Five months after the fire, the French authorities have refused to fully disclose the results of their testing for lead contamination, sowing public confusion.... [I]t took a month before city officials conducted the first lead tests at a school close to Notre-Dame. Even today, city and regional health officials have not tested every school in the proximity of the cathedral.
The tests showed levels of lead dust above the French regulatory standard for buildings hosting children in at least 18 day care centers, preschools and primary schools. In dozens of other public spaces, like plazas and streets, authorities found lead levels up to 60 times over the safety standard. Soil contamination in public parks may be among the biggest concerns....
Some French officials and lead experts have cautioned against ‘‘paranoia’’ and argued that in a city as old as Paris, not all of the high lead levels can be attributed to the Notre-Dame fire.... “The state was afraid to make people afraid,” said Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of health....
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"Flames engulfed 460 tons of lead when Notre-Dame’s roof and spire burned, scattering dangerous dust onto the streets and parks of Paris."
The NYT reports.
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That's what you call 'burying the lead' -- er, 'lede.'
Not being a chemist, I'll simply note that testing after the event doesn't provide a baseline. It makes it much more difficult to interpret the data/risk.
I'm hoping there's a chemist or two out there that can describe what happens to lead in such a conflagration. Does it vaporize?
Class action.
We played with mercury when I was a kid; and there were lead soldiers. Even today I solder with tin/lead solder.
Stuff seems to be less fatal than its reputation.
The alarm was needed to get the law passed but it has side effects.
'Some French officials and lead experts have cautioned against ‘‘paranoia’’ and argued that in a city as old as Paris, not all of the high lead levels can be attributed to the Notre-Dame fire'
Does it really matter what the source was? If they're too high, they're too high. Fix it. Or don't.
In the days of leaded gasoline, most people's blood lead level was way above what would be considered dangerous now. We mostly did all right unless we were eating lead paint chips off the floor.
Lead is a bad thing. So is fire. Together, even worse. I suggest the Paris government pay unemployed immigrants to hand-clean the entire surface of the city, of course wearing suitable protective clothing and respirators. It would be a win-win-win, with immigrants being paid, and doing useful work, and being seen by everyone as contributing their sweat equity to the improvement of the town.
This of course won't work if the immigrants refuse to work in a Catholic place of worship.
The average child in the U.S. prior to 1975 had lead levels in their blood more than ten times the current standard due to the use of lead in gasoline. Strangely, the kinds of health catastrophes routinely predicted today at far lower levels did not occur.
Funny that.
Was there in July. Walked by, took pictures, all that stuff.
I feel gggrrrrreeeaattt!
Lead, climate change, vaping, plastic straws, guns, fracking, meat...
Whaddya wanna bet the French EPA hasn't spent the last 50 years removing lead-based paint from the city of light?
Narr
How do you say, "I smell lawsuit" in French?
460 tons? Nearly 1 million pounds? Really? That sounds like a lot.
My whole family used to participate in the making of lead fishing weights (sinkers) in our kitchen. We would melt quart size pots of lead and pour them into molds. I don't remember even opening the windows.
Everyone is a racist.
Everything is an environmental catastrophe.
And the environmental fear-mongers were afraid that the state was afraid to make people afraid.
They ruled out terrorism in a couple of hours -- surprised it's taking longer as to lead poisoning.
bagoh20: "I don't remember even opening the windows."
Memory loss is one of the symptoms. ;-)
460 tons? Nearly 1 million pounds? Really? That sounds like a lot.
Gothic builders used tremendous amounts of lead. It was abundant, easy to work, and corrosion-resistant. The ancient Mediterranean world had depleted much of Europe's known deposits of tin, consequently, the available copper was reserved for casting bells.
Along parallel lines and reiterating the need for baseline data.... Back in the day when I was doing environmental work for a utility, we had a bucket truck that began leaking hydraulic fluid, a lot of it, onto a Baltimore city street. We immediately called the regulator to report the quantity and location. The regulator looked at the stormwater drainage maps and called back shortly to say that the oil would be draining into the harbor in 30 or so minutes at location X. We rushed a recovery team down with booms and equipment to mitigate the environmental damage. We collected something like 3 times as much oil as we lost. All those non-point sources of pollution....
I'm hoping there's a chemist or two out there that can describe what happens to lead in such a conflagration. Does it vaporize?
From the videos of the Note Dame fire I've seen, I assume the fire was a particularly hot one. If lead is exposed in the air at a sustained temperature of 600º C what you'll get is lead(II) oxide, aka PbO, which is typically a fine while powder, perfectly suited to being lifted along with the other particulate smokes.
bagoh20
Of course you don't remember opening the windows....
Question addressed to the French - are you people unaware of the existence of HEPA filtered vacuum cleaners?
Most of that PbO is either in the Seine or in vacuum cleaner bags by now.
Why rely on the French gummint to test the lead levels? It must be a simple chemical assay that can be performed by dozens of private organizations around the world.
Kevin Drum of Mother Jones has been following the correlation between lead levels in the air from leaded gas and violent crime twenty years later. Changing over to lead free gas seems to correlate reasonably well in several studies. Not The Answer, but one of the contributors. Young violent criminals seem to have diminished mental capacity and impulse control. Makes me wonder where antifa finds the lead to ingest today.
I would assume most of the lead melted and is still on site. Surely, some of it oxidized to the (II) oxide, PbO- that will have been carried on the wind everywhere nearby.
PbO is almost as dense as metallic lead, so it's not going to go very far. By my rough estimate, 90% of it fell out of the ash plume within a kilometer of Notre Dame, i.e. mostly on the Île de la Cité, given the wind conditions that day, southeasterly breezes at 3-4 knots. That means most of it fell on pavement and rooftops which have been washed many times by rainfall since last April.
The siding on my first house (ca 1894) was mostly held on by multiple layers of lead paint. When I replaced the cedar sawn shingles in 1978, I could pull them off by hand after breaking the seal on the paint. In the Roaring 20's, when my Granddad's house construction crew got far enough along, it was one guy's job to boil linseed oil in a kettle over an open wood fire and bust up chunks of lead oxide to dissolve in it. Voila, white paint. Real mess to dispose of later, though, as I found out.
The average child in the U.S. prior to 1975 had lead levels in their blood more than ten times the current standard due to the use of lead in gasoline. Strangely, the kinds of health catastrophes routinely predicted today at far lower levels did not occur.
And one tenth the obesity.
...imagine a lead-free roof burning, but covered in solar panels
"A new study by Environmental Progress (EP) warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there’s been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment"
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/06/solar-panel-waste-environmental-threat-clean-energy/
Young violent criminals seem to have diminished mental capacity and impulse control.
Going way out on a limb here, but I will posit that middle age and older violent criminals also have diminished mental capacity and impulse control.
Also, that young people in general have less impulse control.
bagoh20 said...
"460 tons? Nearly 1 million pounds? Really? That sounds like a lot."
Rating: Probably true.
This site:
https://www.notredamedeparis.fr/en/la-cathedrale/architecture/la-charpente/
says there were 210 tons on the roof.
The internet tells me that lead weighs 708.06 pounds per cubic foot. That means 210 tons (420,000 pounds) of lead is approximately 593 cubic feet. Assuming 1/4 inch thick slices, it would cover 28,472 square feet, or an area about 169 x 169 feet. That seems reasonable for the roof of Notre Dame.
The kicker is that, according to this site:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/notre-dame-cathedrals-restoration-stumbles-11564651800
there were another 250 tons in the spire.
Quaestor wrote...PbO is almost as dense as metallic lead, so it's not going to go very far. By my rough estimate, 90% of it fell out of the ash plume within a kilometer of Notre Dame, i.e. mostly on the Île de la Cité, given the wind conditions that day, southeasterly breezes at 3-4 knots. That means most of it fell on pavement and rooftops which have been washed many times by rainfall since last April.
Written with aplomb. Bravo!
bagoh20 said...My whole family used to participate in the making of lead fishing weights (sinkers) in our kitchen. We would melt quart size pots of lead and pour them into molds. I don't remember even opening the windows.
My dad used to collect scrap lead from the streets and where he worked at the newspaper which -- in the 19602 -- still used Linotype. The lead in the streets fell off of wheels where it was used in balancing wheels. He'd melt the stuff down in a saucepan and propane torch. I used to love to watch him as he skimmed the slag. He'd cast the liquid into 3 and 4 lb weights which he'd sell to SCUBA divers. A freshly cast ingot looked like mercury but it gets a passivating layer of lead oxide as it cools.
He died of a brain tumor.
Written with aplomb. Bravo!
Very clever!
Years and years of leaded gasoline use would also blanket a city like Paris with lead oxide which never really goes away. I wonder if a careful lead isotope analysis could distinguish Notre Dame's lead from lead introduced as tetraetyllead? Isotope analysis has been used to distinguish copper and silver sourced from different parts of the world. Theoretically, medieval lead and modern gasoline lead are sourced from different and distinguishable sources.
As another data point for the "before" state, France did not discontinue use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline until the year 2000
chikelit@6:30 has plumbed the depths. And the connection between unleaded gas and obesity seems clear--lead is very filling! Many poor American kids breakfasted on lead flakes from the window sill, and then breathed asbestos at school all day.
Narr
So I read, anyway
@fullmoon
Take a look at the most recent Mother Jones presentation. As the violent young guys age, there is a corresponding increase in crime in their now older cohort. Not as bad when they were younger. Maybe some died or learned how to cope and calmed down or were in prison or ??
Organic lead is very bad for organs say leaded gasoline. Inorganic lead (lead metal) is less bad and reports to the bloodstream from the gut or the lungs; small particles go faster. Lead has a half life of 28 days in the body being excreted in pee and poop. At the same time, lead is mineralized from the blood into teeth and bone which can be reabsorbed into the blood when you are old, sick, or starving.
The answer is to give everyone a few doses of EDTA chelating agent to bind lead into disposable molecules and clear the blood of lead. You can also drink a lot of beer and pee a lot, which helps. Lead is most dangerous for developing kids. I played with mercury and lead soldiers as a kid and perhaps if I had not I would be smarter than I am, an unknown loss.
Do French people still catch and eat fish from the Seine?
If so, it could help us to understand, or at least sympathize to some degree with, the French.
Separately, I grew up in the 50's and 60's and inhaled my share of tetraethyl lead fumes from those completely not-emission-controlled cars. As a teenager, I occasionally melted down lead on the kitchen stove, mostly to cast bullets from (don't ask).
Make of this what you will.
I agree with rhhardin. There's nothing wrong with 60/40 tin/lead solder, and the resin flux smells very nice when heated.
We've only got 12 years left - party on.
when the Hindenburg went up in flames,
is that when they stopped making them out of led?
This is sort of a topical issue now in France. There is a big issue broiling away over the government's using controversial herbicides/pesticides within meters of housing and urban areas. There are forty mayors now banning the herbicides/pesticides within 150 meters of their towns; the Minister of Agriculture objects and the government has taken the mayors to court saying their local bans are illegal.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190906-france-glyphosate-french-rebel-mayors-roundup-monsanto-government-illicit-pesticide-bans
While we may be sanguine about the impact of lead poisoning (even minute amounts) that could be sourced to the burning down of the cathedral, this report would will not be welcome. The growing sentiments against the aristocratic state are quite strong now. It will not sit well.
And yes, people do eat fish from the Seine.
Of course, it will only be a matter of time before both the lead and the chemicals will be blamed on the Americans
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