Lead astray

>> City finally agrees to remove brain-damaging substance from parks

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

What if you were told that the city of Montreal had knowingly welcomed children into poisoned playgrounds full of a toxic substance that permanently reduces their IQs, damages their hearing, harms their nervous systems and slows growth?

Consider yourself told.

Although lead's toxicity has been known since antiquity, until 1983 the city of Montreal used lead-based paint in its playgrounds. In 1993 the administration launched a program to make parks safer but chose to spend its resources on replacing wooden swings and other potentially dangerous surfaces rather than removing the lead-tainted kiddy rides. The city instead opted to paint over the lead paint every two years. In spite of this strategy, in a well-publicized case from 1994 a child was hospitalized for anemia caused by lead poisoning contracted from a city playground.

The problem was forgotten until this spring, when Alissa Sklar, a mother of twin two-year-old daughters, noticed flakes of paint in NDG's MacDonald Park sandbox. "I had heard other mothers say that a city inspector came and said there was lead paint here. Then I noticed there were so many of these chips in the sand that I brought some to a lab downtown which agreed to analyze them for free," says Sklar.

The lab confirmed that the paint chips were tainted with the toxin that can devastate young children. "The city denied it for so long. They kept telling me it was a safe kind of lead, they didn't want to do anything with it," she says. A petition was set up and a city official offered to remove the installations and leave the playgrounds bare. Eventually Sklar spoke out at a neighbourhood council meeting, which prompted the city to test for lead at five playgrounds. Four of them were found in violation of Canadian law by containing excessive levels of lead.

Last week, the city announced that it would replace over 400 of the 3,009 playground installations in its 650 parks. These include 45 painted concrete tubes and 350 spring-mounted animal rides that will be replaced at a cost of $40-million over the next seven years.

Some remain unimpressed by the city's handling of the lead file. "They purposefully and willfully ignored this issue and by doing this they have condemned hundred of kids to be poisoned by lead," says Daniel Green of the Society to Vanquish Pollution. "They were advised by the health services after a child was contaminated in 1994, they've known about it and they did nothing. Any competent city manager that reads a little bit will know that this problem has been well documented in the United States, Toronto and elsewhere. These are places which have responded quicker than we have."

Green suggests that the health hazard inherent in lead poisoning should require the city of Montreal cordon off the affected areas until they are removed.

"Hundreds of children might very well be condemned to have learning disabilities because of lead exposure that could have been eliminated. I believe that parents living around these contaminated parks should evaluate their legal recourse against the Montreal and Quebec governments for dereliction of duty and endangerment." Green also suggests that free blood tests be made available for parents who want to gauge the level of lead in their children's bloodstreams and that collation therapy, in which patients literally pee the lead out of their system, be made available in some cases.