Earlier this month, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of California's waters, received a settlement in a lawsuit it filed in January in the United States District Court against AT&T subsidiary Pacific Bell.

The cables have been in disuse since the 1980s, when Pacific Bell switched to fiber optic cables, the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance said in a press release. They were discovered by local divers working to remove garbage from Lake Tahoe. 

The nonprofit estimates that the cables contain 63 tons of lead — or 3 pounds of lead in each foot. 

"While the amount of lead the cables have leached into Lake Tahoe is unknown, attorneys for CSPA found that three feet of cable left for one day in in a tub of Lake Tahoe water leached 4800 times the amount of lead allowed to enter a source of drinking water," the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance said in the press release. 

AT&T said it hired an "expert firm" and did not discover any lead leaching into the lake. In a statement, the company said, "We are committed to preserving one of the most scenic freshwater lakes in the Sierra Nevada. We have agreed to remove these cables because they are no longer in use, however, we dispute any notion that they were a source of pollution. We are disappointed to see the Alliance take such an adversarial posture after we have agreed to work with them to remove these cables."

Continue reading the article from SF Gate here.