Matt Murphy could tell there was something wrong with the controlled burn of a house just across the street from his neighborhood.
As he and his neighbors watched the old home at 1213 S High Street catch fire on November 5th, Murphy caught a whiff of an unmistakable smell.
“I recognized the smell of lead paint,” said Murphy. “I’ve unfortunately worked with lead paint removal in the past and knew what it smelled like.”
When Murphy, a contractor by trade, saw paint chips falling from the smoke plume above the house, he grabbed a couple and made his way over to the local hardware store to purchase a lead paint testing kit.
The test results showed immediately that lead was present in the debris, and at alarming levels.
Some of the chips were 10% lead content, which is really really high,” said Murphy.
Independent testing by the Environmental Resiliency Institute at IU confirmed the lead content of fallen paint chips was in the ballpark of 10-12%. Some chips contained so much lead that it had to be measured in parts per hundred rather than parts per million.
Matt Murphy, a neighborhood resident and contractor by trade, knew almost immediately that there was an issue with the controlled burn at 1213 S. High Street
“That’s pretty concerning,” said Chris Sapp. “I’ve got a ten year old daughter, and kids are most at risk for lead poisoning.”
Sapp had been in his front yard watching the burn as well, but didn’t think anything of it until Murphy texted him about the potential hazard. Once Sapp tested the paint chips in his yard, the results were the same.
Independent contractors hired by the City of Bloomington did additional testing to find that there was no discernible lead content in the air, and more recent soil testing did not contain “unacceptable levels” of lead.
While the results were comforting to residents with young children like Sapp and Murphy, it didn’t quell their frustrations with how the incident was handled in the first place.
“Nobody in the city or the fire department notified the neighborhood that there was going to be a burn of a three story wooden house in our neighborhood,” said Sapp.
Sapp claimed that notices had only been placed by the city in the public library, and in the Bloomington Herald Times. Sapp said he and his wife only found out the burn was happening when they saw a tweet from the paper.
Chris Sapp, a resident of the neighborhood where lead paint chips were spread, expressed concern for the health and safety of his daughter.
“Common sense would’ve prevented this,” said Murphy. “Its always a bad idea to have a two and a half story fire of any kind in the middle of a dense core neighborhood.”
When the neighborhood asked for containers to help dispose of the lead ash, the city brought out just one trash can for the entire neighborhood. And cleanup crews were delayed a few days by weather as they tried to begin the remediation process.
“The city has been very slow to react,” said Sapp. “They’ve seemed very concerned, they talked very concerned, but they’ve ben slow to act.”
City councilman Dave Rollo asked mayor John Hamilton to put out an executive order to put a temporary halt on leaf blowing, but received no response. When Rollo and other city council members held a town hall meeting with residents from the neighborhood, neither the mayor nor a representative from the city were in attendance.
“The mayor has been remarkably absent and silent which has been disappointing,” said Murphy.
The city said that wearing gloves, a mask and washing up after completing yard work would help prevent the little, if any risk posed by remaining lead.
The cost of the remediation was expected to be around $118,000 once it was completed. Despite testing that found levels of lead not to be harmful, the city was still taking precaution by not composting leaves from the fall zone.
“We live in this city that prides itself on being a green city, being very environmentally friendly,” said Sapp. “And we just had this major pollution event in the middle of the city.
