Discussion of the Myths and Facts about the Lead Scare from a Washington, DC area contractor
With the warm season fully underway, it is time to seriously consider that remodeling project you have been putting off for the past ten years. Whether it is a new addition, or simply the revival of an old wing of the house that has begun to deteriorate due to long exposure to moisture and mildew, remodeling is an excellent way to make an old home feel new again. Of course, remodeling poses challenges, from the stress it puts on your wallet to the compromises you will have to make with your time and space while it is underway. With all the stress involved, nobody wants the added concern of safety on the table, but remodeling carries some inherent risks that do need to be addressed. Luckily, ensuring the safety of a remodeling project is a relatively straightforward process, if a few key concerns are taken care of.
First, it is important to be aware of all the potential environmental contaminants. Remodeling disturbs your building’s homeostasis, pulling all the skeletons out of the closet, if you will, of your home’s construction past. And one of the big boogeymen lurking in the closets of most homes is lead paint.
Lead is a heavy metal that occurs naturally as an ore in the earth’s crust. In its ore form, it is inert and self-contained, staying out of the air, water, and soil that surround it. Lead has many useful chemical properties due to the way it reacts (or fails to react) with other substances. However, since lead never naturally enters the environment, our bodies have evolved no way to process it. It readily absorbs into our bloodstream, but our bodies can neither use it, nor recognize it as an intruder, similar as it is to other heavy metals that our body finds useful. Upon exposure to lead, our bodies start to build up internal deposits of the substance, interfering with normal bodily functioning and causing problems ranging from digestive problems to nervous disorders.
If your house was built before 1978, chances are that it is filled with lead. Lead was a very popular component of paint until the EPA banned the use of lead paint in homes in 1978. Lead made an extremely powerful pigment, and also contributed features of added stability and durability to the coating mixture. When the EPA banned its use, paint manufacturers had to struggle to come up with the technology to replace it. On account of lead’s popularity, most homes built before 1978 contain at least one layer of lead paint.
Luckily, like lead ore in the earth, lead paint cannot harm anyone while it is solidly adhered to the walls or ceiling of a home. It is only when the paint system starts to fail, leading to the paint chipping or flaking – or when the paint system is disrupted by the procedures of remodeling – that the lead enters the environment in a manner that can become dangerous. Lead paint chips that are ingested, or lead paint dust that is inhaled, brings lead into the body and renders a person vulnerable to poisoning.
Protecting against lead involves a simple two-step process: first identification, and second, containment. In the first step, the lead paint risk is assessed based on the age of the building and the presence of lead revealed by some simple chemical tests. In the second step, plastic draperies, special equipment, and extra procedural precautions are taken to contain all lead residue released by the remodeling process.
While you can do lead-safe remodeling yourself, your best bet is to engage the help of an EPA-certified lead-safe contractor. Blue Door Painters estimators are certified both to perform basic tests to detect the presence of lead, and to execute lead safe renovation procedures if a threat is detected.