Delicious but deadly

Don't let your kids eat the lead dirt.

The amount of lead in the topsoil of playgrounds, yards and other neighborhood spots may be the best indicator of how likely children are to have high lead levels in their blood, according to a new study from Tulane University.

The study, conducted by Howard Mielke, a Tulane geographer and environmental researcher, upends a common notion that young children have the highest chance of lead exposure inside their homes because of lead paint or pipes.

Instead, research that ties blood lead levels to soil lead levels suggests an underestimated source of exposure is in outside play areas, where young children often engage in what experts call “hand-to-mouth activity” — in other words, inadvertently eating dirt.

The good news is Mielke's more recent study shows a significant drop in lead levels in both soil and blood samples. So things have gotten better.  He also says remediation is relatively easy to do. These Central City residents are hoping it is, anyway.

The lead pit

The city is (finally) preparing to do remediation work on the lot where the Central City incinerator once sat.  It's been a long time coming.

The city has planned a remediation for the space 10 years after the Jericho Road Episcopal Housing Initiative commissioned a grant-funded survey showing the dangerous levels of contamination. The work should be completed by the end of the year, according to the city.

It's not as if the Jericho Road study revealed anything unexpected. The incinerator was cited numerous times during its lifetime. And most New Orleanians are familiar with Howard Mielke's maps showing high concentrations of lead contamination in the older and formerly industrial parts of the city.

I'm not entirely sure but I think the reason they're getting around to actually doing something about it now is they have "resilience" money to spend re-habilitating vacant lots into stormwater management projects. This site sits right along the path of the uptown watershed currently receiving work.  But it isn't specifically included in the description. However this FOX 8 story does say the city claims it is associated with the project.

Anyway, they're about to go digging in the lead pit.  Hopefully they know what they're doing.  Not everybody is convinced.

But residents are worried that the plan, which involves removing a few feet of soil in some areas and up to 5 feet in others, will cause the lead and PAHs to migrate into their lawns, heightening their risk of exposure.

The 21-page removal plan, put together in March 2019 by the Leaaf Group for the LDEQ, details where the lead is highest and how workers will remove it. But it doesn't address residents' concerns about migration of the lead during heavy rains and during the remediation process.

Yeah well, good thing there's never any street flooding or anything like that in the area.  At least there isn't anything radioactive in the pit.... that we know of yet.

Many many Flints in waitng

This is a national problem as much as it is a Louisiana problem.. but it definitely is a Louisiana problem.

Of the state’s roughly 1,300 drinking water systems, about half operate infrastructure that is more than 50 years old.

Other systems have some of the problems — and they will be on a list eventually — but the 10 are the closest to crisis. The governor’s task force plans to work with these 10 systems before they get to the emergency level that the northeast Louisiana town of St. Joseph’s did in 2016, when dangerous levels of lead and copper required the total replacement of the pipes, filters and equipment at a cost to taxpayers of $9 million.

Eight of the targeted 10 systems are under state administrative orders for not addressing the problems inspectors have found. The state has issued 300 administrative orders to systems over the past three years.

Four of the 10 systems on the list have found traces of lead in single or multiple tests and didn’t properly inform the water customers. But lead findings alone didn’t get the systems on the list.

It's a critical public health challenge that could be met with a massive investment but that isn't likely to come any time soon. The federal policy at the moment is more about privatizing infrastructure than revitalizing it.  Meanwhile at the state level, we're... well.. I think we know.

Delicious but deadly

It's likely that the solution here is fine.  The schools decided to install filters everywhere that should mitigate the lead hazard. But it probably would have been worth doing the testing anyway for informational purposes.  I'm having a hard time figuring out what justifies S&WB's aggressive pushback on that.

Delicious but deadly

The lead is in your pipes.

If you are living in New Orleans, you may be – or may have been – exposed to elevated lead levels in your drinking water without even realizing it, a risk that could spike as the city of New Orleans embarks on a $2.4 billion infrastructure overhaul.

That is the finding of a new report released Wednesday (July 19) by the New Orleans Inspector General’s Office. It calls on the city and the Sewerage & Water Board to be more targeted and proactive in warning residents of the risk of higher lead levels in the water. It also recommends the city take specific steps to help residents protect themselves, like handing out water filters and developing incentive programs to help low-income families remove lead service pipes on their property.

“Other cities are making great efforts in communicating with their citizens about this problem,” Inspector General Ed Quatreveaux said. “We need to take the small level of energy we have here around this issue and intensify it, because this is a serious problem.”

Serious as the problem may be, Cedric Grant says it might be more your problem than it is his.

Lead, once valued for its malleability and durability, was widely used for city service lines and home plumbing up until the mid-20th Century when we started to learn more about its toxicity. A ban on the installation of lead pipes came into effect in 1986.

Homes built before the late 1980s, which includes much of New Orleans’ housing stock, may still have lead service pipes, which can release the toxic metal into the water.

Grant with S&WB has long emphasized the agency is only responsible for replacing lines on public property. “There are public and private responsibilities here,” he said.

There may also be public lead service lines still in service under our roads. Grant said the agency replaces any lead lines it encounters during regular work, though, because lead was once an industry standard, it does not have a catalog of where those lines are. (The city started taking inventory of the city’s 140,000 service lines last fall. So far, 3,000 service lines have been recorded, 800 of which were lead.)   

Can't afford to protect your family from the poison that enters your home thanks to an old building code that has nothing to with you?  Too bad. You probably should have been more "responsible." What are you thinking trying to live in this city if you can't meet the cost of paying for your own resilience anyway?

Delicious but deadly

That good ol Crescent City Clear 

The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board and Mayor Mitch Landrieu's office are notifying residents citywide of the possibility of temporary elevated lead levels in drinking water as crews begin to dig up roads in coming months. The work, which has started in earnest in Lakeview and ramps up citywide headed into fall, affects a number of neighborhoods including New Orleans East, Gentilly, the Lower Ninth Ward and the Audubon area Uptown.

Extremely Mitch voice: Hey y'all wanted y'all's streets fixed, right?

Like ketchup on a well done steak

Lead paint is good now, apparently. Eat some every day.

Environmental Protection Agency officials are proposing to eliminate two programs focused on limiting children’s exposure to lead-based paint, which is known to cause damage to developing brains and nervous systems.

The proposed cuts, outlined in a 64 page budget memo revealed by The Washington Post on Friday, would roll back programs aimed at reducing lead risks by $16.61 million and more than 70 employees, in line with a broader project by the Trump administration to devolve responsibility for environmental and health protection to state and local governments.

St. Joseph

The water supply in St. Joseph, Louisiana has (finally) been declared unsafe by Governor Edwards.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a public health emergency for the town of St. Joseph after officials discovered elevated levels of lead and copper in several water samples. 

"Out of an abundance of caution," the Louisiana Department of Health recommends that residents do not use the town's tap water for drinking or "personal consumption, including making ice, brushing teeth or using it for food preparation and rinsing of foods," the governor's office said in a news release today. (Friday, Dec 16)

This is slightly different from the public advisory issued back in February which told everyone the brown water was safe to drink. Better late than never, I guess. 

The state Department of Health and Hospitals noted in a report Tuesday that several maintenance deficiencies were found during its December inspection, including a deficient filtration system and rusty tanks.

The water then flows through the aging system to homes and businesses. Between May 2012 and January 2016, St. Joseph issued 20 notices advising customers to boil their water before use as a precaution.

Repairing the system would cost about $8 million.

“This is a problem that is common to a lot of small communities around Louisiana. They’re not able to raise the funds to maintain the system and meet higher standards,” Guidry said.

The national media has taken notice of the problems in St. Joseph, which state Sen. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, attributes to the situation in Flint. He welcomes the publicity, saying it is helping his efforts to secure the funding necessary for upgrading the water system in a town — like many in northeast Louisiana — that simply can’t afford the repairs.

“In these very poor and rural areas, it’s hard to keep the streets up, keep up the water systems and sewers because they don’t have a lot of tax base,” Thompson said. Forty percent of St. Joseph’s population lives below the poverty line.

Having seen this story and, of course, the saga of the tainted water supply in Flint, Michigan this year, one wonders how many more places are facing a similar predicament.  The answer is a lot.  In fact, a recent Reuters investigation found almost 3,000 areas with higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint. Their story starts in a place called St. Joseph.

ST. JOSEPH, Missouri – On a sunny November afternoon in this historic city, birthplace of the Pony Express and death spot of Jesse James, Lauranda Mignery watched her son Kadin, 2, dig in their front yard. As he played, she scolded him for putting his fingers in his mouth.

In explanation, she pointed to the peeling paint on her old house. Kadin, she said, has been diagnosed with lead poisoning.

He has lots of company: Within 15 blocks of his house, at least 120 small children have been poisoned since 2010, making the neighborhood among the most toxic in Missouri, Reuters found as part of an analysis of childhood lead testing results across the country. In St. Joseph, even a local pediatrician’s children were poisoned.

St. Joseph, by the way, is patron saint to "craftsmen, engineers, and working people in general." These are precisely the sort of people who could be put to work fixing the environmental and infrastructure problems in towns like St. Joseph, MO and LA if only the money and political will could be found to begin those projects.

Donald Trump has made some noise both during the campaign and transition period about a new and aggressive infrastructure program.  That sounds positive at first. But will what Trump actually has in mind end up benefiting places like St. Joseph?  Probably not.

Trump’s “Contract with the American Voter” (get to know this document) stresses that his American Energy and Infrastructure Act “leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.”

What do “public-private partnerships” and “tax incentives” mean here? This report from Peter Navarro, set to be one of Trump’s leading economists, lays out the blueprint. The government would sell $1 trillion in revenue-producing bonds, needing only to supply an equity cushion to ensure everyone gets paid. Navarro estimates around $140 billion in government funding when all is said and done, which you could easily get through repatriation.


Investors would get a tax credit to entice them to buy bonds, and Navarro claims that the tax revenue from new jobs created by the projects makes up for that cost. He also wants to contract out these projects, building in a 10 percent profit margin for the private contractor. Navarro claims that construction costs are higher when built by the government, and the private sector is more efficient.

Does this sound familiar? It’s the common justification for privatization, and it’s been a disaster virtually everywhere it’s been tried. First of all, this specifically ties infrastructure—designed for the common good—to a grab for profits. Private operators will only undertake projects if they promise a revenue stream. You may end up with another bridge in New York City or another road in Los Angeles, which can be monetized. But someplace that actually needs infrastructure investment is more dicey without user fees.

So the only way to entice private-sector actors into rebuilding Flint, Michigan’s water system, for example, is to give them a cut of the profits in perpetuity. That’s what Chicago did when it sold off 36,000 parking meters to a Wall Street-led investor group. Users now pay exorbitant fees to park in Chicago, and city government is helpless to alter the rates.

You also end up with contractors skimping on costs to maximize profits. A shiny new toll road between Austin and San Antonio, Texas, done through a public-private partnership is falling apart after only a couple years, and improper drainage is leading residents of Lockhart, a city along the route, to complain of flooding. The contractor refuses to make the fixes; instead the company is walking away with outsized profits.

Under this scheme, private investors and contractors hold power over project selection. Trump—a.k.a. the government—would just be the name on a privately owned bridge or seaport or electrical grid. The notion of an inherent public benefit to infrastructure improvements, the entire point of the enterprise, is totally eliminated.

Sorry about the long quote there. But it's necessary to get the sense of what's about to happen. American voters in poor and rural areas of the South and Midwest just installed Donald Trump as President precisely because they've already suffered too long the consequences of this neoliberal shell game. And now they are about to get hit with it again in spades.

It's also worth noting that Trump's nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency is best known for suing that agency to prevent enforcement of laws meant to rein in polluters.

 So it's worth remembering as well that St. Joseph is also the patron saint of the dying if you're looking for someone to pray to.

 

Water water everywhere...

Water everywhere is the problem in Louisiana. Not a drop of it to drink is the problem in Flint, Michigan.  It's all one unbroken sea of trouble in Washington today where the Senate is voting on the continuing resolution that will keep the government operating and, more importantly, could fund efforts to deal with both issues. But.. well...

On Tuesday, both sides still maintained that the other was "playing politics" by holding up a stop-gap funding measure that would prevent a government shutdown on Sept. 30. The bill is scheduled to be taken up for a procedural motion on the Senate Tuesday afternoon, but Democrats and Republicans continued to signal that no consensus had been reached Tuesday morning.

And, just as I'm typing this, it looks like the latest attempt to pass something has failed.

Senate CR with #laflood is blocked (unable to get 60 votes) after Dems say they won't vote for bill that includes #laflood but not Flint.

— Elizabeth Crisp (@elizabethcrisp) September 27, 2016

Ideally we would find the money to deal with both of these humanitarian crises. But.. well...

Cleansing flood

Katrina as one big lead remediation project.

It would have been hard to imagine that the foul layer of muck coating much of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina would have done anyone any good, but it seems that all that mud may ultimately have improved public health.

The infusion of new sediment, combined with the extra dirt brought in later to help raise homes throughout the city, appears to have contributed to a dramatic decline in the amount of lead found in both soil and blood samples, according to a new study published in the journal Environment International.

It’s not all good news. There's still a lot of lead in the soil. Especially in the "up and coming" parts of town.

Termite gig economy

Ah, Spring. The heavy air crowded with a desperate scramble for something like love under the ugly light of a thousand artificial moons.

In native conditions, the termites fly towards the moon, which provides them a direction that guarantees they move away from the home nest's foraging ground. Humans have provided them with artificial moons, drawing them to new wood sources in buildings.

When the termites land, the male and female seek a single partner to begin a new nest, shedding their wings and then searching for the proper location, which will include a source of wood, a place that's protected from wind and competitors, and that has a source of water.

Good luck, you crazy kids.  You know the water may be contaminated, and, of course, the rent is too damn high. Add to that the growth of short term rentals everywhere and finding a place with a three to five year lease is more and more difficult.

It takes three to five years for the couple to grow to the point where the female becomes the queen of a new nest, and begins producing eggs.

Don't know how they're gonna do all that and save for retirement. There's just no security for anyone anymore. 

Delicious but deadly

Mardi Gras beads.

Dr. Mielke, along with the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based non-profit group HealthyStuff.org and Dr. Holly Groh, a founder of VerdiGras in New Orleans, studied beads from China. They found lead and an array of toxic and cancer-causing metals and chemicals, including bromine, chlorine, cadmium, arsenic, tin, phthalates and mercury.

At least one of these chemicals was found in 90 percent of the beads at levels higher than allowed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

"Basically, if you have lead exposure early on in childhood, it does change the ability throughout life," Dr. Mielke said.

Lead exposure from leaded gasoline, wheel weight and paint of the past in urban areas has been scientifically linked to learning and behavior problems.

Problem isn't going to go away overnight. Safer, recyclable or degradable alternatives are becoming available but they're relatively expensive compared to the standard plastic stuff and can't be ordered in the same bulk quantities.  And most of these parades and their riders are on pretty tight budgets so.. well, it's a process. 

On the other hand, if we find that the toxicity is a clear enough danger, we should be able to ban the leaden beads straight away. But we all know things don't work like that around here. 

More lead

Last week when the city closed Markey Park for lead remediation, we pointed to this NPR story from 2006 featuring Professor Howard Mielke's work identifying and mapping high concentrations of lead in the New Orleans soil.

Today, the Times-Picayune publishes a better version of Mielke's map complete with soil consentrations listed by census tract.

From Mark Schleifstien's front-page article.

Because of its large number of older homes and more compact urban area, New Orleans has historically had a high number of children with elevated blood lead levels. In 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina, 13.8 percent of all children tested in the city had levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter, the level considered lead poisoning by the CDC. In 2009, that level had dropped dramatically to 5.3 percent. The exact reason for the drop is unknown, although research by Mielke and others indicates that sediment washed into the city during Hurricane Katrina reduced lead levels in soils in flooded areas.

Not sure what to make of that given this a few paragraphs later.

Lead was banned from paints in the United States in 1977. New Orleans’ housing stock, however, contains a huge number of homes that predate the ban. After Katrina, improper sanding of lead-based paints has added to the lead dust throughout the city, Mielke said.

Is there more lead dust now or less?

Delicious but deadly*

Lead soil

Because tests of soil from Mickey Markey Park in the Bywater showed higher than normal levels of lead, the city will extend last week's temporary closure of the park and will "immediately" begin remediation of the park, City Health Commissioner Dr. Karen DeSalvo announced today.

The announcement is the result of an unusually swift chain of events that started when routine pediatric blood-lead tests showed elevated levels for a group of Bywater and Marigny children. The parents formed an educational group and consulted with Howard Mielke of the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research, who found that the surface dirt in the children's favorite playground contained high levels of lead.

I remembered seeing Mielke's name featured in this NPR story about renewed concern over lead contamination in New Orleans after the flood. It featured this map of lead concentrations in New Orleans soil.



If you're unfamiliar with NOLA geography, Markey Park is located right around that big maroon splotch on the map.


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