Lead in Baltimore

Flint is not the only American city where governmental failures and mendacity have exposed people to lead. Baltimore has certified houses as lead-free that are not in fact so.

When people in Baltimore talk about “lead checks” they are not talking about the inspections that are supposed to ensure that children aren’t endangered by lead poisoning; they are talking about the settlement payments that come after the damage is done. In the most recent discovery of fraudulent lead inspections, the inspector was not named, but is known to have worked for American Homeowner Services LLC between 2010 and 2014.

Although there have been dramatic reductions in lead poisoning in Baltimore over recent decades, an investigation by the Baltimore Sun in December showed that more than 4,900 children have been affected by lead in the last decade – 129 in the last year alone.

But Saul Kerpelman, a lawyer who has handled thousands of lead cases, says these numbers don’t really show the extent of the problem. Those numbers, he said, are calculated based on a blood lead level (BLL) of 10 micrograms per deciliter (mg/dl). But the CDC has recently determined that any amount of lead in a child’s blood can immediately and irreversibly cause brain damage. Kerpelman said that if you cut the BLL number in half to the current threshold number of 5 mg/dl, there could be as many as 4,000 cases in Baltimore last year and if the acceptable lead level were set to zero, it could be as many as 10,000 exposed children. Kerpelman said that out of the more than 4,000 cases he has dealt with, “99% are black”.

“The hysteria about Flint, Michigan, is totally justified,” Kerpelman said, referencing findings that residents had been using water with alarmingly high levels of lead. A Guardian investigation in the wake of Flint has found that cities around the country are systematically distorting water tests to underplay the amount of lead in the water.

But Kerpelman says Baltimore’s problem with lead paint is even worse because such a large percentage of the city’s housing stock was built before 1978, when lead paint became illegal, and is owned by landlords who see their properties “not as an investment [but] as a cashflow machine” in “the same areas where there used to be legal segregation and those were the only places that a black person was allowed to live”.

Many of the same absentee landlords come up in these cases over and over again.

“If you type Stanley Rochkind into Maryland case search, his name comes up over 500 times,” Kerpelman said.

Nothing like a slumlord and a corrupt investigator working together to poison tenants.

Significant lawsuits are the way to stop this problem. Of course, when Republicans talk about “tort reform,” this is exactly the type of lawsuit they are talking about.