New Home Regs & Air Pollution At School

Getting the lead out… everywhere this time.

This is The Environment Report. I’m Lester Graham.

Renovating old homes or apartments can mean scraping or sanding old lead paint.

That lead paint dust settles where children play, and it puts them at risk for learning disabilities.

Shawn Allee reports why the government's tightening rules on home renovation.

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The Environmental Protection Agency just finished rules about home renovation and lead paint, but children's advocacy groups said they weren't strong enough.

Anita Weinberg is with Lead-Safe Illinois.

She says some rehab contractors are trained on how to handle lead paint safely, but only some property owners are required to hire them.

Weinberg says the rules didn't apply if there were no kids in that unit at the time.

WEINBERG: That's perfectly fine, but tomorrow you turn around and sell your home to a family with children. And the work that was done, if it wasn't done safely, there's certainly the possibility there's still going to be a lead hazards in that home.

So, now the EPA's proposing if you hire a rehab contractor at all ... that contractor must be trained to handle lead paint - regardless of whether children live there now or not.

The rules would apply to homes built before 1978.

For the Environment Report, I'm Shawn Allee.

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This is The Environment Report.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently wrapped up a 60-day look at toxic air pollution around schools. Ultimately they're looking to gauge the health effects of pollutant exposure. Gigi Douban reports many of the schools were chosen based on how close they were to heavy industry.


It’s pretty much a given: put a school near heavy industry and an interstate, and those kids are going to breathe polluted air. What the EPA didn’t know was just how polluted it would be. So the agency in August put air samplers outside of 63 schools in 22 states.

One of those schools is Lewis Elementary in Birmingham, Alabama.

Fade in ambi of calling out names for carpool

Richard Gooden was picking up his granddaughter, who attends preK at the school.

Gooden, for one, was glad to see an air sampler at the school. Living up the hill from the American Cast Iron Pipe Company, he's seen thick layers of dust settle on his windows.

Gooden ACT: I got a little white house with vinyl siding, and you can't tell there's vinyl hardly because of the dirt coming from that pipe shop.

Gooden has lived in that house for 43 years. His granddaughter spends most days there, and he wonders whether the air is safe to breathe.

The EPA plans to have some answers. Corey Masuca is the senior air pollution control engineer at the Jefferson County Health Department in Birmingham. He says they're working with the EPA to screen for about 100 different pollutants.

Masuca ACT: We looked for them, then we found them.

So far, he says, only three of those--benzene, manganese and acrolein-- were found at high levels. Acrolein levels were more than 100 times higher than what the government considers safe. It comes from anything from coal to fuel to cigarette smoke.

Masuca ACT: ... so it's fairly ubiquitous.

Masuca says the findings are not a major cause for concern. But Janice Nolen, assistant vice-president for policy and advocacy at the American Lung Association. says ubiquitous doesn't mean safe.


Nolen ACT: The fact that it's in lots of places doesn't mean it is not a big problem. It means that we have a lot of things we have to clean up.

Until they’re cleaned up, the only thing schools CAN do is keep kids indoors during recess on days when pollution levels are high.