Gopher Resource Eagan, MN Battery Smelter & Recycling Plant exposed workers to multiple toxins.

• 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.

Hundreds of workers at Gopher Resource lead smelter may have been exposed to dangerous levels of lead. The consequences have been profound.

Gopher Resouces has possibly exposed hundreds of workers and nearby residents with high lead levels for decades.

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• Gopher exposed workers for years to levels of lead in the air that were hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. At imes, 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.

• 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.

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