I have lived in Los Angeles for more than 9 years now, and I have never taken a tour of celebrity homes. I have not toured Universal Studios. I have not toured L.A.'s graveyards, looking for the names of the dead and famous. I have not gone on the Haunted Hollywood Tour. In fact, when I walk on Hollywood Boulevard, I forget to look at the names on the stars I'm stepping on.
I did read recently, though, about an L.A. tour I would like to take; the "Toxic Tour", organized by Communities for a Better Environment (CBECAL). Started in 2007, it's a tour of Los Angeles' most notorious environmental disasters of the past and present. They also have tours in Northern California.
"The purpose is mainly to let people know that there is something going on here, which is the dirty little secrets that pretty much most people don't know about," [tour leader Robert] Cabrales says. "When we talk about tourism and people coming over to visit Los Angeles they're not going to see the nasty parts." - Yahoo News
Tour goers will see where La Montana, a mountain of concrete rubble from the 1994 earthquake, was deposited in the residential area of Huntington Park where it wrought havoc with the air quality for almost 10 years and caused a spike in asthma rates among the children living there.
With a concentration on environmental social justice issues, the tour also stops at Suva Elementary School in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Bell Gardens, where it took years of lawsuits and protests to shut down the two nearby chrome plating facilities that were causing a multitude of public health issues for the children and their families due to high levels of hexavalent chromium being released into the environment from the plants.
Oil refineries and trash incinerators in residential neighborhoods, polluted beaches, schools being built on toxic land, CBECAL keeps a watch on all of it and let's tourists and residents see it, too. The next Southern California Toxic Tour will be on November 22nd, so grab your sun hat and a camera and go take in the sights! You won't be oggling over a Beverly Hills McMansion or catch a starlette out for her morning latte, but you might get inspired to be a real star and help clean up L.A.'s toxic little secrets.
