Get the Lead Out
Jan. 14, 2016 — During January, Habitat Weekly will advise boards on how to deal with a quartet of natural-born killers. This week: lead.
Lead-based paint was outlawed by the federal government in 1978 for some very good reasons. Lead exposure can cause learning disabilities in children, violent behavior in teenagers, and mental dysfunction in the elderly. It can cause miscarriages, stillbirth and brain damage. In extreme cases it can cause death.
Lead-based paint remained in use for several years after the ban, and so it remains a legitimate source of concern for co-op and condo boards, even in buildings built after 1978.
"Lead is dangerous if you accidentally ingest it or breathe it in," says Adam Corven, lead project manager for JLC Environmental Consultants. "Once it gets in your system, it damages your bones and you can't get it out. It's a difficult life after that."
Lead can also be a source of expense for boards - with fines for ignoring laws running into five figures.
If your building was built before 1978 and you're planning on doing work that will disturb old paint, the first thing you need to do is test for lead. You must hire a contractor certified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), or a an outside firm to do the lead tests. EPA-certified workers can perform the tests using relatively inexpensive EPA-approved kits, or more sophisticated X-ray fluorescence machines. Paint chips can also be analyzed in a lab to verify the test results.
Depending on the lead levels in the old paint and your building's budget, there are several ways to proceed.
"You can do a total removal and remediation - that's the most expensive," Corven says. "It's up to the abatement contractor and the client. Encapsulating the lead paint with a sealant is less costly and time-consuming than remediation."
If you encapsulate the lead paint, Corven adds, you need to do a visual inspection every three years to make sure there's no chipping or cracking.
If someone on your staff is involved in painting, window or door replacement, or any work that disturbs more than six square feet of lead paint in an apartment, that worker needs EPA certification. Businesses such as Big Apple Occupational Safety, Inc. offer classes that lead to EPA certification for lead workers, inspectors, assessors, supervisors and project designers. (Unit owners and shareholders who do the work inside their own apartments are exempt from the certification requirement.) Even if your super or other staffer is not directly involved in a job involving lead-based paint, the certification can help the staffer make sure that contractors are performing remediation, removal and clean-up work properly.
Exterior work is a slightly different story. "A lot of people have learned that total abatement of lead outdoors doesn't make sense," says Gene Ferrara, president of JMA Consultants. "When painting a fire escape, for instance, we use an encapsulant, then we recommend two coats of heavy-duty paint, always following lead-safe work practices. I think that's how 90 percent of the industry works today."
The reason is that people have discovered that when it comes to lead, there's no such thing as a sure thing.
"People go through full lead abatement," Ferrara says, "and down the road they find that there's still lead there."