Playing Around with Poison: Lead Exposure after the 2019 Fire

By Caitlen Cameron

The day is April 18th 2019, two days after the historic fire at Notre Dame in Paris. It’s around 6:30 am and you are waking up your kids in your Parisian home to get ready for the day. “Bonjour les enfants!” you say to your little rascals. You get their lunches packed, breakfast made and send them quickly out the door. You relax believing your children would be ultimately safe at school and you turn on the news to see any updates on the fire. But little do you know that sending your kids to school on this day could have harmed them for the rest of their lives. 

Notre-Dame on fire, yellow smoke rises from the lead in the roof and spire.  Wandrille de Préville, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

During the fire at Notre Dame, according to GeoHealth, 430 milligrams of lead was released into the air from the roof and spire of the cathedral. Residents in the surrounding areas were exposed to these lead particles on their balconies, front porches, and especially their playgrounds. Now, you may not be a Parisian parent waking up to send your kids to school, but many parents in the days after the fire did not know they were exposing their children to lead. In fact, they did not know the full reach of the lead contamination for months.

Government officials started conducting the first lead tests in schools in close proximity to Notre-Dame. According to the New York Times, 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 was among the biggest concern. “Non-contaminated soil would be expected to contain less than less than 100 milligrams of lead per kilogram of soil. However, in samples collected within a kilometer the cathedral's remains, the levels averaged 200 mg/kg. And in the northwest direction downwind of the fire, the lead was significantly higher, averaging nearly 430 mg/kg -- double that of the surrounding area, and surpassing France's 300 mg/kg limit” (Earth instituteat Columbia University).

Now even though these levels were over the limits, government officials were more worried about causing panic for the public. They claimed that “Lead already exists in half of all historic buildings in Paris so, we should not be alarmed, and tourism should continue.” But adult tourists should not have been the biggest concern for the city. It should have been the toddlers and pregnant mothers that believed everything was normal. Hundreds of children went to school for weeks before the public health system in Paris began cleaning these outdoor spaces. And according to the CDC, “Exposure to lead can seriously harm a child’s health and cause well-documented adverse effects such as; damage to the brain and nervous system, slowed growth development, learning behavior problems, hearing and speech problems. And to top the damage off, there is no level of safe lead consumption identified by their guidelines.

Children playing in Paris.  Philippe Alès, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

So why didn’t public officials speak up? “The state was afraid to make people afraid,” said Anne Souyris, the city’s deputy mayor in charge of health, who also noted that officials were faced with a singular disaster that left them struggling with hundreds of smaller issues. The state did not want to harm its summer tourism bubble, claiming they feared it would harm the economy even more than the disaster that already occurred. So, by putting the priority on the business side, they did not start cleaning schools and parks until at least the end of August, leaving some schools unable to open in the beginning of September.

While the schools in downtown Paris were finally getting detoxed, schools in the worst affected areas were still open to children. These towns were downwind to the fire itself, reaching over a mile outside of the city. These towns were not under scrutiny for lead pollution from the fire until traces of lead were found in bees honey in October. Since bees in the area collected pollen from local parks and greenery, they were able to carry the amounts back to their hives and contaminate the fall supply. “Three dozen samples were collected from hives around the Paris region after the fire and compared to samples from Paris from 2018 and from another part of France in 2017. The highest lead concentration was .08 micrograms per gram from a hive less than three miles west of Notre Dame." The danger threshold for contents in honey is .10 micrograms so the levels were labeled as okay for sale, but it was still a surprise for researchers. Their work brought led to local testing and the notice of high numbers. As a precaution, health departments began to supply local students ‘parents with voluntary blood tests. Since the real threat was not advertised many parents did not take their children until it was advertised on the news stations 6-8 months after the interactions could have occurred. 

Bee collecting pollen.  CSIRO, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Overall, the entire crisis of the lead spread was highly under regarded. Parents should have been notified immediately to clean their homes and yards. Even if scientists like Alexander Van Green, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, believed the effects were “temporary if regular cleaning in a household occurred”. It still does not account for the possibility of re-exposure coming from schools, playgrounds, parks and yards. According to the Times, lead does not go away, it can be cleaned up and moved but it doesn’t disappear. The public should always have a right to know if their children’s health is at risk no matter the levels or amount. Once statewide testing was finally installed, they found only two intense cases of lead infection. However, we will not know the true impact the levels had on children’s young neurological systems for years to come.