What AT&T and Verizon knew about toxic lead cables for decades
wsj.com
wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/lead-cables-telecoms-att-toxic-... https://archive.is/MA0wG
“Aerial lead cabling runs alongside more than 100 schools with about 48,000 students in total. More than 1,000 schools and child-care centers sit within half a mile of an underwater lead cable, according to a Journal analysis using data from research firm MCH Strategic Data.”
We took lead out of gas (except general aviation). Everyone who buys or rents an older home or even just buys paint at the hardware store is reminded of lead in paint. Most are aware of lead in pipes, especially where these pipes are present. Yet lead levels in children nationwide are still substantially higher than they should be given the mitigations that have already been done.
These cables are likely a huge portion of what’s left, and almost nobody has heard of them. Even when they’re right in front of your face hanging from a telephone pole.
The reason people are trying to get carbon nanotube electricity lines in the air is not because 'nano' is a cool word, but because they're really light while conducting electricity. Lead is, well, quite the opposite of that.
There are significant problems with swcnts (and even more so with dwcnts or mwcnts, due to less effective macrophage breakdown from h2o2 release). But there are some applications where their use can be a large improvement. The fact that only very well trained professionals should ever come in contact with certain materials (like extremely high powered lines) makes this use case more acceptable. Additionally, concealing swcnts in a polymer and using extrusion methods of chlorosulfonic acid into carbon tetrachloride to make really compact nanowires can help quite a bit for making the product affect the public less if any problem may occur that downs the power lines.
Buried cables used to be lead jacketed before viable polymers suitable for long term use were developed in the modern era.
Especially since there are thousands and thousands of schools in America that get their water from wells.
It doesn't seem overly-cautious to wonder about lead placed under a water course 50 years to a century ago finding its way into the groundwater supply a half-mile away.
At that point wouldn't it be so diluted that it's basically indistinguishable from background levels?
Well, the question is how much lead leaches out and gets transported by rainfall down to groundwater tables from which we source our drinking water.
But I'm unclear on how lead that had leached into groundwater would remain in groundwater. Shouldn't the lead, being heavier than water, drop out of the groundwater and get caught up in the soil? Isn't this the primary filtering function we expect of soil — the reason aggregate is used as a filtering medium in wastewater treatment?
If not, wouldn't you expect to hear about water tables that have problematically-high natural levels of this or that heavy metal? Wouldn't you expect that it'd be deadly to drink groundwater that had ever flowed through any underground ore deposits?
Looking into it, though, apparently lead metal and lead ions are both toxic, through independent mechanisms. And that the toxicity of e.g. lead-based paint is due to the toxicity of lead compounds, rather than the toxicity of metallic lead.
Still: is there cause to believe that metallic lead from lead sheathing in cables, would react with something in the ground to form soluble lead compounds, rather than remaining particulate metal and therefore coming to rest in the soil? Things don't oxidize underground, right? And groundwater is usually pH-neutral enough to not create an environment amenable for reduction reactions involving e.g. chromium or sulfur, right?
I say this because several people above have mentioned that there are other metallic-ion "natural pollutants" in groundwater — but I've still never heard of groundwater with high natural lead levels.
Elemental mercury is very difficult to absorb, and even in vapor form the LD50 is quite high. It typically requires extended exposure to even vapor from mercury to have any issues. Even a drop of organic mercury on a glove (let alone skin) can kill.
Historically, even periodically drinking liquid elemental mercury was relatively harmless and didn’t poison anyone. You’d have to do it a lot. The Louis and Clark expedition used it for its laxative effects, and it’s allowed historians to confirm which campsites were theirs or not, for instance.
Most compounds and salts of mercury, especially organic compounds, are incredibly toxic. [https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/mercury/mercorgcasedef.asp]
Many of those compounds form when metallic/elemental mercury is around certain microorganisms, like those in many ponds and lakes, or when man made.
Lead isn’t dissimilar. Lead poisoning (or measurable uptake) from elemental lead almost always requires extended ingestion or inhalation of lead, or ingestion/exposure to a salt or compound which allows easier intake.
The most common forms of lead poisoning usually involve things like habitual smoking or eating while having lead dust covered hands, or persistent ingestion of lead containing substances (like contaminated water) or breathing in of lead contaminated dust.
It takes a surprising amount of persistent exposure, unless someone is really stupid. Like doing oxyacetylene cutting of lead sheet without PPE, or cleaning a shooting range then not washing their hands after.
Care to elaborate? Even handling bullets should be no more posionus than handling diver weights?
Also, be aware that most primers usually have some kind of heavy metal in them (lead azide, lead styphnate, mercury fulminate) though there are newer compositions using strontium and tetrazine starting to get traction. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury(II)_fulminate]
Additionally, non-jacketed bullets (common with rim fire, low power pistol, blackpowder, and some other random stuff) will blast lead off the back of the bullets at the muzzle or forcing cone and into the air.
If the area is adequately ventilated it’s not really an issue. Some indoor ranges are not! Sometimes significant amounts of fine particulates can end up at shooting stations from it, or be inhaled.
That said, just wash your hands and don’t hang out in ranges that get Smokey and you’ll be fine. If you’re cleaning up a range with bad ventilation, wear a respirator rated for metal dust.
I’ve done all the high risk activities (including a decent amount of soldering with gasp leaded solder) for over 3 decades, have done that, and have tested ‘non-detectable’ for lead and mercury every time I felt like checking.
I’ve had friends who didn’t that ended up on Chelation therapy. Don’t be like them. They’re miserable.
If you handled a lot of powdered/pulverized lead powder, and then stick your hands in your mouth and lick your fingers - it could conceivably cause a measurable body burden of lead even if you did it once, maybe. So don’t do that.
It's still not good to inhale (chronic exposure can cause asthma and other respiratory issues) but it's not really an issue of leaded vs. lead-free.
And for what it's worth, I've always anecdotally heard that solder paste is what you really want to be worried about, rather than solder wire, because it's much easier for small amounts to get smeared onto objects/surfaces and contaminate them.
I've certainly heard about such:
https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/a...
> lead, being heavier than water, drop out of the groundwater
Sodium chloride is over twice as heavy as water, and yet doesn't 'drop out' of it.
> you expect to hear about water tables that have problematically-high natural levels of this or that heavy metal?
That does happen. Cadmium is probably the most common culprit.
> In groundwater in Pakistan, mean Cd concentrations of 10 μg/L originated from Jurassic sulfide-bearing sedimentary rocks (Naseem et al., 2014). In Germany, background Cd concentrations in groundwater range from 0.11 μg/L in loess aquifers below arable land to 2.7 μg/L in sandy aquifers below forested lands [1]
The limit in the USA and EU is 5 ug/L. It's quite possible to drill a well with natural cadmium levels above the generally accepted safe level. Lead, arsenic, chromium, barium, and copper are other common culprits. In particular, chronic arsenic poisoning from naturally-occurring arsenic in ground water and aquifers affects many millions of people around the world.
Where I live, I get periodic water quality reports in the mail, with the test results for all kinds of different contaminants.
The reports always list the typical source of contaminants; and naturally-occurring metals in the ground is very common.
Interesting artifact: A well near my childhood home has unusually high levels of chromium for the town. It's believed to be from when someone was running a car repair shop near the watershed; and they left some brake drums or similar car parts outside.
Maybe so they have an excuse to tear the wires down and end services in areas they don't care to service anymore.
Maybe so they can get more subsidies to run fiber that they'll promise to connect people with, but won't ever need to account for.
It's just at "end of profitable life".
For me as a phone nerd who would prefer to have a landline, but no longer have a good justification for it, and frankly I'm unsure if I even have a good drop anymore to my house (its not had service since 2010 - before I owned it).
I keep thinking I should reach out to AT&T and try to order services, but I just never quite get around to it.
Both PIC and Lead Cable pinhole overtime, the life of areal (either PIC or Leaded) cable is 30-50 years, the life of buried cable is 50-90 - all of this cable exceeds that point, and must be replaced.
The phone switches that are connected to the cable are all near or over 40 years old, and closer to 45-50 years old in design, the spares pool is surprisingly healthy (because so many switches have been decommed) but the software that runs of these switches is also near end of life - and in the sustaining engineering phase of its lifecycle.
There may be a life for some copper cable, but it will be literally the last mile. Which is a lot smaller in scope than what we have now.
I get angry when I see it, thinking about the history of free easements, tax abatement, subsidy, and other favorable treatment that the telcos received, historically, and how they can leave this perfectly serviceable infrastructure to rot.
Frontier bought assets from Verizon knowing full well they were going to ride this infrastructure until it was worthless while investing as little as possible. It is no surprise the copper plant has rotted on the poles, they treated their copper and fiber plants like trash in nearly every part of their territory.
There's no way it's getting removed in the next 50 years without a subsidy so maybe this is...OK?
Looking at what this is doing to the stock price of AT&T adds another potential item to your list:
Hedge funds pushing well-timed narratives to their benefit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
The post-breakup structure diagram is all I needed to see.
50/50 $T/$VZ long. Ez mode.
Things like food contamination can be tricky to stop, but we’re getting better at it. I get amazon alerts when batches of a food I buy from whole foods were found to be contaminated. That’s only happened once, but it turned out to be okay.
Worth noting that the mitigations you mentioned do work, because many kids live in the environment you describe but do not have elevated levels of lead.
It does seem reasonable to ask that if a lead cable is overhead on poles and not in use anymore it should be pulled down. In general we shouldn't leave a ton of abandoned infrastructure up in the air on poles.
I can believe there are health issues for telco workers who historically worked with lead cables, and the telcos absolutely need to protect their current workforce from lead if they are regularly working around and disturbing this old infrastructure.
Hunted meat contains a detectable level of lead, and pigs fed lead-hunted venison have a detectable rise in blood-lead levels within days. [1]
So a sub-group of the population regularly and deliberately exposes itself to quite a bit of lead. It's the largest risk factor for high blood levels in children. [2]
Seems like a potential problem. Might be worth switching to lead-free ammunition and considering what effect these decades of selective lead exposure may have had on our communities.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2669501/
[2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/higher-rates-of-f...
I didn't know this until I took my kids to a shooting range in Reno. Before going I had read warnings to make sure to wash their hands afterward, but it was nuts how much residue ended up on our hands after shooting only a single box of rounds; and given the feel of it, likely heavily laced with lead or other metals. I don't think I'd ever take my kids to a gun range again unless I brought my own gun (with well-maintained parts) and used lead-free ammunition--most importantly lead-free primers.
AFAIU it's much easier to find non-leaded bullets than non-leaded primers, though neither is very popular. Until very recently all the discourse on lead exposure and contamination seems to have been focused on the bullet itself.
Not without reason. Animals hunted with lead bullets often leave lead fragments in the natural environment via gut piles (if recovered) or the carcass itself (if not recovered).
Lead poisoning is one of the leading causes for death for carrion birds (who eat the carcasses/gut piles) - such as the California Condor. Because of this, wildlife preservation groups - like the Peregrine Fund - have been vocal proponents of eliminating lead bullets.
Messing with it or changing the environmental equilibrium is often what what increases risk / makes it a non-negligible risk.
See also:
EPA's embarrassing DC screw-up where replacing chlorine with a "safer" alternative caused lead chemical pathways to reverse and lead levels to spike: years of deposits into non-lead infrastructure -from (previously removed) lead pipes- suddenly became unstable and began leaching back into water due to the chemistry change. The leadfree water system suddenly had a lead problem, because some one at the EPA decided that the chlorine system was a bigger problem than it really was.
Especially when it comes to these types of (potential) remediation projects, never assume that the unknown unknowns will be harmless, or even less risky than the no-build alternative.
When an industry depends on problems to exist, problems will be always be found.
When goals and reasons-to-be are accomplished, very few seem willing to 'admit' their victory - and give up their self-important justification for whatever selfimage they've built on top their cause. So the cause is extended or a new one is invented.
"In conclusion, further study - and more research funds - is needed."
If your "industry" is finding the poisons that we human are putting into the Earth, then I think it is true that problems will always be found.
One question, though, is whether they take that opportunity. Another more salient question is whether the Wall Street Journal, of all the possible papers, has fallen under the influence of such groups.
And it certainly seems as if they’ve found some people with elevated lead levels in blood, and ground and water samples that exceed EPA limits.
This is also true of heavy metal poisoning in human bodies. The treatment for metals poisoning is to ingest chelating agents which, in theory, bind to the heavy metals and carry them into the bloodstream, where they are then excreted via urine or other means. Unfortunately a sometimes side effect of this therapy is the unsettling of metals from, e.g. fat stores and the relocation of them into the brain, making things worse rather than better
That didn't happen here. Those lead cables are leaching into local surface water and the environment. Although this article focuses mainly on the harm to workers.
It won't stop the use of leaded fuel until the FAA bans it, which should have happened decades ago. Your airplane can't fly without unleaded fuel? Cool! You can stare at it in the hangar!
Jet engines are completely different from the piston engines you'll find in general aviation (sans choppers, which mostly run on jet engines).
Piston engines need leaded fuel for lubrication as well as knock resistance, and deviating from the original certification of the engine/plane requires a type-specific certification - every model of plane you want to fly that was certified with 100LL AvGas needs to be separately tested if it can fly safely with lead-free AvGas [1].
[1] https://www.flightglobal.com/engines/faa-approves-100-octane...
I do think some European engines have looked at diesel though
There is no other reasonable choice. Lead fuel has to go away simply because of the amount of lead that deposits all around GA airports.
Pretty much everyone in general aviation who is using leaded fuel wants to get away from it. It clogs corroborators and exhausts, requires special mitigation for spills and handling, and is generally not great.
The FAA approved and is now working to promote GAMI G100UL to replace leaded fuel in aviation, the big roadblock is passed as it is approved for all engines for which 100LL was approved for. So the phase out will go as fast as FBOs switch and GAMI can manufacture or license.
> Once you use a soldering iron and you begin to melt it, then you begin to get gaseous lead and that can be inhaled and that's more of an exposure problem. So the question would be, in a case like that, are they properly protected when and if that lead is mobilized?
At normal temperatures, that’s Flux, not lead. “Gaseous lead?”
[0]: https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere... "Exposure, bioavailability, distribution and excretion of aluminum and its toxicological relevance to humans"
You would need to set your solder gun to about (edit 750, not 1100) degrees Fahrenheit to begin truly vaporizing the lead. Which, some soldering irons are capable of, but lead solder’s lower melting point of about 400 degrees makes the risk low.
If you heated solder up to the point that lead was boiling off, your circuit board would be on fire.
You cannot get lead poisoning from using leaded solder.
No no, if you want to get lead into your system you've got to really try quite hard. Taking some lead and mixing it with tin won't get the job done, oh no, not even a little bit. You're going to want to make it into an organic salt, maybe by welding on a lovely big acetate and then getting that into your stomach.
Now why would you want to do a thing like that?
Well, you might be an ancient Roman, with a fondness for "defrutum", a sweet sticky confection made by boiling soured wine and grapes in a lead pot until all the water is driven off. The acetic acid rips lead out like nobody's business and gets well and truly stuck together. Oh, and it tastes really sweet too, this lead acetate, which is just the thing to liven up any Roman party if the wine's gone a bit funny in the sun.
Now you've got a lovely big sugar that your digestive system will happily squish into your sensitive tissues, where it'll break up and be on its way leaving a big fat lead atom right there with nothing to bind to, until it finds something. Oh hey, you know that sugars - even with a great big lead atom weighing them down - cross the blood-brain barrier just fine, right? You couldn't design a better way to get lead poisoning.
Now toss in some ergot mould because you won't eat the local wheat because everyone is going mad from something and it must be those wily locals poisoning you so you only eat rye shipped over from Rome in mouldy sacks, and pretty soon - between the brain damage from lead acetate and the hallucinogenic mould - you're ready to turn horses into senators, and tell your soldiers to blunder into midgie-infested marshes in the North of Scotland where they sink out of sight never to be seen again.
Lovely.
When people 'smell' something when soldering or pouring molten lead, the are smelling aeromatics that are gassing off the materials, not lead particles suspended in air.
The overwhelming danger, and the reason so many people who did work with lead back in the day have high blood levels of lead, is simple contact via their hands with the materials. This guy was likely picking up lead lines, lead ingots to melt, leaded solder all day and then not washing his hands before eating lunch, or rubbing his eyes, etc.
In rare cases dust with lead particles could have been inhaled but this is even pretty rare unless they were literally belt sanding lead alloy metals in an enclosed space.
This argument is fallacious. It is not 100C in my house, but water is evaporating and water vapor is in the air; the air is 40% saturated with water vapor.
The vapor pressure of lead is pretty low at typical soldering temperatures, though.
Lead-core candlewicks are well studied and put tons of lead into the air as the candle burns at 500C or less
[1] https://archive.org/details/0840_Underwater_Cable_and_Other_...
Back in high school electrician shop class we had a few sections of medium and high voltage distribution and transmission cable (The cross sections were neat to look at esp the 130kV 1000 MCM that was about 4 inches in diameter). One of which was a 1 foot length of PILC partly stripped to show the construction and mounted to a wooden base. It sat out in the open on a table covered in dust and lead oxide. After touching it our shop teacher made sure to tell us to thoroughly wash our hands.
edit: forgot to mention lead water mains that still exist. Family friend worked for the DEP and said they liked to "leave the lead be" as the harmful oxides were on the outside of the pipe and not a major threat to the water within. Disturbing the pipes was said to be a larger hazard than leaving them in service.
In April 2014, because of annual rate increases from the DWSD, the Flint City Council voted to join the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), which would be developing a raw water supply pipeline from Lake Huron. The water supply contract with DWSD was subsequently terminated, and the Flint water treatment plant began treating water from the Flint River on a full-time basis and distributing the treated water to residents and other customers. When the plant went into full-time operation, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) did not implement corrosion control, as mandated by the LCR. Instead, the Flint water treatment plant was allowed to complete two six-month monitoring periods without corrosion control and then the MDEQ would decide if corrosion control treatment was necessary.
https://www.materialsperformance.com/articles/material-selec...
Reading this, my first and biggest question is : how did the lead get into their blood?
Having spent ~20 years soldering in the electronics industry on a daily basis I had always assumed that lead isn't getting into your body unless you ingest it. There are ways to ingest lead that we know about : flaking lead paint becomes dust and can be breathed in; lead compounds from burned gasoline can be breathed in; lead in water that has traveled through lead pipes (and possibly copper pipes soldered with lead) can be drunk.
But how do you ingest solid or liquid lead? Disappointing the article never addressed this. It seems the authors heard "worked with lead" and "lead in blood" and just said "yeah that seems obvious".
Wouldn't we see very high levels of lead poisoning in plumbers? (before the move away from lead solder they were heating the stuff with a blowtorch, often in cramped unventilated conditions). Were studies done to eliminate the possibility that the people above ingested lead in some other way?
https://warwick.ac.uk/services/healthsafetywellbeing/guidanc...
Plumbers don't do much soldering and use very little solder when they do. And lead solder has been banned in any pipe that carries drinking water since the 80s.
> https://ehs.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/EHS-0167.pdf
The first page of this link you shared mentions lead oxide:
> During the soldering process in the form of lead filler metals, lead oxide fumes are formed and excessive exposure to lead oxide fumes can result in lead poisoning.
"Because of the relatively low temperatures in electronic soldering, fumes from these metal constituents themselves are not normally a concern"
Seems like a squirrely way of saying that it might be dangerous, but nobody has been inclined to check.
Today no. But in the past of course they did. Every house has 1/2" and 3/4" copper pipe with sweated solder joints. At least 10's of them in each house, if not 100 or more.
Ok, but if this happens wouldn't it be easy to run a study to show a correlation between working in solder-exposure occupations and accumulated blood lead level?
There are millions of workers who would have been exposed in this way (e.g. me), not just a few folks working for big-bad-AT&T.
Good suggestion. Sounds like you can add a new data point. How are your blood lead levels?
You can also use silver solder on copper.
If this were true, would leaded gasoline have been an issue?
Solid lead, on the other hand, is much more inert. The main danger of working with elemental lead is breathing in dust if you're grinding it.
First - only 20-60% of the cable in the wild is lead (depending on the locality, and age of construction), from the mid to late 60's on, PIC (or other similar plastic covered cable) was installed. Also, as capacity was added in between 1980 and 2000, lead cable was removed from service over time.
Second - Yes, You're gonna get exposed to lead working in the field on wired telecom, I have some measure of exposure, lead is not good - but its a risk to employees who work on the legacy wired plant.
"Shalini Ramachandran: I talked to a number of women who worked in AT&T central offices doing lead soldering work, connecting lead sheathed cables from the outside with the internal central office machinery. They actually showed gloves with the fingertips cut off because they had to do sort of small, intricate work to melt the solder with a soldering iron. So, they describe breathing in those fumes. They're not being sort of fans or exhaust around and feeling headaches often every day coming home from work and gastrointestinal issues, nausea, constipation, infertility issues, miscarriages. One woman had developed kidney cancer and had to have a kidney removed."
Though I see one glaring issue with the way the mention things here - by the time a cable reached the main frame of a CO, they were stripped from their sheath - yes they wore fingerless gloves because you needed to be able to wrap the fine copper wire around the lug on the frame, and then solder it with an iron who's tip is roughly the size of a human thumb. That wire though is copper, and the wire from the field was on the back side of the frame, not the front side where the regular work was done to run jumpers. That said, the solder users was lead based.
I have no doubt AT&T studied blood lead levels among employees (AT&T had a how-to document on sweeping), they had a document for every purpose, and studied every aspect of their operations. Those studies were done just before we understood how harmful lead is, it was known to be not good, but not how bad even safe levels of lead could be for humans.
Third - while there is a risk to the general public, its generally infinitesimally small - meaning there is probably more lead in the soil from cars going by for 40-50 years with leaded gasoline, than there is from the buried lead cable underground, or the areal lead cable overhead on the poles.
Fourth - Most of this plant is either going to be abandoned or replaced within 20ish years. Copper last mile is a declining business, even AT&T (nee SBC) is moving to a FTTP from a FTTN architecture. Meaning outside of some remediation costs, removing it from the ground and/or poles will be enough to solve this.
There is no non-manual-labor way to remove the lead contaminated soil with the cables. Any effective remediation will kill many workers.
The same was true of asbestos remediation. It was better to leave it in place, but that never stopped a well meaning idiot from contaminating a whole building pulling out perfectly safe and effective insulation.
Having been a former lineman at PacBell (yes, I'm old), I can tell you that there should be no surprise when you're working in old buildings, with old legacy systems, in a building with zero windows.
Bad news is the best news when you are in it for the long haul.
Edit: I meant that we have bare lead pipes in the ground along with water being sent through them. I also think there was lead used in solder on copper pipes until the 70s or something like that. Surely these are more likely reasons for higher lead accumulations than (poorly) insulated lead wires in the ground?
Lead alloy was also used as the primary electronics solder, and of course in gas and paint in higher quantities so I really was getting the feeling these articles are drawing weird conclusions that telephone cables were the cause of the lead they are finding.
I guess you haven't read a newspaper in the last 70 years.
Yes, journalism is not perfect, sometimes they err catastrophically, but let's not discount all the good things good journalists have done and are still doing.