A study of urban housing demolitions as sources of lead in ambient dust: demolition practices and exterior dust fall.

Abstract

Demolition of older housing for urban redevelopment purposes benefits communities by removing housing with lead paint and dust hazards and by creating spaces for lead paint-free housing and other community resources. This study was conducted to assess changes, if any, in ambient dust lead levels associated with demolition of blocks of older lead-containing row houses in Baltimore, Maryland (USA). In this article we present results based on dust-fall samples collected from fixed locations within 10 m of three demolition sites. In subsequent reports we will describe dust lead changes on streets, sidewalks, and residential floors within 100 m of the demolition sites. Geometric mean (GM) lead dust-fall rate increased by > 40-fold during demolition to 410 µg Pb/m 2 /hr (2,700 µg Pb/m 2 per typical work day) and by > 6-fold during debris removal to 61 µg Pb/m 2 /hr (440 µg Pb/m 2 per typical work day). Lead concentrations in dust fall also increased during demolition (GM, 2,600 mg/kg) and debris removal (GM, 1,500 mg/kg) compared with baseline (GM, 950 mg/kg). In the absence of dust-fall standards, the results were compared with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (U.S. EPA's) dust-lead surface loading standard for interior residential floors (40 µg/ft 2 , equivalent to 431 µg/m 2 ); daily lead dust fall during demolition exceeded the U.S. EPA floor standard by 6-fold on average and as much as 81-fold on an individual sample basis. Dust fall is of public health concern because it settles on surfaces and becomes a pathway of ambient lead exposure and a potential pathway of residential exposure via tracking and blowing of exterior dust. The findings highlight the need to minimize demolition lead deposition and to educate urban planners, contractors, health agencies, and the public about lead and other community concerns so that society can maximize the benefits of future demolition activities nationwide.

Exploring Childhood Lead Exposure through GIS: A Review of the Recent Literature

“…At the data preparation stage, address geocoding is the most used tool to transfer tabular data sets, such as screened children addresses, into GIS [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]23]. Various GIS functions were used for multivariate mapping of BLLs and risk factors in a limited custom such as linking SES data with screened data records [49,50], map overlays [51,52], distance calculations [53], and hyperlinks to demolishing sites' photos and city maps for mapping dust-fall lead loadings [54]. More sophisticated spatial methods have also been used such as spatial clustering [15,18,21,24,26], spatial autocorrelation [10,13,15,18,21], spatial regression [14], and risk modeling [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

Source contributions of lead in residential floor dust and within-home variability of dust lead loading

“…DPb-landing (Dixon et al, 2005b) Annual vehicle traffic (Sheets et al, 2001), (Mielke et al, 2010), (Mielke et al, 2011) Surrounding demolition (Farfel et al, 2003), (Farfel et al, 2005), (Rabito et al, 2007), (Dixon et al, 2012) Leisure freq (Hozhabri et al, 2004), (Schapiro and Bretin, 2006) Ext work (Rabinowitz et al, 1985), (U.S. EPA, 2000), (Reissman et al, 2002), (Dixon et al, 2005a), (Clark et al, 2011), (Dixon et al, 2012) Int work…”

Characterization of PM10 and PM2.5 Source Profiles of Fugitive Dust in Zhengzhou, China

“…However, most studies focused on road dust (RD) (Wang et al, 2005;Chen et al, 2006;Han et al, 2011;Shen et al, 2016), soil dust (SD) (Ho et al, 2003;Kong et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2016) and cement (CE) (Vega et al, 2001;Ho et al, 2003). Unfortunately, few chemical profiles on demolition dust (DD) are existent, although heavy metals in ambient air contaminated from DD have been evaluated for health risk assessment (Farfel et al, 2003;Brown et al, 2015a;Azarmi and Kumar, 2016).…”

“…Moreover, toxic components such as heavy metals (As, Cu, Zn, Pb, Cd, Cr, and Ni) exist in fugitive dust, and they pose serious harmful effects on human health (Martuzevicius et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2015). For example, demolition activities increase human exposure to lead, which may affect the brain and nervous system (Farfel et al, 2003;Han et al, 2012). As, Cd, Cr, and Ni, with carcinogenic risk, are usually found high level in RD (Kasprzak et al, 2003;Goldbohm et al, 2006;Han et al, 2011;Cao et al, 2014).…”