Lead Gutters? But the CHILDREN!
January 18th, 2010
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Lead is not exactly an uncommon material. In fact, you probably come in contact with it on a fairly regular basis. There’s lead in most electronic solder, lead in your car battery, lead in your tackle box, lead on the belts of SCUBA divers, lead on the fenders of old cars and lead in your wine glasses. There are lead bullets all over the world, littering shooting ranges and sitting on
Lead is, of course, toxic, which is why you shouldn’t do anything like eating the lead or grinding it into a fine powder and inhaling it. The toxicity of lead, however, is fairly mild. The Romans used to mix lead with vinegar and produce something they called “lead sugar,” which they sprinkled on foods. That was a very bad idea and eating paint chips that contain lead in the form of lead carbonate is another bad idea. This is especially true if you do so on a regular basis, since these forms of lead tend to enter the body fairly easily and accumulate, causing progressive damage with repeated exposure.
However, lead in its metallic form is perfectly safe to work with and even hold in your hand. Its an excellent choice for things like gutters, where lead and copper can be used to create gutters that are low maintenance and last many years, resisting corrosion and wear and tear. The lead is not very mobile in the enviornment and because of the durability of these gutters, they are popular for all kinds of buildings.
So why not install them in a school? Well, because there are no words like “the safety of the children,” to dismiss all rational discussion and because we live in a society where a single broke thermometer is enough to evacuate an entire school and bring in hazmat teams in moonsuits.
Parents alarmed over use of lead in school project
GUILFORD — Parents are urging officials to prohibit the use of lead in an upcoming elementary school roofing project, saying the material is a safety risk for children.
The school board has finalized design requirements for roof and gutter replacement at Guilford Lakes Elementary School this summer. The specifications document asks the designer and contractor to “avoid using lead-coated copper gutters.”
But that type of gutter can still be used if the professional designer hired says it’s the best material, as lead-coated gutters have proved to be long-lasting and durable, said Cliff Gurhnam, director of facilities and operations.
Well, since the gutter contractor knows that lead copper is one of the best, if not the best, material for this kind of application, that’s likely to be the recommendation. It’s not exactly an unusual type of gutter for a building of this type. They look good and they’re very durable. What more could you ask for in gutters?
PTA Co-President Kim Beckett told the school board recently that many parents have shared their concerns with her over the issue.
“We want to keep costs contained, but our childrens’ safety should be above that,” Beckett said at the meeting.
Now we have it. The most potent combination of political buzzwords: “our children,” and the word “cost,” “money,” or “safety.” Here’s where the rational discussion goes out the window, because the fact is that lead copper gutters are an industry standard that is perfectly safe and under normal conditions will have negligible seepage of lead into the local enviornment. Considering that this is a fairly well to do town, I wonder how many of the parents have lead copper gutters on their own home and don’t even know it!
As for cost, lets not forget that there’s legitimate reason to be concerned about cost in a project like this. Every dollar spent maintaining less durable gutters or installing more expensive gutters is one more dollar that can’t be used for textbooks, teachers’ salaries or even safety improvements to the school. Given that school districts don’t have an unlimited budget, spending money on useless items that don’t improve anyone’s safety can actually hurt both safety and the quality of education.
She said lead could seep from the gutters and into rainwater the gutters catch, and then contaminate the ground when the water flows out.
“The concern is the lead run-off, and anybody on the Board of Education understands that lead and children do not belong together,” Beckett said.
“Children” + (name of a substance people hear in the context of “poisoning”) = villagers with torches.
Parents also grew concerned last year during the roof and gutter replacement at A.W. Cox Elementary School when contractors began installing lead-coated copper gutters. Beckett said parents asked that a different material be used and were successful.
Gurnham said officials opted to use a new material for a few reasons, but declined to elaborate. The change cost the district an extra $42,000 in restocking and reordering fees, and in labor costs to take down the lead-coated gutters that had been installed, Gurnham said.
Sam Gerritz, who has two children in the school system, said Thursday that he would like to see data from soil tests at Cox, where lead-coated gutters had been used for decades before the roofing and gutter project. He added that he’s learned a lot about lead poisoning in children from his uncle, a geologist professor at Xavier University in New Orleans who has studied the topic.
“The way children get lead poisoning is ingesting soil. They do all the time. Children are getting their hands dirty, licking their fingers, things like that. It’s a real concern,” Gerritz said.
“From my perspective, the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to bring lead into a school setting. They (school officials) need to prove this isn’t going to be a danger and I haven’t seen data that supports that claim.”
Gurnham said soil testing was completed at Cox last year when parents questioned the use of lead-coated gutters.
“It came back with the normal standard for soil. After 20 years, there were no elevated levels of lead in the soil,” Gurnham said.
When the design and list of materials are complete for the Lakes work, they will be reviewed by the Standing Building Committee, which oversees all town construction, he added.
So exactly what the hell level of “proof” will these parents accept? I doubt there’s any. Soil tests after 20 years of use on a building would be expected to be normal. After all, it’s a standard material for high quality gutter installations and has been in use for more than a century. If your children regularly eat large amounts of dirt, then you probably have some bigger problems. Yet given that soil levels are negligible, even this shouldn’t cause any real concern.
The idea that a school district would spend fourty two thousand dollars, taking down perfectly good and brand new gutters in order to install inferior gutters over concerns for a non-existent hazard is the height of absurdity.
However, if there is anyone out there who has lead copper gutters and wants to get rid of them, I’ll gladly tear them down and haul them to the scrap metal dealer, no charge!
This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Education, Not Even Wrong, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 18th, 2010 at 10:06 pm
While guaranteed that everyone is over reacting, I wonder why this relatively expensive material is being used instead of industrial grade PVC. I agree that Lead-Copper looks better, but it not going to stand up to the abuse the walls of a school usually get, in particular the downspouts.
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January 19th, 2010 at 5:11 am
DV82XL said:
If you’re going to deal with fools, wring out every penny you can.
“Oh of course you need the more expensive gutters. They’re more expensive so obviously they’re better. What’s that? 200% markup? Not us, guv, it’s for the children so we’re providing them virtually at cost.”
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January 19th, 2010 at 9:41 am
During the current renovation on This Old House, Tom Silva used lead to water proof windows.
Given the reputation of the show of being cutting edge and somewhat PC, if there was something better/newer/more efficient they would use it.
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January 19th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
DV82XL said:
I don’t know about this individual school, but some of the school buildings were built some time ago and have slate roofs, masonry walls and such and they may already have copper gutters intact on other parts of the building or it may just be in keeping with the building’s architecture to use something classic-looking like that.
In any case, the copper-lead gutters are within the budget and requirements and at this point changing things would be more expensive. Note the other school mentioned already had them installed and parents insisted that they be torn down, at a cost which could have paid a teacher’s year-long salary, bought a new class set of textbooks for several subjects, outfitted the school with about 100 new computers, upgraded several science classrooms or expanded the school library.
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January 19th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Don’t tell anyone but lead pipes were used for city water lines at one time and many still remain.
They are safe however because of hard water deposits coating the inside of the pipes.
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January 21st, 2010 at 8:31 am
A few remarks:
1- Lead contamination of soils probably also came from old car oil additive (http://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth), the reduction of contamination on one site without reference measurements is therefore very likely to give wrong conclusions (aka the one you expected).
2- Are there naked cooper pipes on the picture? As I recall, cooper is fairly oxydable and cooper salts are toxic too.
3- Lead is indeed very stable in neutral environment, but is corroded by mild acids and its salt is soluble (explaining its use with vinegar), as a consequence, touching it with your bare hands may cause a slight contamination (some people sweat is acid enough), as a consequence, people manipulating lead are advised to wear gloves. At the place where I worked, that manufactured X-Ray generators, they were using cheap disposable food-grade plastic gloves.
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January 21st, 2010 at 5:41 pm
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has excellent toxicological profiles for all sorts of chemicals. I couldn’t get the lead (Pb) profile to download, so I sent them an email to fix the links. Once they get it fixed, I recommend you look at the profile. Their FAQ’s are geared to the public and only so-so in my opinion. I use a number of their profiles to prepare safety/risk training for specific nuclides/chemicals. They do a good job of summarizing the research on the chemical/nuclide, but the profiles are big and do take a while to wade through. Here’s the link to the lead profile, and hopefully they’ll get the links fixed soon.
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/TF.asp?id=96&tid=22
It is the rare person who can respond to parents’ concerns intelligently, with knowledge, with empathy, and actually educate the parents. I’m never surprised when I see these things get out of hand. Emotion will always trump logic unless the logician (person who has to respond) knows how to employ techniques to counter the emotion (usually fighting fire with fire).
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January 21st, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Franck said:
Well, first of all, I think much of the leaded gasoline complaints are overstated, but there are definately areas that are contaminated with lead compounds from sources like gasoline, paint, dyes and other products. It depends on the compound its in, and in the case of gasoline it was worse than just straight out lead, because it was a soluble organo-lead compound and when it burned it released lead in a number of different forms right into the atmosphere at low altitude.
Franck said:
Some copper salts are, but copper itself is not. It’s used in medical implants and drinking water pipe and the oxides are not harmful either. Actually, they’re desirable even to the point that many copper items are artificially oxidized.
Copper is fairly corrosion resistant because the oxides that form slow the penetration of oxygen into the copper. Raw copper starts off bright orange but slowly oxidizes over many years until it’s a dull brown. After many more years it builds up enough copper oxide to give it a green coating. Think Statue of Liberty.
Franck said:
Well yeah, if you handle it regularly, it would be a worthwhile precaution, but if you did touch it with your bare hand (which yeah, I have done plenty of times) it’s not like it would do anything. Perhaps if you touched it every day with sweaty bare hands then it might. They’re being cautious.
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January 22nd, 2010 at 9:51 am
As a regulator who deals specifically with Lead I rarely worry about it. If it is flaking off (paint) then we ask that it be stablized. If it is being removed we ask they use precuations. Asbestos in schools is what I get concerned about – schools handle it very poorly and at least locally they really don’t seem to get that it has health effects (particularly on “fast breathers” like kids). They waste tons of money on organic gardens and hippy dippy crap but not one cent to properly abate asbestos.
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January 25th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
“From my perspective, the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to bring lead into a school setting. “
By this standard, what materials can be used?
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January 25th, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Chuckie said:
I don’t know. I’m just wondering how many children will be hurt in the process of trying to push-start a school bus that doesn’t have a battery.
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January 26th, 2010 at 2:23 am
nick362 said:
Under normal conditions, using metallic lead for seals outdoors like that is perfectly safe. It’s also excellent material for that use. It’s inexpensive, easy to work with and it has just enough plasticity to it that it will give a little if the house settles or there is pressure from ice or something.
Chris said:
Not surprising. Asbestos tends to be pretty messy when it has to be removed. Those tiny little fibers can easily get into everything and get inhaled. The proper way to remove asbestos is usually to have the whole area sealed and to wash everything down and collect the water.
Of course, asbestos is “natural” – as is lead, by the way. Not that this changes anything, although some seem to think so.
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June 7th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I don’t want to interrupt all the fun you’re having with this topic, but since my name is mentioned in this blog post I’d like to provide a little background.
1. I hope nobody is contesting this: small children + high lead levels in the soil are a very bad combination. Adults can handle a much higher exposure to lead without adverse effects, so I don’t believe there is anything wrong with additional information being required when lead-containing construction materials are being considered for a school project. In the case of the Cox school, a 20+ year experiment had already been conducted (lead-coated copper gutters had been in place since the building was constructed) and so the soil test data was highly relevant to the discussion.
2. To answer Chuckie’s question (#10)- the soil test was sufficient proof for me, as that was my primary concern, but the data which Cliff Gurnham cited in the news article was not available at the time the decision was made to remove the lead-coated copper gutters. I don’t agree with the process that culminated in that decision (I would have been happy to wait for the data), but are you suggesting that we shouldn’t ask whether an alternative to a lead-based product could be used?
3. Comment #12 highlights an important point: asbestos and lead paint were widely used 50-80 years ago…how much money has been spent in removing materials which were once believed to be “safe”? I’m sure there were plenty of manufacturers who continued to argue that asbestos and lead paint were safe long after data emerged suggesting otherwise. When it comes to issues of public safety, open discussion and transparent decision-making should be encouraged, not ridiculed.
Sorry for the interruption. Now back to your regular programming.
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June 7th, 2010 at 1:33 pm
@Sam Gerritz – The critical point here is that the decision was made without reference to fact. Also it is a major issue in the case of some things like lead paint and asbestos, that the process of removing it very very often releases more of the contaminant into the immediate area than sequestering it.
Finally, ask yourself why lead is use in this application. It is used particularly because it doesn’t dissolve in rainwater, and the minute amount that does is in the form of PbCO3 or Pb(CO3)2 and will be carried away by runoff. The ones that would stay in the soil are the sulphide form (S2-), or the phosphate form (PO43-). In these forms lead is extremely insoluble, and thus have low bio-uptake potential.
The fact remains too that any lead found in the soil near that school is likely to be from leaded gasoline use, as Franck said, or at the very least these would be difficult to control for, if the soil were being tested.
On of the big problems with this sort of public advocacy, is that assay techniques have become so sophisticated that just about anything can be found in any sample if you look close enough, and when this is combined with the public’s inability to weigh risk rationally, trouble and expense is the outcome with little real gain.
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June 7th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
@DV82XL – Thanks for your considerate reply. I appreciate your perspective, and as a medicinal chemist I understand all too well the issues surrounding risk/benefit analyses. However, your reference to “fact” is where the difficulties arose in this particular situation- and I’m not trying to put you on the defensive here- can you point me to a peer-reviewed study which shows that lead-coated copper gutters do not leach lead into surrounding soils? (I agree that the soil test was a poor substitute for a well-designed study). The committee members I was interacting with could not…and that’s where the “burden of proof” discussion came up. Why is it my responsibility to convince the committee that these gutters are unsafe? Given that there are plenty of non-lead-containing alternatives out there, if they can’t define the risk, then why should we take it?
If I understand your last point correctly, whose role is it to ensure that the public is not being exposed to environmental toxins? I’m afraid that I don’t trust the private sector to have the public’s best interests in mind 100% of the time…
Thanks.
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June 7th, 2010 at 3:28 pm
I’m an industrial chemist/metallurgist (retired) and in some cases I see things as a matter of commonsense logic rather than looking for peer-reviewed studies. Plating lead on copper, while relatively simple, is an added expense, not only for the equipment and labor, but also the costs occurring because of strict environmental standards that attend this process. A glance at the table of potentials eliminates the notion that this is a sacrificial coating on copper. A bit of research shows that the reason, is in fact for cosmetic purposes.
Now by definition a decorative coating has to have a good appearance, hopefully for the life of the product, thus one would not select one that would likely be damaged in service by the very act of using it. Again drawing on a reasonable understanding of lead chemistry, I see that there is little chance of compounds being formed in this system that are both insoluble enough to deposit on soil, and and concurrently have a high biological uptake. Thus I conclude that the dangers from this installation are below the level of concern.
The last point I made was a simple one: a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. When combined with mob thinking it leads to foolishness.
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June 8th, 2010 at 2:23 am
DV82XL said:
There has recently been an application of the “Linear non-threshold” mentality to substances like lead observing such things as “no safe level.” This is also being applied to things like formaldehyde, methanol, MTBE etc. According to some, exposure to even one molecule is harmful and thus the whole idea of very strict regulations and opposition to any use of the stuff at all.
Pitty, really. While not suitable for applications where toxicity is an issue, lead is just a great material. It’s a joy to work with. Soft, ductile, melts easily with a blow torch, flows nicely, highly corrosion resistant, bonds well with other metals…
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September 1st, 2011 at 6:39 am
Well, I guess lead gutter is not safe for kids though we can try other gutter without any dangerous materials like lead; we will put our family’s life to risk with lead substance. I guess we should be very careful to the materials that we are going to use to our home if it’s safe or a threat.
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September 1st, 2011 at 7:43 am
copper gutters said:
Didn’t you read the post about lead gutters not actually being so dangerous?
Oh right, you’re just as stupid spammers who doesn’t understand the existence of rel-nofollow (don’t worry, I used up some your bandwidth for you).
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