Editor’s note: This is Part One in a three-part series examining lead poisoning in Chicago. Read Part Two and Part Three. Also, see the results for playgounds tested for lead.
By Matthew Hendrickson
March 13, 2009 – Lead poisoning in Chicago children is a major health concern, but the city’s day-to-day battle against the problem has drawn surprisingly little scrutiny.
Recently, veteran lead inspector Elijah Ezeofor allowed me to shadow him for a day, providing a rare glimpse of the city’s lead poisoning prevention efforts – and whether those efforts were working.
At age 60, Ezeofor is a soft-spoken man who still has black hair, cropped short. He has been an inspector the last 16 years, saying with a chuckle, he is looking forward to retiring soon.
As we cruise down I-90/94 toward the South Side, he tells me most inspections are scheduled early in the day to accommodate the working schedules of residents.
But inspectors want to end the day early for another reason.
“I hear shots occasionally if I’m out late,” he says. “We get to a lot of places. Some are nice, and others are not so. I was coming out of a house one night and I saw a kid across the street. Maybe 19? He was running down the block and shooting, so I had to jump behind my car until he was gone.”
That is why hunting down some children with lead poisoning can be difficult.
“Sometimes it’s dangerous to go around just knocking on doors,” Ezeofor says. “I don’t do that anymore. People get angry, so now I just leave a door sign, and whoever has the child will call then.”
The No. 1 way children acquire lead poisoning is through lead paint in old homes. By itself, lead paint is not risky. But when it flakes or creates dust, children can ingest it by touching the particles and putting their fingers in their mouths. A lead problem in the home is usually identified only after a child has been found to have high lead levels in the blood – meaning many kids are used, in effect, as lead barometers for the household.
After a short drive, Ezeofor walks up to a row of small, one-level apartments across from a school and knocks on the door. There is no answer, but we hear a commotion inside.
“Who is it?” a voice calls out.
“Public Health,” Ezeofor calls back.
“Who?”
“Public Health Department. We are here for the lead inspection.”
The door opens a crack.
“Who are you?” she asks. “What you doing?”
Elijah offers his ID card and asks if the mother of the child on his sheet is home.
“Her kid’s got lead?”
“Just a little. Nothing to worry about.”
At first she denies knowing the mother, then says that she does not know where she lives. But Ezeofor explains that he just wants to check for lead and that the costs will be passed onto the building’s owner, not the tenant.
The address is not quite right. The name we have is for the woman’s cousin, who does not live there. But Ezeofor keeps explaining, and soon he has the mother’s correct address and phone number, and has signed up the woman at the door for her own appointment.
Walking back to the car he opens his door and smiles.
“Well, now you see,” he says. “I’ve got two appointments now for tomorrow.”
Our next stop turns out to be the most significant one of the day: a large brick apartment complex, two miles away. Several of the houses on the block are shuttered with plywood boards.
We ring the bell on a door with no outside handle, as it appears to have been torn off. Two floors above us a young girl pokes her head out a window and shouts down.
“You from the Health Department?”
We make our way up a set of stairs, and Ezeofor points to corners where he suspects lead. Inside, the apartment is almost bare, except for three bedrooms filled with old toasters, coffee pots, bicycle parts and garbage bags full of clothes. There is no furniture, except for three televisions and several single mattresses on the floor.
Ezeofor places down his gray case that holds his equipment.
“Do you have mice? Roaches” he asks the matriarch of the apartment, Eugenia Pelmer. “How’s the plumbing? Heat? Has the child been out of the country recently? Does the child wear any jewelry? Does the child spend a lot of time anywhere else?”
The child in question is a 2-year-old girl named Mekrya, who is staring at us from behind Eugenia, her mother. Soon she becomes bored and runs off, thumping her feet across the room in only a diaper, back to the television where she plops down and watches a court TV show.
Ezeofor walks through the apartment, sketching the rooms, doorways and halls.
Paint is flaking off the walls. Roaches scurry across the baseboards, unafraid of the light or occupants, who seemed to no longer notice or care.
Eugenia says her family has been living in the apartment since November of last year. She was hardly surprised to hear that Mekrya had high levels of lead in her blood when she was tested at a routine check-up. Eugenia has been through this before with her other daughter, now 16. Families like Eugenia’s that move frequently can have positive tests several times as they shuttle from one leaded apartment to the next.
“I was kind of shocked at the same time though,” she tells me. “We were planning on moving anyways ’cause this landlord won’t fix anything, but this is the icing on the cake.”
Elijah pulls out his LPA-1, a hand-held lead scanner that looks like a power drill. Inspectors use it by pressing the square end against objects to get a quick reading of the lead content.
He slowly makes his way through the apartment, carefully scanning each wall and surface. Any surface with a reading of 1.0 or higher gets a mark in his notes. Our first few attempts show no lead on the living room window trim or the radiators. But the baseboards are confirmed targets, as are all the trim around the doors, walls on the east and southwest sides of the apartment, and the red paint on the concrete door step and window ledge.
It’s not unusual to find lead paint on steps and window ledges. Such paint is used primarily because it holds up well against the elements. In fact, most of the city’s bridges and CTA stations use lead paint. As for Mekrya, it didn’t take the inspector long to conclude why she has high lead levels: She likely ingested paint particles on the floor by crawling around on her hands and knees.
When we are finished, Ezeofor explains to Eugenia that he will be sending a letter to her landlord to explain which areas need fixing.
“Should we move?” Eugenia asks.
“Well, you can move if you want,” he says. “I don’t want to tell you that. They can come in and fix it, and it won’t be a problem for you anymore.”
On our way out, Ezeofor uses his scanner to test the hallway stairs and walls, where the paint flakes like dandruff, leaving tiny piles of dark red dust in the corners. Not surprisingly, both spots test high for lead.
As we leave the apartment building, I notice that a young woman and her small child follow us out.
I ask Ezeofor that since Eugenia’s apartment tested positive for lead, can we assume other units in the building also have major lead problems.
He nods.
“Will the whole building be tested?” I ask.
He shakes his head no.
“So the little girl we just saw walk out might be being poisoned right now, but until she gets a test before school and tests positive there isn’t anything you can do?”
He acknowledges it makes little sense to clean up one unit and not the rest. But inspectors, he says, are hamstrung: They can’t test a unit without a referral from the state. When they do get referrals they often contain scant information, making it difficult to find the children. Worse, many kids are not even tested until they are enrolled in school.
Add it all up, and it may be years before inspectors like Ezeofor catch up with a child who on a daily basis is being exposed to dangerous amounts of lead.
And by that time, the damage likely will have already been done.
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