Introducing Untold: Toxic Legacy

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Speaker 1 Hi, I'm Laura Hughes. I'm dropping into your hot money feed to tell you about an investigative series I've been working on at the Financial Times.
It's called Untold: Toxic Legacy.

Speaker 1 I'm the public policy reporter here at the FT, and a couple of years ago, I got a tip. It was about animals dying in Wales.

Speaker 1 This wasn't really my beat, but I had to check it out. So I got in my car and I drove there.
I started knocking on doors.

Speaker 1 And what I found was that dangerous levels of lead were leaching out of abandoned lead mines and infecting the land.

Speaker 1 Horses were dying of lead poisoning, and people were selling eggs contaminated with lead.

Speaker 1 But that was just the start of this story.

Speaker 1 People are being poisoned too.

Speaker 1 In humans, lead poisoning can lead to mood disorders, heart disease, kidney failure, and infertility.

Speaker 1 Children are particularly vulnerable, with lead causing behavioural problems and lowered IQ.

Speaker 1 And this is happening all across the UK.

Speaker 1 I found evidence that leads in our water, our houses, in our land, and in some cases, children are dying as a consequence.

Speaker 1 In this series of Untold, come with me as I uncover this hidden lead poisoning epidemic and show how the government in the UK has largely turned a blind eye to the problem.

Speaker 1 So, here's episode one of the series. I hope you enjoy this preview, and if you do, find Untold toxic legacy wherever you find your podcasts.

Speaker 16 If you go through into the garden, I'll let the dogs out into the other side.

Speaker 16 I lived in the big house up there. I brought my children up, the majority of them, from the teens onward.

Speaker 1 We had pigs, sows, pregnant sows.

Speaker 16 We had ducks, chickens, goats, dogs, cats.

Speaker 1 30 years ago, a mother of five, we'll call her Sylvia, moved to a picturesque spot. in West Wales.

Speaker 1 It wasn't just the house she loved, it was the land it came with.

Speaker 1 For Sylvia, it was the perfect place to bring up her young children and fulfil her dream of raising animals. It was the kind of place where everyone knows everyone.

Speaker 1 Only one neighbour tried to warn her

Speaker 1 that her new home might not be as perfect as it seemed.

Speaker 16 One old man said to me,

Speaker 16 You'll never get sheep to to live there.

Speaker 16 I didn't say why. And I thought, I haven't got sheep, so, you know.

Speaker 1 It took about six months before Sylvia noticed something was wrong with her garden.

Speaker 16 Nothing would grow. The grass didn't grow.
We didn't get lush long grass in the spring. It was...

Speaker 16 tan colour in the winter, like it had been burnt.

Speaker 1 One day, Sylvia noticed something wasn't right with one of her horses. A black mare.

Speaker 1 A massive tumour had formed under the horse's skin.

Speaker 16 She had what I can only describe as a bunch of grapes coming from her back end.

Speaker 1 Sylvia suspected cancer, so she called her vet.

Speaker 16 And he said, Oh, yes, I'm sorry, I'll just go and get my... you know, and he, she was, she died.

Speaker 1 Then four months later, Sylvia pulled into her driveway to find another horse had died. It had happened again.

Speaker 1 This time, it was a young horse named Ruby.

Speaker 16 I'd come back with the other children in the car and Ruby was dead in the field. Just dead.

Speaker 16 And it was, it was horrible. She was a 10-month-old.

Speaker 1 It kept happening.

Speaker 16 We lost piglets. Probably about eight piglets.
All died.

Speaker 1 It was...

Speaker 16 it was weird. It was getting weirder and weirder.
Ducks died. Chickens died.

Speaker 1 Sylvia couldn't keep her animals alive.

Speaker 16 You didn't know what you were going to wake up to the next morning.

Speaker 18 That's how bad it was.

Speaker 16 Is there going to be another dead animal?

Speaker 1 She would take care of the bodies and her children would look on.

Speaker 16 It was horrendous.

Speaker 16 It's seeing the dead bodies and not knowing why.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 16 if they're dying, then what's happening to us?

Speaker 3 Hello.

Speaker 1 Good morning.

Speaker 1 Sylvia's second oldest, who we're calling Lily, was 13 at the time.

Speaker 19 Considering it was 30 years ago, it's

Speaker 19 it's a big impact.

Speaker 19 Still, sorry.

Speaker 1 When Lily was growing up, she spent more time than anyone outside. She was happiest when riding her horses.
They would spend hours up in the hills and mountains surrounding the house.

Speaker 1 She would stop to take sips of water from the stream. It was a quiet, idyllic childhood.

Speaker 1 But unnerving things started happening to Lily as well.

Speaker 16 Your teeth went green, didn't they? Not your teeth, your gums went green.

Speaker 10 Do you remember that?

Speaker 3 My gums and my hair had a strange

Speaker 19 green change to it as well.

Speaker 16 I remember saying, repeatedly saying, Have you cleaned your teeth? Have you cleaned your teeth?

Speaker 16 But it was when, yes, I have, yes, I have. Oh, me watching her, and then, oh, it's still there.

Speaker 1 Around the same time, Lily had begun having trouble at school. It was unlike her.
Her behaviour seemed to have changed.

Speaker 19 I was very depressed at the time. I don't think my attendance at school had been very good since probably second year of secondary school and then never got back from that.

Speaker 19 I think I sat one of my GCSE exams. I just didn't turn up for the rest.

Speaker 1 All of it seemed inexplicable.

Speaker 19 If Ruby had not dropped dead suddenly,

Speaker 19 we might not have known. And goodness knows what could have happened.

Speaker 1 Sylvia called the vet to investigate Ruby's death, the second horse that died on their land.

Speaker 1 And so the vet did an autopsy.

Speaker 16 He rang me and he said she's got four times the amount of lead in her

Speaker 21 than

Speaker 16 is ever expected. That was when I started looking things up.

Speaker 1 She learned lead is toxic. dangerous to animals and humans, especially children.
So they went to the doctor for tests. Sylvia and Lily both had elevated levels of lead in their bodies.

Speaker 16 When we learnt about the lead,

Speaker 16 it just broke us.

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 16 It broke me.

Speaker 16 Knowing that it's so toxic.

Speaker 1 The source of the lead, in hindsight, was obvious.

Speaker 16 About a quarter of a mile above us was a disused lead mine and it's quite a large one.

Speaker 1 Sylvia had no idea her land was contaminated with lead and probably had been for quite some time.

Speaker 1 It's still hard for her to reckon with today.

Speaker 16 And I felt like I just pulled my head out from the sand because it was horrendous.

Speaker 16 Why didn't I, why didn't I do something about it at the time? I should have done, I should have done.

Speaker 21 Nothing I can do now.

Speaker 19 For us, that house and that land should have been living the dream.

Speaker 20 And it was a nightmare.

Speaker 1 Sylvia and Lily's story from 30 years ago in the remote mountains of West Wales may feel far removed.

Speaker 1 But the poisoning of her family and her home is just one example of something much deeper happening across the United Kingdom.

Speaker 1 My name is Laura Hughes. I'm a reporter for the Financial Times.
And for the past two years, I've been uncovering the UK's perplexing relationship with lead.

Speaker 1 I started with lead mines, but quickly realised this is a problem that goes much bigger, much wider. Traces of old lead are laced throughout the UK.

Speaker 1 It's in soil, in water, in houses and in food.

Speaker 1 And while the dangers of lead are recognised around the world, they are largely overlooked in the UK.

Speaker 1 At almost every point in my reporting, I found a government who has largely turned a blind eye to the threat of lead poisoning and a near total absence of widespread regulations to protect public health.

Speaker 1 The result?

Speaker 1 Generations of Britons poisoned.

Speaker 22 I think the most terrifying thing is that once it's happened there's not really an easy route out of it. The damage is done.

Speaker 22 You've already exposed your children to something that could cause them long-term damage.

Speaker 23 Lead is there ticking along, incrementing a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little more damage, a little more damage.

Speaker 16 And you feel like a conspiracy theorist if you talk to people like neighbours who are interested, kind of. They're like, oh, you know, something else that will kill you.

Speaker 16 That's what people have got the attitude of. Oh, it's just another thing in our world that's killing us.
Every American child is tested for this, so why isn't every British child tested for it too?

Speaker 24 Why in Britain are we failing to prevent a preventable disease?

Speaker 26 It's been convenient to push the blame onto people, and they're failing at one of the most basic functions of government, which is to protect its citizens.

Speaker 16 At the time, for me, it was like: if I report this,

Speaker 16 people are going to hate me. I won't move on with my life.
And I was so petrified of being dragged across the coals for reporting them. And I still am.

Speaker 1 For the Financial Times, this is season three of Untold: Toxic Legacy.

Speaker 1 Episode one:

Speaker 1 Silent Danger.

Speaker 1 Just a few years ago, in 2023, I received a tip.

Speaker 1 It was about horses dying in Wales.

Speaker 1 The tip was that these deaths were somehow linked to a kind of pollution

Speaker 1 leaching out of old lead mines in the countryside.

Speaker 1 Things like this are out of my remit. I cover public policy issues in England.
I'm not an environmental reporter and I'm hardly any kind of pollution expert.

Speaker 1 But I started looking into it. It sounded like a horror film.

Speaker 1 So it surprised me when I couldn't find much public information.

Speaker 1 Then I stumbled across a report. Someone had commissioned a study tasked with figuring out what was happening to the horses in Wales.
The study was led by a young academic. I contacted her.

Speaker 1 Her name is Andrea.

Speaker 22 I'm Dr. Andrea Sartorius, and I'm an ecotoxicologist who works at the University of Nottingham.
I study lead mines and the full ecosystem effects that they have on the surrounding environments.

Speaker 1 Andrea was passionate and sharp. The first time I spoke with her, I knew she'd be one of my main sources.

Speaker 1 For her research, Andrea travelled to West Wales. Her first task was to scout old lead mine sites and the areas around the mines where people were living.

Speaker 22 So, on that first day when we went and visited the sites, it was a beautiful, really sunny day.

Speaker 22 It was actually quite warm, it's very surprising for October in Wales, and it was so absolutely lovely there. I remember thinking this is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Speaker 1 She was struck by West Wales, how idyllic the landscape was.

Speaker 1 These are picture postcard scenes. They're where a lot of locals spend their Saturdays.

Speaker 22 People love going up to walk on the mine sites there. It's very common to have footpaths there, have cycling there.

Speaker 22 People walk their dogs, they ride horses, and they just enjoy it as they would any other part of the landscape.

Speaker 1 These hillsides are dotted with old stone building ruins and mine shafts. Though the lead mines are all shut down now, that's where Andrea began collecting samples.

Speaker 1 She filled test tubes with dirt, water, sand.

Speaker 1 Then she moved to nearby properties and onto bigger things.

Speaker 22 We tested horses, we tested cats, dogs, sheep, chickens, pretty much any animal that we could get our hands on, we were testing for lead concentrations.

Speaker 1 It was when they took their samples back to the lab and the data came in that Andrea had had to sit down.

Speaker 22 I was pretty gob smacked that somewhere that looked so beautiful and felt so natural and untouched was actually very, very polluted.

Speaker 1 They found lead in levels that were higher than Andrea had anticipated.

Speaker 1 Much higher.

Speaker 22 We found incredibly high concentrations, especially in the pastures that the horses were grazing in, which really set off our alarm bells.

Speaker 1 In the places around the mines, elevated levels were to be expected.

Speaker 1 But as she tested further and further outside of the mine sites, into the surrounding countryside, the data showed those levels were high as well.

Speaker 22 And so the pollution in the environment was likely deposited there maybe hundreds of years ago when the mines were active, but they were still going into local wildlife, for example.

Speaker 1 Andrea's research suggested that the land was toxic. Worse is what Andrea found in the wildlife samples.
In the animals, there were potentially fatal levels of lead in their system.

Speaker 1 It was the lead that was causing these mysterious horse deaths. Almost three decades after Sylvia's horses had also died from lead poisoning in West Wales.

Speaker 1 It was still happening.

Speaker 1 And it begged the question: if the lead was killing horses, what was it doing to the people who were living there too?

Speaker 22 I don't think it would occur to most people to even be concerned about that. People don't really know that there's a potential risk.
They're just not well informed about this at all.

Speaker 22 And you're talking hundreds of thousands of people in the UK. It's not just a couple farms.
It's not unique to a couple villages here and there.

Speaker 1 The data Andrea collected suggested this was much more than just some polluted grazing fields. Her research was beginning to point to something much more systemic.

Speaker 22 There are thousands of mines located across England and Wales in particular, and these mine sites aren't all mapped.

Speaker 22 We can only estimate the number of mines, and I've seen estimates of everything from about 3,000 to about 10,000.

Speaker 1 Everything I was learning from Andrea's research was extraordinary to me. I found myself thinking about the implications of what I was learning.

Speaker 1 For what initially seemed like a random tip outside of my area of coverage, I kept pulling in more and more of my focus.

Speaker 1 I wondered about the scale of the problem. This part of Wales wasn't the only place in the UK with old lead mines.

Speaker 1 Where else could be contaminated?

Speaker 1 For the next year, finding the answer to these questions would take me all over the UK.

Speaker 1 First, I knew I had to go to West Wales myself. So I got in my car with no real plan other than to knock on people's doors and get a feel for how big this might be.

Speaker 1 People growing things lead. Crikey, yeah, look, look how steep this is.

Speaker 18 Wow.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 there was a farm around here.

Speaker 1 In Wales, I went from farmhouse to farmhouse, knocked on door after door.

Speaker 1 I asked people what they knew about lead pollution in the area.

Speaker 1 It's fair to say, I received a mixed reception. Upon finding out that I was a reporter, a sizable number of people declined to speak to me.
They didn't want to hear about animal deaths.

Speaker 1 At one point, I was even accused of being part of a global conspiracy to bring down the farming industry.

Speaker 1 The people who did talk to me requested total anonymity.

Speaker 1 Their stories confirmed what Andrea was telling me.

Speaker 1 More unusual animal deaths, produce that just wouldn't grow.

Speaker 1 Some farmers did know there was lead in their environment, at least to some extent. They were just living with with it.

Speaker 21 Everyone's very friendly.

Speaker 21 Unless you're asking them, are they poisoning their neighbours?

Speaker 1 A queue has gathered outside a village hall in West Wales.

Speaker 1 FT producer Percy's love and I follow the queue inside.

Speaker 1 A man is stationed at a folding table with two other volunteers.

Speaker 1 From locals, he's taking sandwich bags and old ice cream tubs filled with dirt from their gardens.

Speaker 18 Can you fill in this little data for?

Speaker 25 Certainly.

Speaker 15 For each of the samples, you've got two samples, have you?

Speaker 18 Yes, yes. Are they from?

Speaker 1 He instructs each person to fill out their name and where they live and what part of their land they've collected this soil from.

Speaker 18 Right, customer. Next man, so I've got two.

Speaker 27 One is these soils.

Speaker 1 These men aren't government officials. They're not part of the local council.
They're just volunteering their time.

Speaker 1 One of these volunteers is Professor Mark Macklin. He's been studying metal mine pollution around the world for over 40 years.

Speaker 1 And over the years, some of his research was commissioned by the UK government. So Mark's findings are not exactly a secret to government officials.
We'll get to that later.

Speaker 1 Mark's more recent research estimates that in the UK today, as many as half a million people are currently living on floodplains contaminated by historic metal mining.

Speaker 1 And the floodplain that's contaminated? It's Mark's own neighbourhood.

Speaker 15 One of the

Speaker 15 outcomes of that was severe lead contamination in this whole region.

Speaker 1 And so he felt he had to start organising a response on his own.

Speaker 1 Through a WhatsApp group, Mark has asked people to bring soil samples. When they get to the front of the line, he asks them where their gardens are located.

Speaker 1 He wants to know how close they live to one of the local rivers.

Speaker 1 And he specifically wants to know if their property floods.

Speaker 27 Did you flood in 2012?

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 15 We were flooded, but not catastrophically as a flooded.

Speaker 1 This village in Wales has a deep history of mining, dating back to a boom in the 1800s. Its rivers once powered a hub of huge lead mines in the area.

Speaker 1 But just over a decade ago, those rivers flooded, as did local houses and gardens. It was catastrophic.

Speaker 1 I start chatting with the people in the line. But yeah, you only know.

Speaker 1 You only knew to test because just someone told you in the area.

Speaker 16 Yeah, after we bought it, yeah.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't an official leaflet that came from the door.

Speaker 1 It's just neighbours talking to neighbours.

Speaker 1 This is a woman named Ruth.

Speaker 16 I mean,

Speaker 1 how do you feel about that?

Speaker 16 I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

Speaker 1 Your soil looks totally... I mean, the soil looks fine.
You would have no idea.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 When Ruth makes it to the front of the line, Mark takes her bag of soil and they head outside to test it.

Speaker 15 Let's see. Let's try and we've got the other one as well, never can

Speaker 18 stand

Speaker 18 behind and that's fine.

Speaker 28 Just because it's an x-ray.

Speaker 1 Mark and the other volunteers have a gadget that looks like it's right out of Star Trek. It's a portable x-ray gun that gives lightning quick results.

Speaker 1 Within 30 seconds to a minute, they tell people whether their soil is potentially hazardous.

Speaker 1 It feels a little like a game of Russian roulette.

Speaker 1 Ruth stands next to them, watching as the soil samples from her garden are zapped.

Speaker 25 Okay, so here are your numbers.

Speaker 1 The results are almost instant.

Speaker 1 It's positive.

Speaker 1 There is lead in Ruth's soil.

Speaker 1 It's about half a gram per kilo.

Speaker 18 So what, okay. So what can you do about it?

Speaker 15 You can't remediate it.

Speaker 15 You have to know where it is. Okay.

Speaker 15 And the scale of it is so large.

Speaker 1 Mark tells Ruth that there's no way to remove the lead from her soil.

Speaker 1 But he says you can manage how you interact with it. Learn what is and isn't safe to do around it.

Speaker 1 The volunteers tell Ruth that while her soil isn't what they call safe,

Speaker 1 she's actually pretty lucky. It's so much worse in other parts of this countryside.

Speaker 1 Just that morning, Mark tested soil with levels more than 10 times what Ruth has.

Speaker 15 The problem is downstream the mines, because that's where people grow stuff, that's where your chickens

Speaker 15 peck and graze, and the rest of it, that's where people live.

Speaker 1 So, as I look around the hall, I wonder why this doesn't feel more official.

Speaker 1 Should there just be a volunteer effort?

Speaker 1 And if there's lead in these people's gardens, should they really be figuring out next steps on their own?

Speaker 1 But Mark says that's all they've got right now. And the lead isn't going anywhere.
It won't degrade. It just makes its way into other things.

Speaker 15 The legacy remains that our river channels and floodplains are incredibly contaminated. The big problem is the lead within those sediments, they don't biodegrade.
They simply get remobilized.

Speaker 15 They get moved downstream. And

Speaker 15 they remain, in terms of human time scales forever.

Speaker 15 And then it gets taken up in the food chain.

Speaker 1 The food chain.

Speaker 1 Meaning, the produce that grows in gardens and farms and feeds countless people.

Speaker 1 This point about the food chain, it reminded me of something in Andrea's report. that I haven't told you about yet.
As I drove away from the village hall, I couldn't get it out of my mind.

Speaker 22 I went into this PhD project really interested in the science side of things, wildlife, adaptation to pollution, and that was my perspective. I wasn't really thinking about humans or livestock.

Speaker 22 But then, within about 10 days of starting the project, we ended up going down to visit some of the farms that were impacted. And it was pretty clear that that wasn't the story here.

Speaker 1 Only a few months into my reporting, I had confirmed everything Andrea had told me from the outset. I had seen the invisible, how plain-looking dirt could contain dangerous levels of lead,

Speaker 1 and how that contamination was ending up in land far from the old mine sites.

Speaker 1 Like me, Andrea had wanted to know the extent of this contamination.

Speaker 1 She was on a farm in West Wales when a realization dawned on her.

Speaker 22 We realized that there were chickens on site that had very high blood lead concentrations and because of that we then grew curious about the eggs that these chickens were producing.

Speaker 1 Andrea tested those eggs and not just once. She tested them again.
and again.

Speaker 22 So we kept on sampling these eggs and just found higher and higher lead concentrations over time in them.

Speaker 1 It turns out on this farm, the chickens were kept beside a driveway built with something called lead spoil.

Speaker 1 Around here it's a very popular driveway additive. It's excellent for weed prevention because nothing will grow in it.
And it's free.

Speaker 1 Locals can drive up to the abandoned lead mines and shovel out all they want from the heaps. So on this farm, as the chickens pecked at the driveway, they were ingesting lead.

Speaker 22 And that was passing through into their eggs, which could then be passed into whatever consumes those.

Speaker 1 The eggs were toxic.

Speaker 1 Such high levels of lead in any food item would likely be deemed unfit for consumption. In other words, poisonous to humans.

Speaker 1 What's more, the farmer who owned the chickens, Andrea found out they weren't just eating these eggs, they were selling them too.

Speaker 22 It was also that they were sold at the farm gate and sold to locals in a local farmer's market.

Speaker 1 When Andrea found lead in the eggs, it became real.

Speaker 1 Toxic lead was in the local food supply.

Speaker 1 So Andrea went to see one of the local farmers herself. She told the farmer that the eggs they were selling were contaminated.
with enough lead to poison the people who regularly ate them.

Speaker 22 The owner stopped selling selling those eggs once we informed them about the lead concentrations in the eggs.

Speaker 1 But Andrea didn't stop at one farmer. She told as many as she could.

Speaker 1 And there were some who made other decisions.

Speaker 22 Just to make it clear, nobody told any of the landowners to stop selling eggs, and that was a personal decision.

Speaker 22 I know there are other sites where landowners did, I tested their eggs for them, and they continued both selling and consuming the eggs themselves.

Speaker 1 In essence, these farms were selling lead exposure in the form of animal products. A nobody official had told them to stop.
To my knowledge, those eggs are still being sold.

Speaker 1 There doesn't seem to be a functioning system to stop this from happening.

Speaker 1 So I contacted the UK Food Standards Agency. They confirmed the UK does not have a safe lead threshold for eggs.

Speaker 1 Andrea had to use levels set by other countries to determine how toxic her samples were.

Speaker 1 The FSA told me it's the responsibility of businesses and local authorities to keep food safe for public consumption.

Speaker 1 So I contacted local authorities in West Wales and they confirmed that the people living in these areas have been given no official information on the risks of lead in their environment.

Speaker 1 I wondered wondered if any of the UK's food was being tested for lead.

Speaker 1 The government told me they do test food for heavy metals,

Speaker 1 but only a supermarket's shelf worth annually.

Speaker 1 Which means, in practice, food safety when it comes to lead in products is being left up to personal discretion.

Speaker 1 The eggs floored me.

Speaker 1 When I tell people about my reporting on lead, I always start with the eggs. Andrea told me that eating lead-contaminated eggs could affect a child's cognitive development.

Speaker 1 I buy eggs from my neighbours and I feed them to my two children. So, if I was living in one of these areas where there are thousands of abandoned lead mines,

Speaker 1 I could be poisoning my own family.

Speaker 1 How many other families could be poisoning themselves?

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Speaker 15 We estimate that there is 190 square kilometers

Speaker 15 of floodplain

Speaker 15 in Wales,

Speaker 15 which is significantly contaminated. And just to give that sort of bit of a metric, I think Birmingham is about 260 260 square kilometres.
So it's approaching those

Speaker 15 urban area sizes. So this is not an insignificant area of land.

Speaker 1 That's Professor Mark Macklin again. He's the one who was testing his neighbour's soil in the Welsh mining village.
He's mapped the areas in the UK most affected by lead contamination.

Speaker 1 In fact, before he retired, it used to be his day job. He's made maps of lead contamination for high-risk areas around the world.

Speaker 15 We've developed a globally usable mapping and modelling tool. We've actually refined that for the UK.

Speaker 1 Mark's map starts with the mine sites themselves. It sounds straightforward, but remember, there are only estimates of the number of lead mines in the UK.

Speaker 1 Part of the reason we can only estimate is because of how deep the UK's mining history goes.

Speaker 15 We've got a very long history starting four and a half thousand years ago we were the first industrial nation and

Speaker 15 there was very large-scale mining and unfortunately this took place without any environmental regulation

Speaker 15 so much if not all of the waste was actually discharged in the nearest water courses.

Speaker 1 The watercourses.

Speaker 1 The channels that run nearby or through the mine sites. Mark is an expert in these.

Speaker 1 He says not only are the watercourses contaminated, but they can spread that contamination further away from the mine sites.

Speaker 15 People might think that it's the mine itself, which is the problem. It is to some degree, but actually the bigger problem is the channels and floodplains downstream of those mines.

Speaker 1 He says it's a phenomenon that's been getting worse in recent years.

Speaker 15 We've got to be mindful that climate change is actually mobilising this, so we need to know where the flood risk zones are. We've done that, we've mapped it, we can provide this.

Speaker 1 So the mine sites are points on the map, but around these points are much larger circles. These are the contamination zones where you are most likely at risk of lead contamination if an area floods.

Speaker 1 Seeing it mapped out this way, the threat is no longer invisible.

Speaker 15 And those can be used in terms of whether there's an issue and people's lives, livelihoods can be protected.

Speaker 1 The academics were all telling me the same thing.

Speaker 1 What was happening with the animals and the eggs is likely happening in other hotspots, all over the UK.

Speaker 1 On Mark's map, there was one place in particular that jumped out at me. It was covered in overlapping circles.

Speaker 1 An area in Yorkshire, which has the highest density of old lead mines in the whole of the UK.

Speaker 1 If I wanted to know more about what was happening, I needed to go there.

Speaker 17 We lost nine sheep. Equivalent to back then would be probably £1,500 in value.
So that's what you know you take, but you know,

Speaker 17 and you talk to other farmers neighbouring, and they're cattle farmers, not sheep farmers, we realize that they were having problems as well.

Speaker 1 You're hearing from a sheep farmer, 300 miles away from where we've been in Wales, in Yorkshire, England. We'll call him George.

Speaker 1 In general, farmers weren't eager to speak to me here either, and certainly not on record.

Speaker 18 So sweet. Yeah, they're really sweet.

Speaker 17 I don't know if you saw this little lamir.

Speaker 1 This part of Yorkshire is home to almost 2,500 abandoned lead mines. That's more than double any other area in the UK.

Speaker 1 It's pretty common for George's land in Yorkshire to flood. One of the first times it happened, the lead runoff from the floods killed George's lambs.

Speaker 1 If it happens again today, he just rotates the sheep off the contaminated land.

Speaker 17 As I say, we have to manage it

Speaker 17 knowing that what can happen,

Speaker 17 you know, and

Speaker 17 there is no compensation, it's just we have to take it on the chin and what have you.

Speaker 1 George, and so many other farmers I've met in my reporting don't seem to be the kind to reach out for help.

Speaker 1 But I also wonder if anyone has ever offered it,

Speaker 17 but no one's ever come here looking for lead or no, no, nobody's, no, no, you know, the EA or whatever.

Speaker 1 The EA is the UK's environment agency.

Speaker 17 The EA,

Speaker 17 whether they test the water in the river, I'm not aware of.

Speaker 17 Nobody's ever come and sampled the soil or whatever.

Speaker 1 And George wanted to know: what if someone had come and tested?

Speaker 1 Then what?

Speaker 1 Would they help?

Speaker 1 Or would it make things even worse?

Speaker 17 But if I had a problem and people said, well, we can't have, you can't produce

Speaker 17 lamb or whatever, what can I produce in that field so I'm stuck I can't produce livestock

Speaker 17 so

Speaker 17 is somebody going to compensate me for the lack of earnings for land I can't use

Speaker 17 and and that's hey that's another avenue you can go down but I'm one person who you you can talk to who's had

Speaker 1 you're one of how many more farmers you're just one that's been very kind and spoken to me but I don't think this is just no no it's not a farm this is going to be representative of a whole load of farms.

Speaker 17 Oh, yeah, anywhere, anywhere where, as we've said, anywhere where there's been lead mines and there's rivers coming down and land gets flooded, it can be an issue.

Speaker 1 It can be an issue, and it was

Speaker 1 definitively.

Speaker 1 It's a tough dilemma for farmers.

Speaker 28 If

Speaker 17 the people like the year and them people don't get involved, and you know, does our meat,

Speaker 17 possibly our lamb, got more lead content?

Speaker 17 You know, it's one of them questions. And, you know, is it better you don't know?

Speaker 1 I'm a reporter. So I obviously can't live with the idea of not knowing about the invisible dangers around us.

Speaker 1 But the total contamination in the UK,

Speaker 1 because of a lack of official testing, we just don't know.

Speaker 1 But I will say this.

Speaker 1 If I can get in my car and find evidence of lead in the environment, I can't help but wonder what officials, proper government bodies, would find.

Speaker 1 Last year, UNICEF and USAID gathered global powers to talk about the dangers of lead poisoning. There's a video of this.
You can find it on YouTube. It has some seriously cheesy music under it.

Speaker 1 But sitting at my desk, I was getting emotional. I listened, rapt.

Speaker 16 It's time we move lead exposure from the margins to the mainstream of development. The future is within our grasp.

Speaker 16 Let's reach for it together.

Speaker 1 A few months into my reporting, I worried I was overreacting about this whole story. But here were world leaders gathered to focus on lead poisoning.

Speaker 1 They were talking about it as an imminent threat to children in low and middle income countries. And they were committing to fight it.

Speaker 1 But from what I'd seen so far, they could have just as likely been talking about the UK.

Speaker 1 I wondered how many children had lead poisoning here.

Speaker 1 I wondered how many only discovered it once their children's behaviour changed or their gums turned green, like Lily in Wales.

Speaker 1 I couldn't help but feel an ache in my chest.

Speaker 1 Why would a fully developed country allow its citizens to be potentially exposed to a toxic chemical?

Speaker 1 As I chased the answer, I began getting more tips from all over the UK, from the places I thought were safe.

Speaker 23 We know about the issue with old mines and runoff, but that's just one of the issues.

Speaker 22 People don't really feel the threat is real to them. I think it's very easy to think, well, that just happens to other people.

Speaker 29 Internally in the house, the lead levels were so dangerously high, we knew it had to be coming from inside the house itself.

Speaker 1 That's next episode on Untold.

Speaker 1 Toxic Legacy.

Speaker 1 Toxic Legacy is season three of Untold, a Financial Times investigative podcast. It is produced with Goat Rodeo.
The series lead producer is Jay Venables.

Speaker 1 Our Financial Times audio producer is Percy's Love. Reporting by me, Laura Hughes.
Writing by me and Jay Venables. Story editing from Megan Nadolski.

Speaker 1 Ian Enright, Tofa Forge, Percy's Love and Rebecca Seidel.

Speaker 1 Executive Producer for the Financial Times is Tofa Forge. Special thanks to Laura Clark.

Speaker 1 Executive producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolsky. Mixing, Editing and Sound Design by Jay Venables, Ian Enright and Rebecca Seidel.

Speaker 1 Editorial and production assistants from Rebecca Seidel, Percy's Love, Max Johnston, Ethan Plotkin and Misha Frankel Duval.

Speaker 1 Fact-checking from Laura Hughes, Jay Venables, Simon Greaves and Lucy Baldwin. If you want to share a tip in relation to this podcast, please get in touch at laura.hughes atft.com.

Speaker 1 Thank you to the many sources who shared their stories with us for this series. For more information and resources talked about in this series, I've left you some links in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Please check them out. Thanks for listening.

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