Home lead testing

Home lead testing 

Problem statement

At risk families can benefit from identifying lead hazards in their homes. The knowledge may:

1. help determine if a professional lead risk assessment is required to assure family safety

2. permit a family to adopt interim controls (eg. regular cleaning or isolation of affected lead sources). 

3. substantiate a request to property owner to take corrective measures using lead safe practices.

Test one: distributing 3M Lead Test Kits to at risk households

In 2021, using funds provided by God Before Guns, CLASH purchased 3M lead test kits that were used in two ways:

1. Volunteer administered testing at Monticello apartments (East 71st and Carnegie) and at two rental properties in Cleveland's Westown neighborhood). In all three of these cases, CLASH volunteers identified lead present in the units and shared the information with the tenants whose homes were tested. In two of these cases, the tenants elected to move from their rental homes without seeking further remediation. In the third case, tenant hired a professional lead risk assessor to confirm the results and reported lead hazards to the Department of Building and Housing before moving from the unit.

2. Distributed lead test kits to families visiting a CLASH information table at a community event. Despite efforts to recontact families who received test kits, CLASH was unable to reach the recipients of the test kits.

3. A CLASH member independently used the 3M lead test kit to determine the extent of lead risk in a house he acquired in the Larchmere area. He determined that it was economically unfeasible to make repairs make the property lead safe. The property was later demolished.

In 2022, CLASH spent another $200 to purchase additional lead test kits for a community event in Cleveland’s Old Brooklyn neighborhood. A CLASH volunteer was trained to brief each family on how to use the test kit, and another volunteer was trained to do follow ups with the recipients. Again we had to report the overall failure to get feedback from the recipient families. Almost invariably they did not answer the phone or respond to emails. On a couple of cases we made unannounced home visit, but couldn’t gain access to the family member who received the DIY kit.

As a result of our experiences in 2021 and 2022, CLASH volunteers have three hypotheses about the repeated failure to get feedback from families who receive DIY test kits.

1. The 3M product is not simple or intitutive to use. In cases where CLASH volunteers used the test kits in homes (Monticello building and individual rental properties with the consent of the tenant), it took us a while to get the hang of using the product. Eventually we used YouTube videos for training on how to use the product properly.

2. The 3M product that we were distributing has a real market value. During the summer of 2022, prices rose by about 50% and there was heavy demand for the product, so that test kits were often unavailable in big box stores. 

3. A third hypothesis is more subtle, but has some anecdotal support from others in the field of lead testing. Families may fearful about reporting known lead hazards either to their family members, their landlords or investigators (like CLASH). One corrobrating support for this hesistancy was when we provided soil test kits (a test tube) to high school students in a 2022 summer program operated by the Northeast Ohio Black Health Coalition. Despite the simplicity of gathering a soil sample in the test kits, none of the 14 students ever returned a sample (just lots of excuses).

In May 2023, a CLASH  team reached out to the University of Notre Dame (UND) which has been offering a DIY home lead test kit to families in Indiana. The UND researchers sympathized with our experiences. They were encountering the same kind of hesitancy from recepient families. The UND kit has two advantages over the 3M kit.

• UND uses samples of soil, water, and paint, not just paint, and

• The UND samples must be returned to UND for analysis. 

Our testing team seems committed to purchasing a small supply of UND test kits to distribute to families in a way that the volunteer can deliver, demonstrate, and retrieve the test kit is a short period of time and receive the test results from UND to share back with the family. With your concurrence, CLASH will to use the balance of your grant to pay for a this latest effort to use home lead testing to extend awareness of lead hazards.

Test two: Distributing University of Notre Dame test kits