughly equivalent to a pile of lead dust 1 millimeter wide, long and tall. About the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.

In the factory, lead-infused dust blankets the concrete floors. It is piled in corners and coats the cabs of forklifts and loader trucks. Some areas are so dusty and dim, they look like the gray aftermath of a bomb.

The company built a new plant on the property in 2012 and announced it would quadruple production while operating more safely. A sophisticated ventilation system was supposed to capture the dangerous dust. But it has not worked properly, according to interviews and internal studies from 2012, 2013 and 2017.

As a result, lead in the plant’s air routinely has been hundreds of times above the federal limit, lab reports show.

The Times obtained and analyzed more than 300 air samples collected by the company from monitors attached to workers from 2007 to 2019. Lead levels exceeded the protection capabilities of the respirators issued to most workers 16 percent of the time plantwide and 26 percent of the time in the furnace department.

Gopher leaders knew lower numbers were achievable. They had to look no further than their other plant in Eagan, Minn.

Tampa employees who traveled to Eagan for meetings or training sessions were stunned by what they saw. The floors were so clean, they joked, you could eat off them.

From 2013 to 2014, the average air-lead reading in Tampa’s furnace department was six times higher than Eagan’s, according to data submitted to Minnesota regulators and other company records.

The highest air reading anywhere inside the Eagan factory was 2,537 micrograms of lead per cubic meter. That’s dozens of times above the federal limit but nowhere near Tampa’s highest reading. In Tampa, it was 78,729 — or more than 1,500 times the federal limit.

In June 2014, a Tampa employee was exposed to 172,655 micrograms of lead per cubic meter while working in the baghouse, where dust gets routed from other parts of the plant. The next year, an air monitor recorded a lead concentration surpassing 200,000.

Those readings were well above the level federal officials consider life-threatening.

Video taken by a worker from the baghouse in 2014 showed dust billowing through a pipe, a gray-brown cloud painting a haze across the workspace. Equipment buzzed and whistled as workers drove small forklift trucks, without windshields.

Workers described pausing their loader trucks in parts of the plant because it became too dusty to see. They tried to clean the floor with push-brooms and shovels, only to toss more dust into the air.

By the end of some shifts, the poisonous dust stuck to their sweaty skin like sand.

A prevalent poison

Gopher has repeatedly violated OSHA’s regulations on air-lead levels and respirators. But the company in recent years hasn’t surpassed the federal agency’s rules for the maximum amount of lead allowed inside a worker’s body.

That’s because OSHA permits workers to have as much as 60 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, a figure established 42 years ago. Many health officials say the OSHA standard is out of touch with modern science, which for decades has established health effects from lead at far lower levels.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says blood-lead levels of 5 micrograms per deciliter and higher count as elevated. But health officials have recognized that damage from lead, like kidney dysfunction, can occur even below that amount.

The Times obtained and analyzed blood-lead tests of more than 500 Gopher employees from 2014 to 2018. Nearly every worker was exposed to enough of the toxic metal to be at risk of serious health problems.

Nine out of every 10 workers averaged levels of lead in their blood higher than 5 micrograms per deciliter.

Eight out of 10 workers averaged levels that put them at risk of increased blood pressure, kidney injury or cardiovascular disease.

In some of the dustiest areas of the plant, workers had the most metal in their blood: Four of every 10 furnace workers averaged a blood-lead level of at least 20 micrograms per deciliter from 2014 to 2016. That’s quadruple the level the CDC considers elevated.

Lead doesn’t stay in the blood long. Some of the metal is excreted in urine or settles into tissues. The rest is mistaken by the body for calcium and absorbed into the skeleton.

A single exposure to low or moderate amounts of lead may not cause lasting damage. But chronic exposure compounds with time and can result in irreversible health effects.

The lead collects in larger and larger bone deposits, creating a bank of poison that can re-enter the bloodstream and attack the body’s organs for decades.

The Times shared its findings with 10 medical experts. All of them said workers in the plant had blood-lead levels high enough to experience short- and long-term health consequences. They added that lead exposure could exacerbate issues like hypertension or decreased kidney function.

Proving a specific ailment was caused solely by lead exposure is difficult. Diseases often develop because of a combination of risk factors, like age, genetics or lifestyle.

The Times reviewed company medical records of 16 former workers, who spent from one year to 33 years at the plant and left in the last decade. Seven had at least one lab result indicating possible kidney damage. Eleven had blood tests just before they were hired, and all 11 saw the amount of metal in their blood jump within weeks of starting at the factory.

Plantwide, at least 14 current and former workers had heart attacks, cardiac arrests or strokes in the last five years, according to interviews and medical records. All were younger than 60. Three, like Ric Hattan, were under 45.

It’s rare to have a heart attack at Hattan’s age. Fewer than 1 percent of people younger than 45 have had one, according to federal data.

Hattan, a former maintenance worker, had blood-lead levels hovering in the mid-teens. He described suffering two heart attacks in his early 40s, leaving him so afraid of stressing his heart he hesitated to pick up his 3-year-old.

“I’m too young to be having a heart attack,” Hattan remembered thinking. “I’m too strong.”

Breaking down

Prospere Dumeus started working at the factory in the fall of 1985. It was then a small, family-owned lead smelter called Gulf Coast Lead. He was 23 years old, new to Florida from Haiti, and assigned to the furnace department.

The old factory was not fully enclosed. Breezes swept through the work area, cooling the workers and pushing lead dust outside. The plant had a single furnace and produced a fraction of the metal it does today. Workers took off respirators to talk. They’d eat and smoke cigarettes beside the furnace.

Dumeus’ formal education had ended in grade school, but as the years passed, he built a vast knowledge of the machinery and its quirks. When something went wrong, Dumeus could diagnose problems better than many mechanics, his co-workers remembered.

Some hazards were obvious. An explosion splattered molten lead on Dumeus in the fall of 1999, burning his left leg and eye. In 2006, hot liquid lead slipped into his boot and scorched his foot.

The burns troubled Dumeus’ sister, Madelaine. She implored her brother to quit.

“I’m telling you,” she told her brother. “This job is killing you.”

But he loved being there. He talked about it with the same adoration as dominoes in the park, fishing trips and Bob Marley songs. He bought a cottage-style home shaded by thick palms within a mile of the plant.

The longer Dumeus worked around lead, however, the more his body broke down. Medical records and lab tests from the late 1990s show Dumeus consistently had blood-lead levels five, six, seven and even eight times what is now considered elevated.

His heart problems began around that time, he noted in a medical form that is part of his records. He was in his late 30s.

Over the next decade, he underwent bypass and valve replacement surgeries. He developed leg ulcers and blood clots. His heart strained as it beat.

Several factors put Dumeus at risk of heart problems: hypertension, smoking, too many fats in his blood. He was diagnosed with coronary artery disease, the most common heart condition in America.

It’s also the form of heart disease most commonly associated with lead exposure. Medical research has linked lead to cardiovascular effects in people with low levels in their blood, mere fractions of Dumeus’.

The highest concentration of metal in his blood, 45 micrograms per deciliter, was measured in June 2006, just over a month after Gopher bought the plant. At the time, Dumeus wore a company-issued respirator that covered only the lower half of his face. Weeks later, company data shows, the amount of lead in the air surpassed the mask’s protection capability by roughly five times over.

In his early 50s, his lungs had the strength doctors would expect to see in a 100-year-old man.

The company last measured the metal in his blood in March 2017. Because lead stays in the blood for such a short period, the tests generally show recent exposure and not what has built in the body over time.

The Times determined the amount of poison lodged in Dumeus’ bones by analyzing 182 blood-lead tests that he took over his career. The calculation estimated a range of lead stored in leg bone, then multiplied the result based on an estimated weight of the skeleton.

The analysis showed how exposures add up. Dumeus’ average blood-lead level of 26 micrograms per deciliter ballooned to an estimated 420,000 to 840,000 micrograms of lead in his bones.

No amount of lead in bone is considered safe.

Two doctors reviewed the Times’ analysis and confirmed the findings. Dr. Brian Schwartz, an expert in chronic lead exposure at Johns Hopkins University, said Dumeus’ levels could be likened to ingesting a daily pill for years filled with poison.

By the mid-1990s, the neurotoxin had taken a significant hold in his body, the analysis found.

In the winter of 2017, Dumeus worked his last shift.

That March, he underwent open-heart surgery. After months of difficult recovery, his personal doctor said he could return to work but forbade him from lifting anything heavier than 30 pounds.

In response, Gopher fired him. Dumeus was devastated, his sister said.

Gopher did not answer questions about Dumeus, citing employee privacy.

Less than two months later, in December 2017, his heart stopped at a church service. He lay without a pulse for at least 27 minutes. Paramedics shocked him twice and revived him.

But his brain had been damaged. His mood became flat, his speech limited, his limbs involuntarily jerky.

He moved to a rehabilitation center in Clearwater. He stopped eating and suffered from seizures. In early 2019, he was taken to the hospital, where he deteriorated. A doctor pronounced Dumeus dead of coronary artery disease, complications from his brain injury and kidney disease at 7:57 a.m. on Feb. 21, 2019.

He’d lived 56 years. For 32 of them, he worked at the plant.

Cleared for work

Federal rules require Gopher to provide employees with regular medical evaluations, and it’s Dr. Bruce Bohnker’s role to make sure workers can safely do their jobs.

Bohnker is the medical director of a Tampa clinic that Gopher has hired for the past seven years to monitor employee health.

But when workers had ailments that could be caused or made worse by lead, Bohnker didn’t note a possible connection or warn them of the consequences, according to a review by the Times of medical files for a dozen workers.

In 2016, Bohnker wrote Dumeus a letter describing findings from his exam and noting his history of heart problems.

Bohnker didn’t say in his assessment that Dumeus’ heart problems and hypertension could make him more vulnerable to poisons. He didn’t note a lab result indicating decreased kidney function. He wrote Dumeus had “a long history of working at the plant with no problems.”

The Times obtained letters Bohnker wrote to six other workers who had hypertension, signs of possible kidney damage or both.

“I find no areas of concern from this physical examination related to occupational exposures with Gopher,” Bohnker wrote to Dumeus and each of the other workers.

Workers described their exams with Bohnker as cursory and said they didn’t get explanations of their lab results, including blood-lead levels.

Bohnker, citing doctor-patient confidentiality, declined to answer questions sent to him about any Gopher employees. He also wouldn’t answer questions about his role or about the risks posed to workers at the factory.

Doctors interviewed by the Times said they would have told the workers with health problems that continued exposure could make matters worse.

Bohnker spent more than three decades as a Navy doctor, retiring in 2005. Records show he’s certified in occupational, aerospace and preventive medicine and has no disciplinary history in Florida.

He is a member of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, and in 2019, served as president of the Florida chapter.

More than a decade ago, the national organization pushed companies and doctors to adopt stricter standards for removing workers with elevated lead levels instead of relying on the outdated OSHA rules. They said workers with two blood-lead tests of 20 micrograms per deciliter or higher or one at 30 should be removed.

When workers whose files the Times reviewed had levels that exceeded 20 micrograms per deciliter or even 30, Bohnker didn’t indicate in his medical opinions that their health could be in jeopardy. Instead, he left unchecked a box on the forms next to “in range where adverse health effects may occur.”

“Clinically insignificant”

Occupational physicians like Bohnker have discretion under federal rules to recommend removing workers from lead exposure, regardless of their blood-lead levels, if the doctor deems exposure puts them at too much risk.

That didn’t happen for Eric Telemaque.

Telemaque had earned a reputation at the plant as a hard worker, known for putting in long days and extra time to support his children and family.

He came to Florida in the early 1990s from the island of La Gonâve in Haiti. He worked two jobs in Tampa, sleeping three hours a night, before getting hired to break down old batteries at the factory.

When he started in 2006, at age 40, he already had a high blood pressure of 148/90. The amount of lead in his system quickly increased.

Telemaque had trouble navigating the health care system, in part because he mainly spoke Creole and needed an interpreter. His medical records show he had struggled to control his blood pressure, sometimes going long stretches without medication.

During his appointments with Bohnker, over the course of three years, tests showed Telemaque had extremely elevated levels of a protein in his urine indicating possible kidney damage.

On Telemaque’s lab results, the protein levels were circled. But Bohnker didn’t mention them in his written opinions or letters.

By his December 2015 physical exam, three separate lab tests indicated Telemaque’s kidneys could be damaged. He had worked at the plant for nine years.

His blood pressure was 207/136.

“That’s the kind of blood pressure that would actually send somebody to the emergency room,” said Dr. Howard Hu, a physician and expert in adult lead exposure at the University of Southern California.

Bohnker wrote in exam paperwork that Telemaque was off his blood-pressure medication.

Telemaque’s blood-lead level was below the OSHA standard. But Hu and two other occupational physicians told the Times that his health problems — elevated protein in urine, hypertension and decreased kidney function — meant he should not have been around lead and other poisons.

Bohnker cleared him to work.

“As an occupational physician,” Hu said, “that’s just bad.”

In his medical opinion, Bohnker marked Telemaque’s lab tests as “clinically insignificant.”

But in a letter to Telemaque, Bohnker noted that one abnormal lab result, an elevated waste product in his blood, could be a sign of kidney problems.

He wrote that Telemaque’s blood pressure put him at risk of heart disease, kidney disease and stroke.

“I strongly recommend that you work to better manage your blood pressure,” Bohnker wrote to Telemaque in bold and underlined type. “You should have a local physician to follow you if at all possible.”

The doctor wrote he had no concerns about lead exposure, however, using the same language he put in letters to Dumeus and other workers.

Telemaque spent seven more months at the factory.

In July 2016, days before his 50th birthday, he suffered a stroke, ending his last shift on the locker room floor. He has had at least two strokes since.

Now 54, his gaze is vacant. He sways while trying to stand.

Last year, he started wandering outside his Tampa apartment and getting lost. An assisted living facility is now his home.

Desperate and motivated

Many workers at Gopher viewed the amount of lead in their blood not as a measure of risk but of their standing with the company. That’s because Gopher put pressure on workers to keep levels low.

The company, according to internal documents, would terminate probationary employees in their first six months if they couldn’t control their blood-lead levels. More seasoned employees were placed on performance plans.

To become a furnace supervisor, Ko Brown said he was required to have a blood-lead level at or below 21 micrograms per deciliter. Advancement at the plant was important to Brown, who started in 2011 with a felony record. Finding another job, especially a good-paying one, wouldn’t be easy.

“The money I was making was life-altering,” Brown said. “I’m rationalizing everything about this company. Not realizing what it’s doing to me — don’t even care what it’s doing to me.”

Brown said he went to a clinic for several weeks of intravenous chelation therapy, a process in which heavy metals are stripped from the body and excreted through urine. It can be dangerous because the treatment doesn’t differentiate between good metals like iron and bad ones like lead.

“I was going there every day off I had,” Brown said.

He got his promotion.

There were other financial incentives.

The company offered bonuses to workers every few months for keeping levels low, internal records show. In 2012, for example, workers received $330 for having a blood-lead level under 17 micrograms per deciliter. They received $100 for a level under 23; $50 for a level under 27.

Medical experts said that tying bonuses to the amount of poison in a worker’s blood was unethical.

It wrongly shifted responsibility for exposure levels onto workers, instead of the company, said Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist and founder of the ethics division at New York University’s School of Medicine.

“You can’t go around blaming them for higher exposures,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. It’s unjust.”

Worker cleanliness is vital, including washing hands during breaks and showering after shifts to remove lead dust. But the company still has primary responsibility to limit the amount of contamination in the plant, industrial hygienists and doctors said.

In recent years, the company allotted quarterly bonuses based on a blood-lead average across employees, sometimes pitting workers against one another.

Gopher made it easy to know who was putting the bonuses at risk. The company posted the names of workers with high blood-lead levels on lists inside breakrooms.

Confrontations sometimes broke out between employees when one believed his bonus was in jeopardy because another was raising the average.

Gopher did not directly answer questions about bonuses or its culture. Robinson, the chief operating officer, said programs to reduce lead exposure have encouraged lower blood-lead levels at the factory.

Workers have tried all types of remedies to extract metal from their bodies. In the most extreme cases, they donated contaminated blood or platelets.

Three employees told the Times they donated blood. A dozen more said the practice was common.

The workers said they believed it could reduce the amount of lead in their blood before their bi-monthly tests. Some said they figured the blood banks would tell them if their donation was a problem.

Medical experts said they’d never heard of such a practice and understood the desperation among workers. But they warned that donating contaminated blood was troubling.

Blood banks don’t screen for heavy metal toxicity, as they do for certain diseases. That could result in a patient receiving blood with lead during a transfusion. Doctors also said donating contaminated blood wouldn’t significantly help the workers lower their blood-lead levels.

Other employees described taking pills, like EDTA, to cleanse their systems.

EDTA tablets are sold as a form of chelation, which is one of the only medical treatments for lead poisoning. Many physicians believe it comes with considerable risks, including potential kidney damage, so it has generally been reserved for those with the highest blood-lead levels.

Federal rules forbid companies from directing employees to use chelation treatment as a means to evade regulatory limits.

“We do not condone and strongly discourage unsafe practices intended to reduce blood-lead levels,” Robinson said.

Other workers shared methods less extreme. They took vinegar pills. They focused on eating leafy vegetables. They tried cilantro, vitamins, fruits, probiotics, prune and pickle juices.

“People had all their ways of getting their blood-leads low,” said Wilbert Townsend, a former furnace supervisor. “And I learned the best way to do it was to stay out of the plant.”

Bringing it home

Lead dust left the factory with some workers, on their shoes, cars or cellphones. It traveled across Tampa and Brandon and Zephyrhills and into their homes, where their children found it.

The Times identified 16 children of plant employees who had lead in their blood, according to interviews and medical records. When workers discussed the blood-lead levels with pediatricians or the health department, they were told dust from the factory was likely the source of the problem, the workers said.

The Department of Health tracks lead poisoning cases across Florida that may come from old paint, ceramics, cosmetics or other causes. Statewide, from 2010 through 2014, the agency found roughly 175 cases of workers exposing their children, including 18 in Hillsborough County, according to the department’s most recent study.

The cases tied to the factory date to the 2000s before Gopher bought the plant. One child ran his fingers along his dad’s truck, coated with lead dust, then put his hands in his mouth, said Joe Galant, who served briefly as the safety manager under the previous ownership. Another worker tracked lead dust home on his boots. The poison infiltrated the carpet, where his son would stick his fingers in his mouth as he crawled.

At least 13 workers have had children with elevated blood-lead levels, the Times found.

The young daughter of Altonio Bradshaw, who worked in the furnace department.

The infant son of Larry Wheeler, who worked in the baghouse.

The elementary school-age son of James Pitts, who worked in maintenance.

The most recent instance occurred last year.

Robinson said Gopher is unaware of lead poisoning cases involving the children of its current employees.

Any amount of lead in a child is considered harmful. The health effects could result in stomach pain, headaches, lowered IQ or slowed growth.

Adam Risher, who worked in the baghouse, learned his oldest daughter, Cheyenne, had lead in her blood in 2014, when she was 4.

During a check-up, she had a blood-lead level of 16.

His younger children also had lead in their blood, he said. Ayden, who was 2, had a blood-lead level of 12. His baby, Addison, hit 34.

County health officials investigated the source of exposure and identified dust from the factory as the cause, records show.

Addison’s pediatrician said her level was so high, she needed to be monitored weekly, Risher said. The infant had more lead in her blood than many of the factory’s furnace workers.

“I don’t know what to do,” he recalled telling the doctor.

Risher’s job was dusty. He and other workers manually collected lead dust whenever the automated system crashed.

He thought about how the lead covered his sweaty body at work. He threw away shoes that might have had dust stuck to them. He considered whether washing his socks and boxers at home was a good idea.

He thought about his kids, his wife who stayed home with them, and the need to make overtime on top of an hourly wage in a job that didn’t require a college education. He vowed to somehow make sure his children’s blood-lead levels came down.

He switched to a department with less dust before leaving Gopher two years ago.

Many workers believed that in the dusty environment, they couldn’t entirely rid themselves of lead. They worried it stuck to their necks or embedded in their hair.

“If you had a blood-lead level,” said Brown, the former furnace supervisor. “You were taking it home.”

Colin, Brown’s son, had lead in his blood since he was an infant. His levels consistently hovered around 9 micrograms per deciliter when he turned 2 and 3. During that time, his dad supervised a shift in the furnace department.

Brown’s job allowed his family to buy a new, two-story home in a Pasco County subdivision. But his pride was diluted by fear and guilt. He weighed the job’s benefit against the danger.

As a baby, Colin developed slowly. He sat up late and didn’t babble, never saying mama or dada. As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Now, at 7, he loves technology and dissecting how it works. His dad said Colin struggles with stomach issues. And in recent months, he started having seizures. Doctors can’t say for sure whether lead has been a factor in any of Colin’s health problems, but Brown is suspicious.

In 2019, Colin had the lowest amount of lead recorded in his body. Two years after Brown left the factory.

Equipment designed to control poisons inside Gopher Resource kept breaking down, creating more dangers for workers. As violations mounted, regulators have been absent.

By Rebecca Woolington, Corey G. Johnson and Eli Murray

In the heart of Florida’s only lead factory, Teddy Ebanks Jr. worked amid mounds of poisonous dust and noxious gases.

Late one night, fumes rushed through his respirator. Ebanks grew dizzy and nauseous. His vision blurred, causing him to see double. Then, he passed out.

“I felt like somebody just turned my lights off,” said Ebanks, 43, a former Marine.

The 2013 incident wasn’t the first time workers at Gopher Resource had been overwhelmed by toxic gases inside the company’s Tampa factory. And it wouldn’t be the last.

Over the past decade, hundreds of Gopher workers have been exposed to alarming amounts of poisons. Nagging mechanical problems meant the factory’s intricate ventilation system didn’t function correctly, and key features designed to capture chemicals were either dismantled or turned off. The equipment failures forced workers to perform perilous tasks to keep pace with production as gas and metal fumes seeped at higher volumes into a cloudy workspace. Many wore company-issued respirators that didn’t protect them.

Federal regulators didn’t protect them, either.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is supposed to ensure that companies provide safe work environments. But the regulatory agency has repeatedly bungled the job at Gopher, allowing hazardous conditions to persist for years, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

OSHA gave Gopher ample warning before site visits, which meant the company had time to deep-clean a factory coated with lead.

The agency sent inspectors who missed evidence of dangerous levels of lead in the air, or who made other critical errors, including testing for the wrong chemical after workers complained about high gas exposure.

That was before OSHA stopped inspecting Gopher at all. The agency hasn’t been inside the factory in five years.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, called the absence of regulators at the plant “a total failure — total abdication of their responsibility.”

Beneath Gopher’s smokestacks, workers extract lead from about 50,000 old car batteries a day and melt it to create new blocks of the metal. The plant is one of only 10 of its kind operating in the United States.

Since OSHA last appeared, Gopher repeatedly put workers at risk, internal documents show.

Lead fumes worsened in the area of the factory where the metal is turned to liquid. By 2019, nearly half of air-lead readings in the furnace department were higher than the protection capability of the respirators assigned to most workers.

The company let lead dust pile up and detected life-threatening levels of sulfur dioxide at least three times in different parts of the plant.

An employee passed out after inhaling chemicals where wastewater is treated. And a maintenance worker was exposed to lead in the air 15 times higher than what his respirator could handle.

Dozens of other Gopher employees worked around air-lead levels that were hundreds of times above the federal limit. At one point, the concentration was more than 400 times over.

“I would call those levels outrageous,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, an expert in lead exposure and director of the Global Observatory on Pollution and Health at Boston College.

“This just calls out for an OSHA inspection,” he said. “Big time.”

The Times examined thousands of pages of company and regulatory records that detail unsafe conditions at the factory and how OSHA has responded. Reporters interviewed doctors, occupational health specialists and more than 80 current and former workers, many of whom shared testing results, videos and photos taken inside the plant as recently as this year.

The first installment of the Times’ investigation, published last week, showed that most Gopher workers have had enough lead in their blood to put them at risk of a host of health problems, including high blood pressure, kidney problems and cardiovascular disease.

Today’s installment illustrates why problems have spanned the last decade: The company and regulators have let toxic conditions linger.

Gopher did not agree to interview requests for this story. The company also declined to answer specific written questions about employee exposures.

In a memo to the Times, Chief Operating Officer Eric Robinson said Gopher is dedicated to safety and that average worker blood-lead levels in Tampa are well below the standards set by OSHA, “the recognized authority for employee blood-lead levels in our industry.”

The blood-lead levels of Gopher workers have been under the OSHA standard for determining when employees must be removed as a safety precaution. But doctors, industrial hygienists and health officials say the level established by the agency in the 1970s is so high, it does more to protect companies than workers.

“OSHA needs to ban lead because there’s no safe level — period,” said John Froines, who wrote the lead standard for the agency in 1978.

Froines, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the standard wasn’t strong enough when it was implemented four decades ago. But he and others believed it was the best they could achieve. Since then, medical research has shown significant harm can occur from even low-levels of sustained lead exposure.

OSHA officials declined to be interviewed but responded to questions in writing. The agency said it sends inspectors to workplaces that are deemed the most hazardous based on a number of factors. Gopher, regulators said, hasn’t warranted a visit under OSHA’s criteria.

The Tampa OSHA office also uses a lottery system to decide which businesses to inspect under a special lead enforcement program the agency developed more than a decade ago. In recent years, Gopher hasn’t been picked.

The program was introduced to better protect American lead workers who had levels of the neurotoxin in their blood high enough to cause harm but below the threshold requiring their removal under the agency’s 1978 rules.

Blood-lead levels 25 micrograms per deciliter and higher “shall be considered high-gravity, serious and must be handled by inspection,” according to the special enforcement program established in 2008.

The directive did not translate at the Tampa OSHA office, roughly 5 miles from the lead smelter.

More than 450 blood tests of workers at Gopher were at least that high from 2014 to 2018 alone, according to data obtained by the Times.

Not one prompted an inspection.

Problems persist

When Minnesota-based Gopher bought the Tampa plant in 2006, the company had plans to transform the open-air smelter into an enclosed, state-of-the-art operation. A new factory, which encompassed the existing one, would raise the plant’s production capacity from 30,000 tons a year to 130,000, an increase worth hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Before construction began in 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had updated its lead standards, restricting how much of the metal could be released into the community’s air. That made it vital for Gopher to control emissions inside the plant, while having a high-functioning ventilation system to keep workers safe in the enclosed space.

Construction wasn’t even finished when mechanical problems with the ventilation system were identified, according to a consultant report for the company. Lead dust from other parts of the plant had been leaking into the furnace area in spring 2012. Exhaust hoods designed to capture lead dust from the two furnace areas were inadequate, the consultants noted.

Gopher’s efforts to keep lead from leaving the new plant made contamination worse inside. Air levels in the building ascended to dozens and hundreds of times the federal limit on a regular basis, according to the company’s air-monitoring data.

The ventilation system wasn’t equipped for how hard Gopher was running, former engineers and pollution control workers at the factory said.

Problems — with lead and sulfur dioxide — were felt acutely in the baghouse, an area of the plant that captures toxic dust before it can escape into the neighborhood.

The baghouse is a three-story structure where dust and exhaust gases from around the factory get vented and routed to rooms called cells. Inside each cell, more than 100 cloth bags, shaped like giant tube socks, hang from ceiling to floor. The bags collect dust and need to be shaken to release the particles into a container below.

Not long after the baghouse was installed, sulfur compounds began to destroy parts of it, eating the metal, and leaving gaping holes. The plant’s mechanical systems to control sulfur dioxide often needed repairs, interviews and documents show.

Rust made the baghouse’s automatic shaking feature too dangerous to use, a report found. That meant workers in hazmat suits had to go into the cells to jerk and shake the poison-laden bags by hand, at least twice per shift.

Workers, like Tevin Craig, propped open the entrance to air out the spaces, their respirators fogging up from the rush of heat. They used monitors to measure gases before entering some of the cells. If the machine beeped, the levels were too dangerous.

“That little meter thing will be going off, screaming,” said Craig, who worked in the baghouse from 2013 to 2017.

When it stopped beeping, workers stepped inside. Sometimes, when dust overflowed from the bags, they left the cells looking like ghosts.

Sustained exposure to poisons can have severe long-term ramifications for the health of workers. And when chemical levels spike, they can pose immediate threats.

Three former baghouse workers described passing out, overwhelmed by heat and fumes, during their shifts. Five described having episodes where they couldn’t catch their breath and their hearts raced or beat out of rhythm.

As the malfunctions persisted, the need for shaking the bags became so dire Gopher hired contractors to help.

Jacob Clemente found himself at the factory in early 2014 assigned to the task. He was 19.

Around 11:20 p.m. on Feb. 28, he and other workers had just finished shaking the bags when Clemente took a water break. Nausea struck him, and he held back vomit. He rested his head to relax, then passed out.

He slumped onto the shoulder of a co-worker, who tried to rouse him. Someone called 911 and reported he’d been convulsing.

Clemente faded in and out but remembered hearing footsteps, a siren, someone saying, “Put him on his back; lay his head here; tilt him up.”

He awoke in an ambulance rushing him to the hospital. Doctors believed Clemente had been exposed to sulfur dioxide and possibly other gases, according to medical records. They sent him home with a prescription for an inhaler to help with shortness of breath and wheezing.

The shift was Clemente’s last.

“Nope, I’m not coming back here,” Clemente recalled thinking. “No. Mm-mm.”

About an hour after Clemente headed to the hospital, some of the baghouse rooms caught fire.

In an email to environmental regulators, Gopher said the fire was caused when gases were sucked into the wrong ventilation system and routed to the wrong baghouse cells. More than 250 pounds of lead spewed into the neighborhood, the company estimated.

Gopher made improvements to the baghouse, including replacing corroded components with stainless steel. The upgrades were completed in 2016 and meant workers no longer had to routinely shake bags loaded with lead, according to interviews and documents.

Other mechanical breakdowns, however, forced workers to do dusty tasks in different areas of the baghouse.

The dust that fell into hoppers after the bags shook was supposed to be pushed by machinery into a pipe, then blended in a tank with water until it looked like chocolate milk.

But the dust jammed along the way. Workers described unclogging it using pitchforks, letting lead-infused dust fall to the ground then shoveling it into containers.

On other occasions, workers manually collected dust in hoppers when the automated system went down. If no container was there to catch it, the dust formed heaps that workers shoveled or gathered with small loader trucks, sending particles flying.

“It would just rain in your face,” said John Casteel, who worked in the baghouse from 2014 to 2015. “Your whole body would just be covered in lead. It was something to see.”

The dusty work wasn’t limited to the baghouse. Len Vernon hammered the sides of a pipe in the furnace department to shake loose clogged debris when a puff of black smoke, dust and metal engulfed him in July 2014.

In paperwork related to the injury, Vernon wrote that the smoke “got into my respirator through my filters.”

He switched his respirator that night and kept working, but he developed a cough and chest pain. The next day, he couldn’t catch his breath. He went to the hospital, where he stayed for three days, later diagnosed with acute chemical bronchitis, medical records show. The smoke he inhaled and swallowed contained silica, limestone and shredded steel.

Inadequate protection

Forty-four current and former workers said in interviews that they didn’t always receive air-lead data from the company to inform them of their exposure. When they did, they didn’t know how to interpret the numbers. The workers assumed the protective equipment given to them was strong enough.

Some workers, like Larry Wheeler, said they brought safety concerns to leadership at the plant but feared going to regulators would jeopardize their jobs.

“You mentioned the name OSHA around there, or you’re contacting them,” said Wheeler, a former baghouse worker, “you might as well say goodbye.”

Gopher did not answer specific questions sent to the company about what it told workers about exposure levels; or about the protective equipment it issues; or about how it reacted when employees raised safety issues with management or with OSHA.

Errors add up

Before OSHA inspectors walked through Gopher’s doors, they made mistakes that cost them any real glimpse into day-to-day conditions at the factory.

Instead of conducting surprise visits, regulators on multiple occasions took weeks or longer to nail down a date with the factory’s safety managers, allowing Gopher time to prepare.

The company assigned workers to heavy-duty cleaning before OSHA’s arrival, according to eight current and former employees. Workers described directives going as far as ordering the repainting of the plant’s floor, predetermining the route to guide inspectors through the factory, and giving explicit instructions that only supervisors talk to inspectors.

Adam Risher worked at the plant for five years in the baghouse, furnace and water treatment areas. He saw regulators come and go. Before one visit, he remembered being directed to help clean the battery breaking area, where the acid-soaked floor was damaged.

Risher said supervisors made it clear the cleaning was for an upcoming OSHA visit.

“The reason why they told us was because they could shut us down,” Risher said. “They could shut us down, and we all won't have jobs. So when you tell us that, of course we're all motivated. We all need to work — every one of us had a family to take care of.”

OSHA said inspectors typically don’t warn companies they are coming unless they need to arrange logistics for chemical testing or follow-up meetings, which they’ve done on three occasions with Gopher. It happened after workers complained to the agency about sulfur dioxide gas.

At the plant, sulfur dioxide is released during multiple production steps, including when lead is melted in the furnaces.

The gas stream flows into ducts and through multiple filtering systems, designed to reduce emissions before they travel out of the plant’s 130-foot stack.

In poorly ventilated areas, according to federal health officials, sulfur dioxide exposure can result in asphyxiation. The gas can cause nausea, vomiting and irritation of the eyes, nose, throat and skin as well as lasting respiratory problems.

Workers had tried to get OSHA’s attention in 2011 by filing a complaint, but that went nowhere. So they contacted the agency again.

“We have filed this same complaint already and nothing is being done,” workers wrote. “This has been going on for 4 months and all they care about is making production. Today they actually made it worse by closing off our ventilation because it was affecting other parts of the plant.”

After receiving the second complaint, it took two more months for the inspector, Lizbeth Troche, to visit the plant after back-and-forth scheduling emails with Gopher.

The day after Troche nailed down her inspection date, the plant’s environmental health and safety manager, Angela Fogarty, met with factory managers. She told the group that ventilation issues were supposed to be addressed March 5, nine days before the OSHA inspector was scheduled to show up, according to meeting minutes. The need for supervisors to have more training about sulfur dioxide was also discussed.

On March 14, Troche came to the factory. Two workers were hooked up to air monitors to gather samples.

One of them was Ricky Bartels, who was well aware of the sulfur dioxide problem. The gas caused his eyes and nostrils to burn and his throat to close. A prickly red rash spread across his skin, leaving a sensation of pins and needles.

Bartels said the gas was so overwhelming, it seeped into a computer room, where workers had to aim a fan to blow it out. He said mechanical problems had allowed the gas to build at different points over months.

But when Troche arrived, Bartels said, a plant supervisor told him they were going to measure a different chemical, sulfuric acid.

“They’re worried about this?” he remembered commenting to a co-worker. “They need to be worried about the f-----g SO2 (sulfur dioxide) that’s gassing us out.”

Bartels, who left the factory in 2013, said he didn’t say anything to supervisors or the inspector because he needed his job.

OSHA told the Times the inspector focused on sulfuric acid based on the agency’s understanding of how the production process at Gopher worked.

Three industrial hygienists said if workers were complaining about sulfur dioxide, it didn’t make sense for the inspector to test for acid.

“That was not the right choice,” said Rachael Jones, an industrial hygienist and professor at the University of Utah. “You wouldn’t measure one, when you wanted to find the other.”

Troche, who still works at OSHA, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. In an April 9, 2012 letter, she wrote to the worker who had complained: “No levels of sulfuric acid were detected. No citations were issued.”

The inspector sampled the wrong chemical, then closed the case.

A year later, Teddy Ebanks Jr., the former Marine, collapsed. Sulfur dioxide, the suspected cause.

Months after that, Clemente, the contracted baghouse worker, passed out. Sulfur dioxide, again the suspected cause.

When OSHA returned in December 2014 to investigate lead exposure after a complaint, the agency made more critical mistakes.

OSHA inspector Olja Correa toured the factory with the company’s safety officers and viewed a year’s worth of air-monitoring data, notes show.

At the time, tests indicated the company regularly had air-lead readings dozens and hundreds of times above the federal limit. In the furnace that year, more than a third of the readings were too high for the respirator assigned to most workers.

Just months earlier, in June 2014, the amount of lead in the air had reached life-threatening levels in the baghouse. Cadmium, a heavy metal linked to lung and prostate cancer, was recorded hundreds of times above the federal limit.

Correa’s report was so sparse, it’s unclear whether she toured the baghouse during her walk-through, and OSHA would not say whether she did. Her report only says that she “observed the battery recycling process.”

Correa gave Gopher one week before she returned to conduct her own air monitoring.

When Correa came back, she attached small monitoring devices to the uniforms of at least three employees. The workers were selected by company managers, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the visit. One handpicked worker who was supposed to represent the conditions inside Gopher’s battery-breaking process spent his days working outdoors, where conditions were safer.

OSHA’s inspection manual says inspectors are supposed to test workers who have the highest exposure. The amounts Correa measured weren’t close to what Gopher had logged in its own records.

Federal rules allow workers to be exposed to 50 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air averaged over an eight-hour shift.

The highest air-lead level Correa recorded during the federal inspection was 738 micrograms per cubic meter in the furnace area. That was above the federal limit, but 10 days before, the plant’s internal data showed readings nearly 20 times higher.

Correa did not assess the plant’s ventilation system, according to records.

The inspector and her supervisors decided to issue no citations, noting in their report that Gopher was trying to control lead exposures.

Correa told the Times she could not remember details about her Gopher visit, saying she has done hundreds of inspections for the agency.

Hours before OSHA closed the case, on March 4, 2015, company data showed the amount of lead in the plant’s baghouse once more surpassed life-threatening levels. The concentration was measured at more than 200,000 micrograms per cubic meter.

Regulators haven’t measured lead at the factory again.

They cited the company in 2015 for an amputation injury, after a worker’s fingertip was crushed. They conducted a forklift safety inspection that same year and issued no fine.

In May 2016, a worker filed another complaint to OSHA about sulfur dioxide levels. The employee said workers were suffering from headaches and that the system to control sulfur emissions had been shut down for repairs. The plant was running and producing lead anyway, the complaint said.

The employee didn’t specify where the high exposures were happening but said the sulfur smell was strong outside, even from 200 feet away.

The next month, OSHA inspector Linette Pruna-Padilla visited the plant to perform air monitoring. But she limited her testing to outside, writing that a smokestack was the only possible source of emissions.

Elevated sulfur dioxide levels had occurred inside the factory in the baghouse and water treatment area, according to interviews and company documents.

Pruna-Padilla skipped them both.

The sulfur dioxide levels in the outside air were below the federal limit, she determined. No citations were issued.

Pruna-Padilla declined to answer questions when a reporter showed up at her door.

That was the last worker complaint the agency investigated. And that inspection, five years ago, was the last time OSHA sent anyone to Gopher.

Missing in action

OSHA has missed hundreds of opportunities to inspect Gopher’s factory.

Under a special program, developed in 2008 to strengthen worker protections, the agency said regulators would inspect workplaces where they learned a single worker had a blood-lead level of 25 micrograms per deciliter or higher. Those kinds of levels have been linked to serious health problems.

More than 450 blood-lead tests of workers at Gopher hit that level from 2014 to 2018, according to data analyzed by the Times.

Len Vernon, the furnace worker, was among them when he drove a loader truck with an un-enclosed cab, scooping lead from a storage area and dropping it into a container to feed the furnace. A plume of dust would blow back at him as the lead clattered into the hopper.

“You are exposed to dust all the time,” said Vernon, who recorded a blood-lead test above 30, his highest at Gopher, in 2017.

Anil Eglais’ blood-lead level exceeded 30 micrograms per deciliter while he worked in the plant's refinery, where molten lead is purified in kettles.

David Hill Jr. averaged a blood-lead level of 25 over his three-decade career and had tests surpass 30 while he worked in some of the dustier parts of the factory.

OSHA said the agency didn’t know about any of the tests over 25. And so, more than 450 instances when the agency should have inspected the plant came and went.

Since OSHA regulators have been absent from Gopher, rule violations and mechanical problems that put employees in danger piled up at the factory month after month. Gopher’s consultants found problems that OSHA didn’t.

In April 2017, Gopher hired consultants to assess its ventilation system. They found parts of the system severely degraded and clogged. They noted that Gopher had removed exhaust hoods designed to capture lead fumes. Other hoods were too small. Both issues let emissions spill around workers.

In their report, the consultants included a picture of metal-laced gases billowing from the furnace.

That June, an email bulletin went to dozens of Gopher supervisors after the company discovered life-threatening levels of sulfur dioxide in the water treatment department. The fumes shot up for more than three hours. The gas reached levels more than four times the federal limit in the department’s computer room.

The levels surpassed the protection factor of the workers’ respirators, the email said. An ongoing, repeated mechanical malfunction was to blame.

That August, workers in the furnace and refinery departments were overexposed to lead. The company had hired consultants to evaluate employee exposures and found that a third of the 40 furnace and refinery workers who had been tested wore respirators that weren’t good enough.

One worker encountered an air-lead concentration more than eight times what his respirator could guard against. The level was 436 times the federal limit for lead in the air.

“Obviously, if OSHA would have come in and done that monitoring, it would have been an automatic citation,” said Jerry McCaslin, who chairs a committee of the American Industrial Hygiene Association focused on indoor air quality.

McCaslin, who works at a foundry in Washington state, said the exposures were so high, they could have warranted OSHA shutting down operations while fixes were made.

The consultants, who did the monitoring for the company, told Gopher to ensure workers had proper equipment for the conditions they faced.

That November, life-threatening levels of sulfur dioxide were again detected in the water treatment area. The company evacuated contractors. Under a policy developed months earlier for when gas levels spiked, employees could go into the space for a limited time wearing air-tank respirators.

That same month, a different set of consultants found too much lead dust piled in the factory.

In the furnace department, more than 40 percent of air-lead tests exceeded the protection level for respirators assigned to most workers in 2017, a Times analysis shows.

The next year, more hazards mounted.

In April 2018, while working in the water treatment area, an employee lost consciousness after inhaling chemicals, according to an injury log.

But the specific cause, and chemical name, were not recorded.

Until that August, the lab Gopher used to test air quality analyzed the results incorrectly, for soil instead of air. Gopher didn’t notice for six months, even though keeping quarterly data is required by OSHA.

That fall, once air-lead data was properly analyzed again, a reading was measured hundreds of times above the federal limit in the furnace department.

More problems were found in 2019.

In March, sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide reached life-threatening levels in the furnace department, according to company data.

That summer, Gopher found at least eight workers — in the furnace, refinery and maintenance departments — had been exposed to air-lead levels beyond the protection capability of their respirators, according to letters the company wrote. One worker’s exposure was 15 times higher than the maximum protection of his device.

A September 2019 list obtained by the Times shows none of the overexposed workers had been assigned a better respirator at that time. Of the more than 200 workers listed, four had more powerful respirators that would protect against high levels of lead. The rest didn’t.

Snapshots taken by workers inside the plant from 2019 capture lead-laced dust blanketing the floor in the furnace department. Video shows fumes surging from the furnace and around a loader truck driver.

In the furnace department, 46 percent of air samples exceeded the protection of the respirators assigned to most workers in 2019 — the highest percentage since OSHA had last been at the factory, the Times found.

Pictures from 2020 show dust collecting atop pipes and fumes from the furnace creating a thick fog across the work area to the point of limiting visibility.

A photo from earlier this year depicts lead-laced dust clogging part of a ventilation pipe like plaque obstructing an artery. Workers say the pipes running from one of the furnaces had rarely been cleaned and the dust accumulation impeded the system.

In the 1,761 days since OSHA’s last visit, the company and consultants it hired documented more than two dozen possible violations — on top of the hundreds of high blood-lead tests that warranted inspection.

OSHA knew about none of them.

Gopher Resource had been working to clean up and fix problems before inspectors arrived. After a five-year absence, regulators finally showed up.

By Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray

Federal safety regulators descended on the Gopher Resource lead smelter in Tampa, reviewing company documents, collecting dust samples and hooking up workers to monitoring devices so that air quality could be measured. Inspectors arrived Monday and stayed all week.

They combed through the plant, where hundreds of workers have been exposed to high levels of the neurotoxin and other chemicals.

For weeks, Gopher’s leaders had been preparing, factory workers said.

The company made repairs to the plant’s troubled ventilation system, attempting to fix long-standing issues that increased the amount of lead in the air, according to interviews with four workers and photographs shared with the Tampa Bay Times.

Gopher fixed malfunctioning devices designed to blow lead dust off workers as they exited some of the most contaminated areas of the plant. It put down sticky mats to pull particles from the soles of workers’ shoes as they left the dusty factory to head home after their shifts.

And just days before inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration arrived, the company had begun another endeavor: replacing the sludge-covered floor where batteries are cracked open to salvage the lead inside.

The recent improvements came after the Times started asking Gopher executives about employee exposures and mechanical problems late last year. Work intensified, several workers said, as the Times neared completion of an 18-month investigation and after publication of its two-part series. The repairs included tearing out lead-clogged ventilation pipes that workers said had rarely been cleaned.

OSHA’s inspection followed mounting calls for government action in response to the newsroom’s investigation, which detailed dangerous conditions inside the factory that spanned years and went unnoticed by regulators.

Before this week, OSHA inspectors hadn’t set foot in the plant in five years.

U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Tampa, and U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, D-St. Petersburg, had written to Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh requesting a prompt inspection. The representatives also asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Gopher, calling details in the Times’ series “chilling.”

When asked about a possible inquiry or involvement in the inspection, Justice Department officials declined to comment.

Castor also has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to review the plant’s operations. The EPA regional office in Atlanta contacted the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission about its recent inspection files.

After Walsh received the letter, OSHA pledged to work with Gopher and its employees to ensure conditions inside the lead smelter are safe. The agency didn’t elaborate and hasn’t released details about its activity at the plant.

Workers told the Times that if inspectors had arrived even a few days earlier, they would have seen dramatic differences in parts of the factory.

A dust explosion in the furnace had severely damaged equipment and piping, prompting a temporary work shutdown. The battery-crushing operation had been leaking sludge for at least eight months, forming a layer of contaminated muck that was inches deep in some spots, according to interviews and photographs taken and shared with the Times last week. A photograph the day OSHA walked through the area showed a far cleaner floor, with only remnants and streaks of mud, a shovel propped against a wall.

Kawahon Duncan, a furnace worker and president of Gopher’s employee union, said company leaders were well aware of the problems but didn’t make them a priority until outside attention came.

“They’ve had numerous occasions where they could have rectified these issues. And they did nothing,” Duncan said. “Safety is not their number one priority. They say it is, but it is not because their actions don’t back it up.”

When Gopher had advance notice before previous OSHA site visits, the company carefully prepared by cleaning, directing only supervisors to speak with inspectors and mapping out the inspector’s route through the plant.

Kevin Merrill, a former refining supervisor who left Gopher last year, said the company always launched efforts to minimize problems before regulators arrived and would craft specific plans for department supervisors to carry out. Cleaning tasks and painting would be required, he said, and employees would be coached on how to answer questions should they be approached.

“Gopher’s going to do whatever it takes to keep running,” Merrill said. “By any means necessary.”

During those previous visits, inspectors made critical errors, measuring the wrong chemical when workers complained of high gas exposure during one instance and missing sky-high levels of lead in the air during another. One inspector was sent for each visit.

On Monday, at least five regulators arrived at Gopher’s sprawling 300,000 square-foot facility, according to four workers who had knowledge of the inspection. They looked at documents and the company’s supply of respirators in the front office before heading into the factory. Regulators returned on Tuesday and hooked workers up for air-monitoring and used dust wipes to collect samples from computer and break rooms.

Despite the company’s efforts to ready for an anticipated inspection, six workers told the Times that within the past several weeks, areas of the plant had remained in disarray. They sent photographs documenting the problems.

A key device that helps control sulfur dioxide had malfunctioned, leaking hazardous liquid in the area where wastewater is treated. Lead-laced dust covered the floor in the furnace department, and the lead sludge caking the ground where old batteries are broken down sat next to pools of what workers identified as acid that had been drained from the batteries.

Gopher did not answer specific questions related to cleanup efforts, repairs or the timing of the work.

In a statement, the company said it spends tens of millions of dollars on improvements each year and that the ones made over the past several weeks weren’t prompted by the newsroom’s investigation or any impending visit from regulators.

“The recent safety and facility upgrades we have implemented were undertaken despite the flawed reporting of the Times, and not because of either it or the expected OSHA inspection,” the company said.

“Additional steps have also been planned and are upcoming,” the company’s statement continued. “Together with our employees, we will continue to look for ways to further enhance safety.”

Gopher, which has declined multiple interview requests, did not say what part of the Times’ reporting was flawed. But the company did acknowledge it had room for improvement.

Problems inside the factory

After the Times first contacted Gopher with questions about safety last October, the company began working to reassure its roughly 320 Tampa employees.

Since the spotlight on the company has intensified, Gopher Resource CEO Brian Leen and other executives flew in from headquarters in Minnesota. They’ve hired a lawyer from Washington, D.C., and they’ve met with employees, asking some to go on-camera and record statements of support.

Workers who spoke to the Times this week requested anonymity because they feared the company would retaliate. They sent dozens of photographs and videos taken in recent weeks documenting issues at the factory.

Many of the workers are Black or immigrants, or have criminal histories that could make finding another job, especially one that pays well, difficult.

Duncan, the union president, said Gopher supervisors have been asked to find out who provided photos and videos to reporters.

“They don’t want people to know what is going on inside,” Duncan said. “But folks have been taking their phones inside to capture problems so the world can see. And because staff has been defiant, we have a story today that could potentially better our future and our health and well-being.”

In a company-wide email, Leen wrote that Gopher advised workers to not speak to reporters and to be cognizant of their social media activity.

In November, Gopher mailed letters to workers, highlighting upgrades to the factory and a decline in average blood-lead levels under the company’s ownership. Earlier this year, Gopher held meetings with employees and described the company’s progress and the upcoming Times investigation. Over the past two weeks, those discussions were replaced by closed-door meetings among executives, three employees said.

The Times investigation found that Gopher employees were exposed to high levels of lead and other toxic chemicals as they recycled used car batteries. Lead is extracted from the batteries, melted in furnaces, purified in a refinery and poured into molds to create new blocks of metal.

About 50,000 batteries can be recycled every day at the plant. The lead is sold to companies like battery and ammunition manufacturers.

The factory is the only lead smelter in Florida and one of 10 such factories in the United States, including a second owned by Gopher in Eagan, Minn.

The Tampa plant has been at its current site, about 6 miles east of downtown, for about six decades. In 2006, Gopher bought the factory, which company executives described as “distressed” when they took it over. Gopher invested hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new factory, enclosing the previously open-air operation. But problems with the ventilation system began almost immediately.

Those issues coupled with other equipment failures have resulted in high levels of lead and other chemicals, including sulfur dioxide, spilling into the workspace. The problems were documented by consultants and the company for years.

Air-lead levels regularly soared hundreds of times above the federal limit in the furnace department, and life-threatening levels of gases were measured at least three times in the past four years. Many workers had company-issued respirators that weren’t strong enough to protect them from spiking poison levels.

A Times analysis of blood-lead tests taken by workers over a recent four-year period found that most had enough lead in their blood to put them at risk of serious health problems, including high blood pressure, kidney damage and cardiovascular disease.

At least 14 current and former workers suffered heart attacks, cardiac arrests or strokes in the past five years. All of them were younger than 60. Three were under 45. One worker died of heart and kidney disease at 56 after working more than three decades at the plant.

In multiple statements to the Times, Gopher has said that since acquiring the plant, the company has cut average blood-lead levels in half. The company has said that the average across workers is a fraction of what is allowed under federal rules. It hasn’t provided a specific number, but a chart it shared in February showed the average above 10 micrograms per deciliter and below 15.

Those levels still are dangerous when exposure is chronic.

Fixes underway

Earlier this year, Gopher started making improvements to its long-troubled ventilation system and added other upgrades designed to limit worker exposure.

In February, the company tore out old ductwork in the furnace department, where some dust-clogged pipes were replaced with new ones.

Three months earlier, the Times had approached the company about mechanical problems at the plant and high employee exposure levels. Days before the work, reporters had sent Gopher summarized findings about life-threatening levels of lead and sulfur dioxide measured inside the factory.

The company also replaced exhaust hoods, designed to capture fumes from the furnaces.

Four years ago, consultants had found that Gopher had removed some hoods on the furnaces and others were too small, allowing fumes to billow into the workspace. Gopher did not answer questions about whether the hoods replaced weeks ago were the same ones identified as a problem in 2017.

The consultants at the time had sent the company recommendations for repairs that correspond to those made in February. And the ventilation upgrades had been on the company’s project list for years, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the list.

Even with the upgrades, fumes have spilled out from the furnace in recent weeks, three workers said.

Just last week, Gopher made additional improvements.

It fixed the chronically troubled air shower system, which blows air from devices that look like hot-tub jets to dust off workers as they leave the furnace and refinery departments, three workers said. And the company added the sticky mats inside the hygiene building, which is where workers eat lunch and change in locker rooms before and after their shifts.

On Monday, as regulators arrived, the company had shut down some work where batteries are broken down. The area was known for having contaminated mud spread thick across the floor and being slippery from puddles of acid.

Special programs designed to better protect lead workers should have brought regulators to the plant sooner. The Times identified hundreds of blood-lead tests of individual workers that were supposed to prompt an inspection under the initiative. OSHA had been unaware of them.

Before Monday, the last time OSHA came to the plant was June 2016.

Since then, Gopher or consultants it hired documented more than two dozen possible violations, mostly related to air-lead levels and inadequate respiratory protection, the Times found. The company also documented sulfur dioxide levels surpassing the maximum capability of the devices.

Hours before OSHA entered the plant, a worker snapped photos of an ashy haze spread across the containment room, where lead material is stored to be loaded in furnaces. Another photograph captured lead-containing rocks, produced as a byproduct when the lead is smelted, spilling out from a room in front of a dust-covered doorway. A broom was propped beside it.

When OSHA inspectors made their way to the battery breaking area, the floor beneath the operation, just days earlier covered in sludge and debris, was wet but far cleaner after workers shoveled the contaminated gunk over the weekend, according to interviews and photos taken before and after.

Workers shared photos and videos chronicling long-standing problems at the Tampa factory.

By Corey G. Johnson, Rebecca Woolington and Eli Murray

What’s it like inside Florida’s only lead smelter? Tampa Bay Times reporters obtained from current and former workers hundreds of photos and videos taken at the factory where 50,000 used car batteries are recycled each day. The lead is melted down and reforged into new blocks. The work can be dirty and each step comes with its own hazards. Many of these images show workers in unclean and dangerous conditions, sometimes narrowly escaping serious injury.

For years, the company’s contracted doctor failed to flag abnormal test results and provide the required follow-up.

By Rebecca Woolington, Corey G. Johnson and Eli Murray

In June 2014, an air monitor strapped to a worker inside a Tampa lead factory picked up an unmistakable red flag.

The level of cadmium, a toxic metal known to cause cancer, had soared to more than 100 times the federal limit.

It happened again the next winter, with the level reaching 75 times the limit. Both times, the amount of cadmium in the air far exceeded the capability of most workers’ protective equipment.

The high readings should have prompted Gopher Resource to meticulously track and document the risk to employees. But records obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show no evidence of any tests for cadmium in the year that followed.

In June 2014, an air monitor strapped to a worker inside a Tampa lead factory picked up an unmistakable red flag.

The level of cadmium, a toxic metal known to cause cancer, had soared to more than 100 times the federal limit.

It happened again the next winter, with the level reaching 75 times the limit. Both times, the amount of cadmium in the air far exceeded the capability of most workers’ protective equipment.

The high readings should have prompted Gopher Resource to meticulously track and document the risk to employees. But records obtained by the Tampa Bay Times show no evidence of any tests for cadmium in the year that followed.

For years, Gopher broke those rules, putting dozens of workers at risk of serious health consequences, the Times has found.

A Times investigation earlier this year chronicled Gopher’s persistent problems with the neurotoxin lead and other poisonous chemicals. Cadmium has long been present inside the factory. But in the rare instances when regulators showed up, they focused mostly on lead or gases like sulfur dioxide.

This story demonstrates for the first time how the company and government regulators mishandled another dangerous chemical inside Florida’s only lead smelter.

Reporters analyzed data measuring the factory’s air quality and reviewed medical records for 26 employees who worked in various locations around the plant. The records depict a company that left workers in the dark about cadmium exposure, despite federal rules requiring they be given comprehensive data.

The documents and interviews also show that Gopher’s contracted doctor repeatedly failed to follow up on lab tests designed to protect the health of workers. It is the same doctor who the Times found had cleared employees to work despite health problems that could be tied to lead.

Gopher executives did not agree to an interview for this story and did not answer questions in writing. In a statement, Gopher said it believes the company is in compliance with federal rules on cadmium exposure and that the Times’ reporting appeared to be based on incomplete records.

But Gopher told multiple employees in writing that the records reviewed by the Times represented all of its testing for cadmium. And when asked by reporters to provide additional information, Gopher declined.

Company officials said they were busy working with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration on a review prompted by the Times’ earlier reporting.

“Gopher Resource is focused on cooperating with the ongoing OSHA investigation and addressing their inspectors’ questions and requests as they continue that effort,” the company said in a statement.

Cadmium is a naturally occurring metal that exists in zinc, copper and lead ore. People are mainly exposed by smoking cigarettes or eating certain foods grown in cadmium-contaminated soil.

At Gopher, cadmium can be found in scrap metal and in the lead that workers extract from used batteries. The lead is liquefied in furnaces, purified in the refinery and forged into new blocks, which are sold to companies. Cadmium exposure occurs from inhaling metal fumes and dust.

Cadmium can build in the body over time, and even low levels are considered dangerous. Chronic exposure can cause lung cancer and can damage the kidneys and bones. It has been associated with increased risk of prostate cancer and heart disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that companies keep air levels as low as possible and equip workers with the most protective respirators around any detectable level of the metal.

OSHA has its own rules, which limit the amount of cadmium workers can have in their blood and urine. The rules require companies to measure the amount of a specific protein in workers’ urine to assess possible kidney damage. When elevated levels are detected, the company physician must provide a written medical opinion, “clearly and carefully” explain all results and follow up with more testing and exams.

Gopher has a history of not providing that follow-up, the Times found.

Anil Eglais worked at the plant for more than 25 years, mostly in the furnace and refining departments. He had poisonous metal in his blood for decades, his medical records show. For two straight years, he had enough of the protein in his urine to require additional medical care.

He didn’t get it — despite having other company lab results indicating problems with his kidney function. The company-contracted physician, Dr. Bruce Bohnker, didn’t mention signs of kidney damage in a letter to Eglais or in a separate medical opinion.

The Times found at least four additional instances when the doctor didn’t document other workers’ need for follow-up. The most recent example occurred in 2020.

Bohnker did not respond to emails or letters from the Times sent to his office and home.

Reporters also asked Gopher in February about the lack of follow-up provided to workers. The inquiries appeared to have prompted some change in practice. At least two workers with elevated protein levels, including furnace veteran Cliff Burnett, were called back to the office for further testing, they said.

Bohnker wrote Burnett a letter indicating that he would receive more frequent medical care until his levels returned to normal. The doctor also referred Burnett to a kidney specialist under workers’ compensation.

“I was shocked,” Burnett said. “Because, I’m thinking, he never did this before.”

‘Astronomical’ levels

Gopher’s problems with cadmium date back more than a decade, records show.

Federal rules require companies to test the air for cadmium every six months when exposure reaches what’s called an action level.

The rules also set a worker exposure limit: 5 micrograms of cadmium per cubic meter of air averaged over a shift.

A higher limit of 50 micrograms per cubic meter applies in two of the more contaminated locations inside the factory: the furnace area and a place called the baghouse, where toxic gases and dust get routed through the ventilation system. Workers in both spots must wear respirators to lower their exposure.

Companies are required to keep accurate data on cadmium exposure levels and maintain them for decades. Current and former employees can obtain the records from areas where they worked. The Times’ analysis is based on records obtained by employees and shared with reporters.

In September 2010, Gopher recorded an air-cadmium level of 272 micrograms per cubic meter in the furnace department. The reading was several times above the federal limit and beyond what the standard company-issued respirators were equipped to handle.

At the time, Gopher was building a new plant with an intricate ventilation system. Construction was completed in 2012. But almost immediately, mechanical issues arose that increased dust levels inside the factory.

It is unclear how much cadmium was in the air. Data provided by Gopher to workers and reviewed by the Times show no testing in factory work areas for all of 2012 and 2013.

Problems continued. In the baghouse, equipment breakdowns left workers doing dangerous manual labor that could increase their exposure. Workers described regularly shoveling mounds of contaminated dust that looked like sand dunes. Some spaces were so dusty, they looked like they’d been coated with a blanket of snow.

In June 2014, records show, a baghouse worker was exposed to an air-cadmium concentration of 7,206 micrograms per cubic meter — 144 times the federal limit and 29 times what the standard respirator could handle.

More testing was done in March 2015. The concentration of cadmium in the air reached 3,839 micrograms per cubic meter in the baghouse.

Mark Wilson, a toxicologist and director of the industrial hygiene program at Tulane University, called the levels “astronomical.” He and two other industrial hygiene experts said that cadmium levels shouldn’t exceed the federal limit of 50 micrograms per cubic meter.

In 2014 and 2015, 13 tests from the furnace had results that exceeded that limit, including two that also went beyond what the standard respirator could handle.

It is unclear if Gopher tested for cadmium in 2016 and the first five months of 2017. Records provided to workers do not contain any results for cadmium tests during that period.

In June 2017, elevated air-cadmium levels in the furnace prompted Gopher’s safety team to voluntarily review its procedures.

The internal review found that Gopher should examine its manual labor methods, such as shoveling debris, because the practices contributed to higher exposure and were discouraged in OSHA’s rules, a draft report shows. It also found Gopher should update worker training to include topics covered by cadmium regulations, such as the health effects of the metal and where and how prevalent it can be in the workplace.

What’s more, the review determined the plant did not have signs to warn workers about cadmium. Under OSHA’s rules, signs are supposed to be posted around certain work areas and include the following language:

Wilson, the industrial hygienist, said communicating dangers to workers is a critical part in keeping them safe.

“It’s just kind of a basic human right,” Wilson said.

The review further pointed out that Gopher needed to complete a written plan for reducing worker exposure to cadmium. The draft report referenced a Nov. 30, 2014 compliance plan that mentioned the metal, but didn’t include any data about exposure levels in the plant.

Gopher’s safety team concluded that the lack of data meant exposures likely were below the federal level requiring semi-annual testing. But an exposure level had actually reached more than 2,800 times that concentration earlier in 2014, an air-monitoring report obtained by the Times shows.

Gopher decided it should fix the problems and measure the amount of cadmium in the air on the same quarterly schedule it used for detecting lead.

But it is not clear how often the company tested — or what the results showed — in the two years that followed. In 2018, a mistake at the lab rendered all of that year’s cadmium air readings indiscernible, according to internal records.

After that, air-monitoring reports don’t show cadmium test results again until the end of 2019.

‘A problem’

While cadmium levels spiked and Gopher identified problems with its own procedures, the company and its contracted doctor failed to help some of the most vulnerable workers.

OSHA requires annual tests to see whether workers have been exposed to cadmium. That includes blood and urine screens, as well as the test for the protein indicating kidney injury.

Cadmium isn’t the only reason someone might have a high level of the protein in his or her urine. Kidney damage from other causes like lead exposure, diabetes or blood cancers can also result in higher-than-normal levels. But company doctors are required to investigate, determine the likely cause and decide whether to reassign the worker to a position where he or she will not be exposed to cadmium.

When a worker’s levels are elevated, OSHA’s rules require the company to provide additional lab tests and a medical exam within 90 days. If the worker isn’t reassigned, lab testing is required at least twice a year until the levels return to normal.

The rules apply to all workers, including those who inhale cadmium through cigarette smoking.

Sixteen of the 26 employees whose records were reviewed by the Times had cadmium in their blood or urine at least once during their time in the plant. Nine of those workers identified as current or former smokers.

None of the workers had levels high enough to require being removed from the factory under OSHA’s rules. But industrial hygiene and medical experts interviewed by the Times said no level is considered safe.

Nine workers had signs of elevated protein in their urine. Seven had other lab results indicating possible kidney damage.

At least six, including Burnett, required follow-up under OSHA’s rules. But Bohnker, the company’s contracted physician, did not note the requirement in medical opinions or letters to those workers before the Times started reporting on cadmium, records show.

Burnett’s test came back elevated in January 2020, according to his medical records. Parts of Bohnker’s letter to Burnett were not easy to interpret or understand. The doctor used medical jargon, included unexplained test results and omitted the elevated protein level.

“You don’t know what the hell that means,” said Burnett, who left Gopher in August. “You just see numbers.”

If something is wrong, he added, “you trust that they’re going to help you.”

Instead, Burnett was allowed to keep working without documented warning from the doctor.

Bohnker and Gopher missed other opportunities to alert workers.

When Bohnker started contracting with Gopher in 2013, his medical opinions directly addressed whether a worker could be sick from cadmium — or too at risk to be around the metal. But by fall 2014, after cadmium exposure inside the plant had reached its highest levels, medical opinions filled out by Bohnker and reviewed by the Times failed to mention cadmium at all.

In addition, lab reports provided to workers from late 2014 through 2016 did not flag results indicating that the level of protein in their urine was above OSHA’s threshold.

Eglais, the longtime furnace and refining worker, regularly had measurable levels of cadmium in his blood or urine, a review of his medical records shows. He smoked cigarettes, but it is unclear how much of his exposure came from tobacco and how much was from work.

Eglais was born in Haiti and grew up speaking Haitian Creole. He moved to Florida and started at the plant in the late ‘80s.

At Gopher, he drove a forklift in the furnace, unloaded used car batteries from trucks and worked to purify lead inside the refinery’s kettles. He described “plenty of dust all over the place” inside the plant. But on questionnaires for company medical exams asking about his exposure amount and duration, he left the answers blank or simply wrote he didn’t know.

Over his career, the amount of lead detected in his blood averaged more than six times what the Centers for Disease Control now considers elevated, putting him at risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and kidney damage.

Based on OSHA’s standards, Eglais had elevated levels of cadmium in his urine as early as 1998, when the plant had different owners. Over the next 10 years, the metal was detected in his urine two more times.

By 2015, Eglais had enough protein in his urine to require additional testing and another exam. His lab results also showed he was anemic and had other signs of kidney injury. But the letter he received from Bohnker after his checkup that year did not mention any need for follow-up.

The next year, Eglais had even more protein in his urine and continued signs of kidney dysfunction. His anemia worsened.

Again, Eglais went in for a checkup. In a letter to Eglais, Bohnker acknowledged that the anemia merited attention and suggested Eglais follow up with a primary care doctor. But he gave no assessment of Eglais’ kidney function or protein level. He wrote nothing about follow-up required by OSHA’s rules.

Instead, he noted, “I find no areas of concern from this physical examination related to occupational exposures with Gopher.”

Eglais himself, however, had serious concerns. He’d watched long-term colleagues and friends become ill and wondered when it would be his turn.

“All of us working at that place,” said Eglais, “you working there long, you ain’t gonna live long.”

A month after his 2016 exam, Eglais, then 58, collapsed inside his home from an infection-related heart failure. At the hospital, tests suggested he might have blood cancer. Doctors recommended he receive further testing from specialists after his discharge.

Dr. Steven Markowitz, an occupational physician and professor at Queens College, City University of New York, said Bohnker couldn’t have prevented Eglais from developing his illnesses. But had the doctor more thoroughly reported the abnormal findings to Eglais, Markowitz said, his prognosis might have been better.

Bohnker, Markowitz said, should have explained in his written assessment that Eglais’ lab results indicated kidney damage.

The doctor also should have acknowledged in writing that work exposure could contribute to Eglais’ problems or make them worse, Markowitz said. And he should have ordered follow-up tests as required by OSHA’s cadmium rules, which Markowitz likened to a cookbook recipe because the mandatory steps are so clear.

“This is a problem,” Markowitz said.

Eglais left Gopher in July 2017. That same month, the company finished its cadmium review, finding itself “substantially” in compliance with the medical requirements outlined in OSHA’s rules.

In an email to the company describing some needed tweaks to worker exams, Bohnker wrote he believed they were “basically okay.”

Eglais, meanwhile, watched his health decline. In 2020, he was diagnosed with severe kidney disease and an aggressive form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma.

Not long after, Eglais began talking to the Times. He said his health problems snuck up on him. He felt good until he didn’t, his body plagued by hidden changes. In recent months, a sense of impending death haunted him. He choked up talking about his outlook.

Times reporters planned to do a final interview with Eglais in July. But he lost control of his pickup truck the night Tropical Storm Elsa rolled into Tampa. He died after crashing into oncoming traffic.

He was 62.

Warning signs missed

When Gopher broke the rules on cadmium, it did so without consequence or notice from federal regulators.

Occasionally, OSHA inspectors visited the plant to assess workers’ exposure to lead and other toxic chemicals. But inspectors missed that the company repeatedly far surpassed the limits for cadmium in the air.

In December 2014, six months after cadmium was measured more than 100 times over the federal limit in one part of the factory, an OSHA inspector responded to a referral about lead exposure at Gopher. The inspector fastened monitors to workers’ uniforms to measure the amount of metals in the plant’s air, including cadmium.

A test in the furnace area recorded a cadmium level slightly above the federal limit. But the inspector wrongly referred to the metal in her report as zinc oxide.

The inspector’s report doesn’t say if she examined the company’s own air-monitoring data for cadmium levels or whether workers were equipped with proper respirators.

OSHA said the agency must have probable cause to broaden an inspection and examine conditions beyond those outlined in an original complaint. OSHA said the 2014 inspection did not include a record of the high air-cadmium level measured months before.

But the level of cadmium the inspector measured in the air alone should have warranted that Gopher regularly conduct air monitoring and place signs around the plant warning workers of exposure to the carcinogen. Her report doesn’t say whether the plant had the danger signs posted.

OSHA didn’t answer questions about why the inspector’s findings didn’t prompt a more thorough review.

“It is the agency’s policy not to discuss determinations beyond what is included in the case file,” OSHA said.

Inspectors who visited the plant in 2015 and 2016 didn’t address cadmium exposure or the contracted physician’s shortcomings in their reports, either.

The Times, in its initial investigation, reported that federal regulators had missed opportunities to hold the company accountable for breaking rules related to other toxic chemicals, including lead.

In April, OSHA began inspecting the plant for the first time in five years. The inquiry is ongoing.

Regulators have taken air samples and wiped surfaces to test for contaminated dust. They’ve interviewed workers and requested a year’s worth of medical records to examine.

This time, OSHA said, it will evaluate Gopher’s compliance with the cadmium rules.