Phone workers worried about lead on old lines wonder: Who will answer their call?

SPRINGFIELD — Inspectors with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found lead after swiping the hands of telephone line workers in Springfield. They performed the tests after workers rinsed off but before they headed home to their families at the end of the workday.

There’s also lead — a metal to which there is no safe exposure level for children — in air sampled from under a maintenance hole at Central and Cedar streets in January. Federal officials told the workers and their union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2324, in a letter that the air concentration of lead in the maintenance hole was high enough to warrant taking corrective action.

But the outcome of investigations into lead once used to coat old telephone lines in the region — as well as a formal report on sediment scooped from the bottom of that maintenance hole — are uncertain because President Donald Trump-ordered staff cuts have paralyzed the agencies sent here to help just five months ago.

Those federal employees — summoned to Springfield through the efforts of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 2324 and U.S. Sen. Edward Markey — also scooped sediment from a maintenance hole in the busy Six Corners neighborhood.

That sediment tested “magnitudes” higher than the air testing, said John Rowley Sr., business manager of IBEW Local 2324, citing an informal conversation with a federal employee.

But a formal report on the sediment sampled from the maintenance hole — a document that can help Rowley protect the health of 230 unionized telephone workers across Western Massachusetts as well as thousands of retirees — has not yet been released by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which faced deep staffing cuts due to the Trump administration’s attempts to draw down the federal workforce.

Based in Cincinnati, NIOSH investigates hazards in the workplace. For instance, it has maintained a firefigher cancer registry and conducted research into indoor air quality.

“I don‘t care who you voted for. Or what kind of reset you thought the country needed,” Rowley said as he showed the Republican the site where the samples were taken just up the block from a Holyoke Chicopee Springfield Head Start daycare. “But there are people cheering for something that is to their own detriment.”

‘Don‘t know until I see it’

Last week, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that 70 NIOSH workers at two offices, one in West Virginia and the other in Pittsburgh, have been spared layoffs. These workers deal mostly with mine safety and respirator testing.

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told senators that staffers will be reinstated in Cincinnati as well. That’s the office that was handling the lead.

“The work in NIOSH will not be interrupted‚” Kennedy said, according to wire service reports. “We understand it’s critically important function, and I did not want to see it end.”

Senators — both Republicans and Democrats — criticized the cutbacks.

And on Friday, after weeks of emails from The Republican, Health and Human services spokesperson Brittney Manchester said she was able to confirm that the Health Hazard Evaluations final report, which includes results of sediment samples in Springfield, will be completed soon and provided to company, union, and employee representatives, OSHA, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

“I don‘t know until I see it,” Rowley said. But he’s already been warned by researchers at NIOSH that the people who performed the tests and completed the report are due to leave federal service.

That means he doesn‘t know if the report will be altered by others. And if he wants to follow up and press the issue, who does he call?

Telephone companies used lead to shield copper wires inside telephone cables from electromagnetic interference up until plastics came in in the 1960s.

Members of the IBEW Local here in Western Massachusetts have tested with high levels of lead in their blood, he said. Workers report headaches — a classic symptom — getting so bad they had to go home for the day.

Contamination on hands, boots and clothing gets carried home to young children who are particularly susceptible to lead impacts.

Lead, according to the EPA, leads to behavior and learning problems, lower IQ and hyperactivity, slowed growth, hearing problems and anemia in children. It causes miscarriages if pregnant women are exposed. And for adults lead exposure can bring on increased blood pressure and incidence of hypertension, decreased kidney function and reproductive problems in both men and women.

Rowley was told to contact staffers at HHS who handle requests for information made under the Freedom of Information Act, staffers at parent organization the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

One day after getting that instruction, Rowley said he was informed that the FOIA staff had been laid off in a cutback ordered by the Elon Musk run Department of Government Efficiency.

The situation angered Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician who worked at NIOSH and now serves as director of the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College.

Unlike Kennedy, Landrigan said NIOSH’s work has already been interrupted.

“What has happened at NIOSH within the past month or so, the new administration has fired 90% of the workers,” Landrigan said in a phone interview. “They have basically eviscerated the agency.”

The answers The Republican recieved after repeated emails referred questions to other agences. One Centers for Disease Control spokesperson replied that OSHA has not performed site work in Springfield despite the agency’s presence.

“I suspect everything is coming to a halt,“ said Jack Caravanos, a professor emeritus of public health at New York University who was among the first to study lead contamination from old utility wires.

Landrigan said the loss of research into occupational safety and health is a danger to the public.

“It’s a small, highly efficient agency that punches way above its weight,” Landrigan said of NIOSH.

Former colleagues at NIOSH had told him that most of the work has stopped.

“It probably means there is no one at the other end of the phone to give these workers their results,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Labor, which includes OSHA, also faces cutbacks to its regulatory staff. But some action is going on. OSHA staff supervised the collection of more air samples from under Springfield maintenance holes earlier this month in response to complaints from anonymous workers, Rowley said.

The EPA referred calls from The Republican to OSHA this week. But Washington-based spokespeople for the departments of Health and Human Services and of Labor didn‘t respond. Boston-based regional spokespeople for those agencies are apparently no longer on the job, with emails bouncing back.

Thehe lead is still there, however, as more than 50 miles sit beneath the streets of Springfield alone, Rowley said.

In July 2023, The Wall Street Journal, following up on a California lawsuit involving lead cables submerged under Lake Tahoe — reported the threat.

Markey, a Democrat sitting on the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, took up the issue and called for phone companies to step up testing and worker protections.

In February 2024, Markey visited Chicopee and watched with Landrigan and Rowley as Caravanos used a handheld X-ray to detect lead in soils in residential neighborhoods.

“President Trump has gutted the agency in charge of researching, testing, and monitoring worker safety,” Markey said in a written response to questions. “His despicable actions will endanger countless workers, from coal miners suffering black lung to firefighters at high risk of cancer. Last year, I brought workplace safety experts and impacted workers together in Springfield to spotlight the danger of lead in telecommunications cables.”

Markey said the work is now “hamstrung.”

In Massachusetts, enforcement of lead laws is handled at the state level. The Department of Labor Standards investigates violations related to lead abatement. The Department of Public Health’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program addresses cases of lead exposure in children.

While visiting Chicopee in 2024 with Markey, Caravanos said results showed that lead had fallen from old overhead lines into the dooryard of homes on Montcalm Street.

And the same thing is still happening not only in the Pioneer Valley but across the country, Rowley said.

Friction and disturbances — possibly from people working with tools — turns the lead into dust. It falls to the ground from overhead wires. It’s not water soluble, but it can get washed like sand as the water moves.

Workers often pump out the pits when they need to go down to work in them.

“Here, in the city, that goes into the storm drains,” Rowley said. “In one of the towns it might go into someone’s yard where their well is.”

Shareholder activism

Verizon, one of several corporate heirs to the old Bell system telephone monopoly and the one doing business here, didn‘t respond to questions from The Republican over the past few weeks. But in the past it’s taken issue with the Wall Street Journal reporting and called for more research.

Verizon wrote a New York congressman in 2023 saying “soil lead levels near Verizon‘s cable there are similar to lead levels in the surrounding area (i.e., background levels) and do not pose a public health risk to your constituents.”

Verizon stockholders will have a chance to weigh in at the annual stockholder vote May 22. The Association of BellTel Retirees Inc., owner of 214 shares of Verizon‘s common stock, is asking stockholders to force Verizon management to do a comprehensive independent study and release the results by December of this year.

This sort of shareholder activism has been used before. Groups of nuns bedeviled Springfield’s Smith & Wesson into assessing its role in gun violence.

Verizon‘s management replied that it studied the issue back in 2023 and is working with the EPA and others.

But the retirees are having none of it.

“As of November 2024, Verizon has provided no further details. In our view, the issue is too important to slip from public view. Lead remediation efforts in other industries have dragged on for years, and we believe that Verizon should be ahead of the curve,” they wrote in support of their proposal in a document provided to shareholders and posed online by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Whatever happens won‘t be cheap. The retirees say a 2023 analysis by New Street Research estimated that remediation could cost $10 billion $26 billion across the nation.

Rowley said Verizon has workers use respirators in the maintenance holes now.

But as Rowley and Landrigan point out, contaminated dust gets on hands and clothes, contaminated mud gets on shoes. And workers go home to families with young children. Children are unusually susceptible.

“Whoever is down there. They are all subject to this,” Landrigan said.