Lead paint is incredibly dangerous

Twitch

Twitch

I must have been living under a rock. I always thought lead paint was a bit dangerous and something to be treated with a bit of respect..... you know, try not to swallow whole chunks of it and what not.

Boy was I wrong. :eek:

Lead paint is dangerous with a capital "D". Think asbestos dangerous, it needs to be treated with that kind of caution and respect.

Here's some info I found on the subject. It's significant that those at highest risk are those families of home renovators, particularly their kids. :( Hence why I've posted in this forum.

Background is that I bought an old house this year and started renovating it. Purely by good luck, the one painted surface I have worked on appears to be the only painted surface in my house that isn't painted with lead based paint.

Then on the weekend I thought of stripping the outside paint and bought a lead paint kit to test. Sure enough it was positive, along with most of the other paint inside. I then thought I'd do a bit of internet research on how to deal with it, which is when I found out the real level of dangers of working on this stuff.

I just wanted to get the warning out there as I'm sure I'm not the only one who was unaware of the seriousness of the danger associated with old lead based paint.

Good luck, and happy & safe renovating :)
 
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yep - my brother in law got lead poisoning and it has changed his entire personality. he went from a really nice family guy to sick, moody, left his wife and kids to become and "wanderer" and is now a surly so-in-so who thinks the world is against him.

not nice stuff at all!
 
Hence my aversion to buying old houses.
Maybe you should include a lead paint test report as part of the build inspection ?

I prefer buying ( and more usually, building) new houses where you at least know what new chemicals you are being exposed to. ( kidding...)

When it comes right down to it, lots of things in the house give off lots of toxic nasties. They're pretty unhealthy places in reality..

kp
 
The Y-man said:
I don't have a problem with old houses. I just have an aversion to renovating work - hence I pay others to do it for me.... :)

Cheers,

The Y-man
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Yep, we can always find someone who likes playing with Lead Paint and Asbestos.

Just had someone do the fiberglass batts in the roof a couple of week's ago complaining that it was over 50 degrees c inside the ceiling.

Dur, why do you think I sat downstairs drinking cold beer.

Best $400 we've spent in a while, except for the guy who sanded and painted the asbestos ceiling in the house we moved, now that was $500 well spent , only wore a cheap paper mask as well.

The beer at the club was cold that day as well.

There are some thing's we just won't do

Boat Boy
 
lizzie said:
yep - my brother in law got lead poisoning and it has changed his entire personality. he went from a really nice family guy to sick, moody, left his wife and kids to become and "wanderer" and is now a surly so-in-so who thinks the world is against him.

not nice stuff at all!
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Umm yes OK!!!!

sounds like you're looking for something to blame! Is there any evidence that lead poisoning leads to people making poor descisions in life????

What ever happened to taking responsiblity for your actions?
 
lead poisoning has all sorts of nasty effects. irritability and mood swings, exhaustion, the shakes, even brain damage. so yeah, if it's interfering with the way your head normally works, i'd say that's a mitigating factor when determining responsibility for a bad decision.
 
A case study on adult monozygotic twins with lead poisoning, both who were retired painters, had typical patterns of cognitive difficulties following chronic lead exposure. This pattern included predominant impairments in the domains of attention/executive function, visuospatial/visual motor functioning, short-term memory, and (for one of the brothers) confusion and fatigue. After exposure to toxicants such as lead in adulthood, cognitive deficits tend to be specific, not generalized, and not affecting language centres in the brain (Weisskopf et al., 2004).
Lead exposure has also been linked to behavioural problems. In his landmark study, Needleman (1979) measured dentine Pb levels in 312 first-and second-grade students (mean age 7.3 years), and administered neurobehavioural tests. The results showed that behavioural and performance problems in primary school children were more prevalent with increasing dentine (teeth) lead levels. These behavioural problems included hyperactivity, distractibility, impulsivity, disorganisation, non-persistence, inability to follow simple instructions and overall poor functioning.

Ref: http://www.lead.org.au/fs/fst28.html
 
lizzie said:
yep - my brother in law got lead poisoning and it has changed his entire personality. he went from a really nice family guy to sick, moody, left his wife and kids to become and "wanderer" and is now a surly so-in-so who thinks the world is against him.
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Was it diagnosed as Lead Poisoning or was an assumption made?
 
Bloss said:
except for the guy who sanded and painted the asbestos ceiling in the house we moved, now that was $500 well spent , only wore a cheap paper mask as well.

Boat Boy
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Yes but who cleaned up all the dust that settled all over the house???:( This is the dust that is deadly!!!!!!
 
Bloss said:
He got rid of most of it, we finished up the cleanup wearing our 2 stage Sundstrom masks that we paint the boat with.

Boat Boy
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The way to properly clean up asbestos and lead dust after the fact, if dust was spread around and not contained, is to remove the top 1.5 meters of your soil and take it to a toxic waste dump.

If it's been worked on incorrectly the soil in your and probably your downwind neighbours property is going to be contaminated forever. :(
 
Twitch said:
The way to properly clean up asbestos and lead dust after the fact, if dust was spread around and not contained, is to remove the top 1.5 meters of your soil and take it to a toxic waste dump.

If it's been worked on incorrectly the soil in your and probably your downwind neighbours property is going to be contaminated forever. :(
Click to expand...

Well that's a bit bloody unrealistic isn't it?

Going on that theory, you'll have to carve the top 1.5m out of all of Rocky as the asbestos roof was removed on the North side of town, just taken of and thrown on the ground with big cloud's of dust, then wrapped up and taken away [well that blocks buggered] and then taken to the south side of town, blowing any dust out of the roof space on the way.

Look out , were all going to die.


The guy's doing the cut and shut reckon they are more concerned about the asbestos replacment being used in houses today, so maybe we should scrape the top 1.5m off of the rest of Aus while were at it.

Hope you can hold your breath for a long time.

Geez :rolleyes:

Boat Boy
 
not to hijaack the thread, but as an aside, on the subject of asbestos: if it's so hazardous then why make it so difficult and expensive to remove?? surely health comes before unreasonable profit? we did everything we were supposed to do while removing it (had been enclosing the verandah), and now it's sitting, double wrapped and airtight in industrial strength plastic, in the front yard. we had placed each piece onto the plastic, damped down, each time we unscrewed a panel. then we finished wrapping them. problem is, now it's too heavy for us to lift and every waste agency in town wants to charge us for a whole skip to come take it away. plus the sheets are too big to fit in my car even if we could lift the bundle. mum keeps saying we should just open up the plastic, and break some of the bigger bits into smaller bits :)eek: ) then re-wrap and take it to the tip ourselves... ok, just had to whinge, sorry to get off track.
 
Sorry, ridicule doesn't hid the fact that the action was irresponsible, and has in all likelyhood contaminated your soil and endangered the life of the mug contractor you employed.
 
Hey, the asbestos roof removers are licenced contractors and the painter also new what he was doing, he'd been doing it for 40 years or more, we even offered our mask's to him.

Who are we to tell them that they aren't doing their job right, and who are you to tell us we are irresponsible for not holding the hand of every contractor we get in for a job.

If these guy's don't want to look after their own health, well, i'm not their Mother, and i'm not their employer.

And if you reckon that has contaminated the soil, well I say every block in OZ that has had asbestos near it is as well, remember the new handling rules haven't been in place that long.

If you ever do an asbestos removal job, report back with your expert comment's.

Until then, i'll leave it to the one's with a ticket.


Boat Boy
 
Bloss said:
Going on that theory, you'll have to carve the top 1.5m out of all of Rocky as the asbestos roof was removed on the North side of town, just taken of and thrown on the ground with big cloud's of dust, then wrapped up and taken away [well that blocks buggered] and then taken to the south side of town, blowing any dust out of the roof space on the way.

Boat Boy
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The fact that is ignored is that contamination happened on a massive scale when the asbestos sheeting was installed.

In general the sheets were cut on site with all those little bits dropping right on to the ground and basically left to become one with the soil.

In the case of the compressed stuff they used grinders to affect the cut, wearing no dust masks (wasn't the done thing then) and again the dust went all over the neigbourhood.

This was the case all over developing areas so you can imagine the level of contamination in these new developments and they didn't clean up as a rule but simply left all the junk for the new home owner to clean up.

My experience with this was some 40 years ago so there must be a lot of people (and even kids) who have been exposed and have not contracted (developed) asbestosis so I think the level of exposure needs to be quite high for it to develope into a problem.

Somebody just reminded me that brake shoes were also asbestos laden so where did all that asbestos go as the brake linings wore out whilst driving around.

luce.rock said:
we did everything we were supposed to do while removing it (had been enclosing the verandah), and now it's sitting, double wrapped and airtight in industrial strength plastic, in the front yard. we had placed each piece onto the plastic, damped down, each time we unscrewed a panel. then we finished wrapping them. problem is,
............
mum keeps saying we should just open up the plastic, and break some of the bigger bits into smaller bits :)eek: ) then re-wrap and take it to the tip ourselves... ok, just had to whinge, sorry to get off track.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately we were faced with the same situation and did end up parcelling it up in manageble parcels but in so doing we had to handle the sheets way more and created asbestos dust in the process of breaking it than simply leaving it all intact.

We then took it down to Menai tip (after having made a booking!!!:() to be directed to the tip face and drop our parcels there. Just after we drove off a Big.... bulldozer came along and bulldoze our parcels along with the rest of the rubbish and the adbestos received no further special treatment.

Presently I am really cheesed of as I have another load of fibro sheets that were the old eaves that I need to dispose of and I really don't feel like breaking it into many pieces as I feel this is where any exposure will happen.

Cheers
 
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