Millions of Children at Risk as War on Lead Paint Stalls | Hacker News Reader

Millions of Children at Risk as War on Lead Paint Stalls

nytimes.com

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I worked as a painter one summer and we painted several houses which had lead paint (either still or at some point in the past) For the most part we would try to do something about it but when you are 40 feet up on a ladder and scraping paint off a windowsill that hasn't been touched in as many years it's very difficult to contain.

For one, you have to wear protective suits and respiratory gear, neither of which was really that effective. They really inhibited my ability to move so a lot of times I would just go gloves and mask. Second, you have to prep ground beneath with thicker than usual plastic sheets to catch the paint scrapings that fall down. This just doesn't really work that well and there isn't always an effective solution. People have bushes against the house most of the time and you can't really control where the paint falls so most of it just ends up on the ground and then gets cleaned up later.

The fines for avoiding regulation are extremely high but I never once saw an EPA person the entire summer and on the occasions where it might have been possible we were warned ahead of time. There is an unspoken agreement that you try to contain the lead paint but you can't really do that much about it.

The main difference that you notice about lead paint is the thickness of the paint. After main years it kind of "cakes", but also that it still looks relatively nice after a long time. In comparison to latex paint it just has a much nicer look and I can see why they used it.

Edit: as a response to other comments, it's relatively easy to detect lead paint, I could usually spot it when we showed up/based on the type of house. I don't know about other sources like pipes though.

When I was a youngster, my dad, a house painter, said the future of painting was lead abatement. In the mid-80s when I started working for him, it was a small sliver of what we were doing. In the early 90s we started getting bid documents that were basically 100% lead abatement.

This certainly is the case in some areas even these days 20+years later, particularly those parts of town that have been lower income for a long time, and are now being renovated. Smart guy to think ahead on that.

You need a power scraper with a vacuum for that type of job, something like this http://paintshaver.com/

With that sort of tool, it sounds nice but you have to consider how much the tool costs, how many times you use it, how long it will last, etc. One thing that the job taught me was how to wisely allocate money towards a business and not buy stuff like this that you don't need.

As long as the client was happy and we were complying with regulation, we used the cheapest tools possible. You could spend spend 1000 or whatever it costs on this thing that vacuumes up paint and put the job in the red or you could spend 10 bucks on some paint scrapers and get shit done in the same amount of time. These kinds of tools also don't always work or take a lot of overhead to set up which is lost money in wages as well as time on the job that could be spend painting the house. The difference between 50% profit and a loss is surprisingly thin.

For a house with a huge amount of lead paint this kind of tool might be useful but that job would be quoted differently and likely would go to a specialist that charges more accordingly and maybe even contracts someone else to do the actual painting. These days most houses that need it have been done.

"You could spend spend 1000 or whatever it costs on this thing that vacuumes up paint and put the job in the red or you could spend 10 bucks on some paint scrapers and get shit done in the same amount of time."

Ideally, you would reuse the vacuum for other jobs in the future.

We tried one of those when we repainted the original lap siding of our 1920 house a few years ago.

It did not work well. Everything had to be just right for it to work properly. If the paint was not a uniform thickness, if there were any old paint drips hanging over the edge of the siding, or if the siding was not laid straight the same width across the wall, it wouldn't shave off the paint evenly.

We found the best tool for the job was a radiant heat gun made from an old toaster oven and a paint scraper. You'd heat the paint until it started to soften, then scrape it off with a putty knife.

Like the parent said, it was difficult work requiring at a minimum a ventilator and gloves, and try the best we could, it was impossible to contain all the paint chips. But I think a few paint dust chips left behind is probably trivial compared to the amount of lead in the soil around our house from decades of cars and trucks going by our home burning leaded gasoline.

It sounds like your company at least tried to follow the regulations. A lot of times, on homes in the Los Angeles area, I see painting crews that don't even take half the precautions your crew took.

Once I saw a worker remove an entire living room's "popcorn ceiling" with a paint scraper. He was wearing regular clothes (jeans and a t-shirt - no Tyvek suit). He just let the material fall on to the floor. All the other workers just paraded through and tromped it all over the place.

Eventually someone swept it up and left it on the back patio in a big uncovered heap.

Surely, they carried out asbestos and lead content tests on the ceiling paint and material beforehand ...

I did the same and either we never painted houses that had lead paint or we were never told about it. It's not even something I thought about.

Probably the worst thing I did was kilz an entire bathroom. (Very little ventilation and I had to use a ton of kilz.) That made me feel terrible for quite a while afterwards.

Super not good. That stuff is liquid evil.

The galling thing is that this really should have been a much smaller problem, since the health issue with lead paint has been known since the early 20th century. Many countries started banning it for interior use around then, e.g. France in 1909, and the UK in 1926. The US eventually did so too, but not until 1978, meaning that a whole bunch of post-WW2 buildings were painted with lead-containing paint, when that was already well known to be a bad idea by that time. There would still be some old residences with lead paint even if it had been phased out in the 1920s, but the numbers would have been much lower.

(Lead pipes have a similar history, phased out in many countries by the 1910s-20s, but installed in the US up until the 1960s.)

I highly recommend the Neil DeGrasse Tyson Cosmos episode "The Clean Room" [1], which is about the prevalence of lead gasoline saturating our environment so thoroughly with lead that researcher Clair Patterson's research on the age of the Earth was rendered nearly impossible. Patterson made it his mission to get lead out of gasoline for the detrimental cognitive effects it would have on the populace, but corporations fought him (with the same tactics they use to fight climate scientists today) and lead was not phased out of gasoline until the mid-1970s [2].

It's unfortunate, research in recent years has shown a stronger and stronger positive correlation between lead in the environment during childhood and violent crime later in life [3][4][5]. This is why what happened in Flint Michigan is a crime against society. That community is going to suffer the consequences of the lead in their water supply for an entire generation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clean_Room

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead

[3] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jfeigenbaum/files/feigenbau...

[4] http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2000_Env_Res_Author_M...

[5] http://www.ricknevin.com/uploads/Nevin_2007_Env_Res_Author_M...

Wow, $2.1 billion to fix the problem for the whole country. That's nothing. That's got to be the lowest hanging fruit with the biggest bang for the buck with ROI paying off for the next century or more.

$2.1 billion over ten years, too. 65 cents a year for ten years, per person.

That's really hard to believe that there is not a national program for this. I wonder why nobody seems to care.

In SLC over 95% of the homes have lead paint. I was advised to give a pamphlet to tenants notifying them that the home has lead paint... and that's it! I was now 100% compliant with the law.

What I found most shocking was that in a city with this great a density of lead contaminated homes, I could only find 5 professional outfits capable of removing lead paint! The only way to get traction on this issue (at least in Utah) is to pass a law against it :(

My understanding is that the safest thing to do with lead paint is leave it alone. Paint over it and keep everything in excellent shape (no peeling/cracking paint anywhere).

Once you touch it you risk sending it airborne or spreading it all over the environment, including as dust or in the soil, both of which are much more likely to expose children to it.

I live in Allentown, Pa., where a remarkable 23.1 percent of children tested had excessive lead. I also work with Head Start and we actually had our funding cut for testing children because they general idea was it wasn't a thing in 2016. Now it is a thing against and we again start testing every child in school. We just had to switch to getting them going to their doctor to check their blood.

My home was built in 1894 and the original wall paper was removed in 2007 before we moved in and all the wood work isn't painted. I found lead all over the house where a few doors or wall was painted in the bathroom and kitchen. Everyone just told me to paint over it but I actually stripped it all and what a pain! No wonder it is an issue no one want's to spend the time or energy removing this stuff when you can just paint over it.

Yes. And yet ... there's a trade off to consider.

e.g. for asbestos, occasionally the best choice (depending on the location of the asbestos containing material and its current condition) is to leave it in place and secure it / envelop it.

In some cases, removing the asbestos bearing material entirely would increase the chance of it entering someone's lungs.

I believe this kind of tradeoff can be applied to lead bearing materials too.

Of course, there's also the peace of mind factor. And that's valued differently by people. Given a high enough budget, removal can probably always be done safely. But sometimes the required budget is awfully high.

Does anyone know how the lead in paint gets into a person's bloodstream?

Is it by "eating paint chips" as the old joke goes? Or does the paint eventually flake microscopically and end up in food and on eating surfaces or something?

I think it is through inhalation and ingestion. Children at at greatest risk. Even dust caused by renovation puts children at risk.

Yes. Literally eating paint chips from pealing paint, windows and moldings are usually the most common sources. Toddlers and young children are both the most susceptible and the most likely to be exposed. I helped a friend fix up a half remodeled POS house he bought where the previous owner was sloppy and his two year old son developed severe lead poisoning.

Lead is insidious. Usually in the environment it gets sequestered as the phosphate or sulfate. Except when it doesn't. The bio-availability of lead phosphate/sulfate is low. However lead paint uses lead-oxide which is highly available.

I think lead-oxide was used for oil based paints because it's pure white, highly opaque, and catalyses polymerization. It's almost perfect except that it's poison.

Oh yeah lead/tin solder is wonderful to work with. makes sad face

Lead paint also tastes sweet. Wall Candy.

Lead paint itself flakes. One of the reasons it was used is because it is "self cleaning" in that the dirty top layer eventually sheds off. The most common way lead gets in your blood stream from lead paint is actually usually dust from flaking paint, chipping, sanding, etc. Even these dust level amounts will spike a toddler's blood lead levels because they absorb it much more readily, thinking it is iron or calcium. If you are iron-deficient you wind up absorbing lead as much as seven times more readily!

I'm surprised that there isn't more awareness of the problem. Hopefully the Flint publicity will help. looks like there is advice online but I've never heard anyone mention it despite living in an area with lots of old houses.

http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/hea...

>>>> For your child:

> Have your child's blood lead level tested at age 1 and 2. Children from 3 to 6 years of age should have their blood tested, if they have not been tested before and: They live in or regularly visit a house built before 1950, They live in or regularly visit a house built before 1978 with on-going or recent renovations or remodeling They have a sibling or playmate who has or did have lead poisoning

I'm curious to see how die-hard free marketeers would solve this problem. To me, this (and similar examples) is proof that strong government is needed so that it can stand up to strong private corporations.

Ummm... the dangers of lead paint would be noticed by consumers who would demand an alternative and corporations would provide it.

If you look at a lot of the health concerns in our society, that's how it works. Often companies change what they are offering long before the gov't passes any laws forcing them to.

> If you look at a lot of the health concerns in our society, that's how it works. Often companies change what they are offering long before the gov't passes any laws forcing them to.

Yes, like the well known example of Tobacco and Asbestos.

...and seat belts and airbags and food labels.

Meddlin' guvment...

Many of the chemical companies that made lead paint still exist, and the risks of lead have been known for hundreds of years. Europe banned lead in the 1920s. I do not think that there should be a statute of limitations on these things, I think that the big old chemical giants should pay for fixing this.

What are you, a communist?

Maybe oppose $2.1 billion to the costs of health related expenses of lead paints for the next decade? But just maybe :)

Please don't.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221679 and marked it off-topic.

We can [partly] solve this in the tech field. (Startup idea.)

A cheap (very cheap!) device to detect lead in paint. It would have to cost under $50, and better under $30.

If you can detect it you can work on it because you can see the problem.

The only way I know to detect lead with a device (as opposed to chemically) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_fluorescence

So, how to make a cheap enough device? You don't need great accuracy - 20% accuracy is fine for this. You need very high sensitivity in the detector because you don't want to generate a lot of x-ray energy in a device hold for household use.

To be practical the device would have to emit so little energy as to be basically harmless even if used on a person. (Low power, but also short duration.)

I'm curious and know nothing of the subject, but what's wrong with the chemical testing? I thought they had home lead paint test kits.

Living in the Pacific NW, we don't really have a lot of lead paint issues like back east.

Probably you don't want to scratch that new toy only to find no lead in it.

If you have lead paint that has been painted over the chemical test will not detect it.

You have to scratch the paint to search each layer and people don't want to do that.

You also can't offer to visit someone for free and do a quick test since each test costs you money.

> You have to scratch the paint to search each layer and people don't want to do that.

So you scratch the bottom, and patch it if you really care that much.

> You also can't offer to visit someone for free and do a quick test since each test costs you money

A fancy x-ray whizzbang that hasn't been developed yet costs money, too. And so does a technician to run it.

This seems like a very silly solution looking for a problem.

If you have lead paint that has been painted over, you don't really have a problem.

That's not true at all. Most lead pain has been painted over by now - it's almost 40 years old.

Yet people are still exposed to it.

(Shrug) You could always teach your kids not to eat paint chips.

Infants put everything in their mouths. They may be poisoned before they understand.

Sounds like an excellent reason not to leave infants unsupervised, then.

Go raise an infant and report back with your luck on this method.

This is why the human race is pretty much doomed.

"Lead paint is poisonous. Your child shouldn't be allowed to consume it."

"No, actually, you're wrong. Have a downvote."

Eventually all civil discourse will look like this. We're already starting to see it in Presidential debates.

No, if the human race is doomed, it's because ignorant people think it's okay to leave children exposed to known toxic substances.

No amount of "supervision" is going to keep a child from consuming lead paint. Children do not get lead poisoning because they walk up to lead-painted walls and start gnawing on them like they are corncobs.

Lead paint forms toxic dust. The dust gets on floors and into dirt. Children crawl around, and they WILL put their hands in their mouths even if they are "supervised" at all times.

What we are starting to see in presidential debates is an ignorant man talking like he knows everything.

Sorry you were downvoted. I gave you an upvote before my initial response.

You may have been downvoted because your response may have seemed a little snarky to some. While your suggestions make sense they are not necessarily practicable or economically feasible in all cases. People are pretty sensitive when it comes to the health their children and wants what's best even when they cannot provide it.

People are still exposed to it because it is in poor repair. The top advice for what to do with interior lead paint is to paint over it.

Plenty of old houses in Portland were built in the early 1900s and have lots of lead issues. There have been quite a few uproars over demolitions without abatement of houses with lead paint near schools.

Like so?

http://www.zefon.com/store/leadcheck-swabs.html?gclid=CKag27...

Or you could just look up the year the house was built.

"All houses built before 1978 are likely to contain some lead-based paint."[1]

(If you do have such a house, don't panic. Read the article below for what you need watch out for)

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/tips.htm

In some places, like NYC, there's often a legal presumption that ALL paint contains lead. It seems that for legal purposes detection is not always the central issue.

"All paint in a pre-1960 multiple dwelling unit where a child under age 6 resides and in the common areas of such multiple dwellings is presumed to be lead paint. A lead-based paint hazard is any condition in a dwelling or dwelling unit where a child under age 6 resides that causes exposure to lead from lead-contaminated dust, from lead-based paint that is peeling, or from lead-based paint that is present on chewable surfaces, deteriorated subsurfaces, friction surfaces, or impact surfaces that would result in adverse human health effects."

http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/lead-ll1-guide-...

Maintenance and remediation become central in these cases, I think. A government-approved technology that lowers the cost and risk of remediation would be a big winner.

I can't help but add: I wonder what Donald Trump does to maintain and remediate the lead in his NYC buildings...

>In some places, like NYC, there's often a legal presumption that ALL paint contains lead.

If that wasn't the case nobody would ever test for lead, and they'd just shrug and say "we didn't know" when it came out later there was lead.

You can buy a lead detection marker for about 3$ you use it over paint if it turns pink/red it's lead....

You can also just test children's blood. That is much more direct and would catch the problem whether it's the paint at home, the water, the paint at grandma's house, etc...

The problem is cumulative, so if you're testing everyone early you greatly limit the damage.

Massachusetts mandates that every child is tested for lead in the blood between 8 and 12 months of age, then at 2 years and at 3 years. Every pediatrician does the tests automatically at the normal checkups. And our rates of lead poisoning are much better than most other states with old houses.

That's one brilliant government policy. Whoever thought that up deserves a gold star.

Edit: really? downvotes for this? Mind explaining?

Probably sounded unintentionally sarcastic?

Entirely unnecessary if you stmt a bad patent who let's your child live with lead paint.

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