Lab testing has proven poisonous quantities of lead contained in paint chips apparently stripped from the Tobin Bridge by climate and time that are raining down onto the properties and streets of Chelsea.
“With all of the work that has been done on the Tobin Bridge over the last number of years, we all believed that the bridge was deleaded,” Roseann Bongiovanni, government director of GreenRoots, informed the Herald. “To learn that the lead is still falling off the bridge 45 years after lead was banned from paint, it’s unbelievable to us all that this is a major problem now in 2023.”
Residents in Chelsea’s Ward Eight grew involved not too long ago once they began discovering paint chips of their yards and on the sidewalks surrounding the Tobin Bridge.
“I see it every time I walk out my door. I’ve lived here for four plus years and the ‘allergy’ I have only hits when I’m at home. I thought it was the trees. Never thought about the bridge,” Garron DeRamus, the proprietor of Wildcat Bike Repair, informed the Herald.
GreenRoots, together with town, had paint chips collected for sampling by an unbiased lab, WHDH TV first reported.
“In all five samples, lead levels are very high, and given the near certainty of direct exposure for residents there is an imminent and substantial danger to human health,” Bongiovanni wrote in a letter signed by the Conservation Law Foundation, Chelsea’s interim City Manager and a Boston University professor of environmental well being despatched to MassDOT’s Secretary Gina Fiandaca.
“Residents have observed thousands of paint chips along the streets, yards and open spaces
underneath the Tobin Bridge from the Fourth Street off-ramp to Lower Broadway where the Mystic River and Chelsea Creek meet,” the previous Chelsea City Council president wrote.
Unfortunately for town and its residents, lead will not be a brand new drawback in Chelsea, Bongiovanni mentioned. In the Nineteen Seventies lead was discovered within the Mystic River and in neighborhoods close to the bridge. As a end result, a number of the metropolis’s youngsters had been monitored for years as the topics of a examine on the consequences of lead publicity throughout improvement.
Use of lead in family paints could be banned in 1978. No such ban was put in place for the usage of lead in industrial functions, nevertheless.
“Residents of Chelsea have lived with countless environmental harms for decades, and this is yet another shameful example. Exposure to the lead paint blowing off the Tobin Bridge has already contributed to serious and permanent health issues in the community,” Caitlin Peale Sloan of CLF Massachusetts mentioned.
While the issue could also be outdated, Bongiovanni mentioned, the response by Gov. Maura Healey’s administration has been a breath of recent air in comparison with the previous.
MassDOT workers performed an inspection of the areas across the bridge on Monday and Fiandaca was on the bottom Tuesday, she mentioned. The company indicated in a reply letter to Bongiovanni that they might fast-track a deliberate $100 million capital venture for fall bidding. That venture would see a number of the metal construction changed and the entire parts over town neighborhoods repainted.
“MassDOT takes the health and safety of its residents seriously and is taking steps to inspect the Tobin Bridge paint and take immediate action to protect the community and the environment. We are committed to keeping the public informed of our progress,” a MassDOT spokesperson informed the Herald.
Bongiovanni mentioned she hopes to have a neighborhood assembly about cleanup and remediation for these affected by the lead-based paint chips.
“This has been happening for four and five decades now. At what point does Chelsea stop being the dumping ground for the state? At what point do environmental justice communities actually get prioritized?” she mentioned. “It’s 2023, let’s restart the clock here and not let any of this happen ever again.”
According to info offered by the Federal Highway Administration, “it is estimated that 35%-40% of steel structures are coated with lead-based paint, including 90,000 bridges. Of all bridges repainted in 1985-1989, 80% of them had lead coatings.”
The Maurice J. Tobin Memorial Bridge spans the Mystic River simply west of the place it and the Chelsea Creek be part of earlier than flowing south previous Boston’s North End.
The span, initially constructed within the late 40s after which referred to as the Mystic River Bridge, is an over 2-mile-long double-decker that carries six lanes of visitors between the cities of Chelsea and Boston.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”