Home Testing: Hazard Inspections, Risk Assessments, & Lead-Based Paint Inspections

 

    

For those new to the Lead Safe Mama website:

Tamara Rubin is a multiple-federal-award-winning independent advocate for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children (two of her four sons were acutely Lead-poisoned in 2005).

Published: August 22, 2013

Updated: June 18, 2023

One of the simplest ways to protect your children from Lead and other hazards that could be found in your home is to hire a professional to test your home — ideally before you move in.

Buying a Home

If you are purchasing a home, consider making the purchase contingent on inspections. Add a “Hazard Inspection” to the buying process on top of the traditional “home inspection” that focuses on construction qualities and defects (wiring, plumbing, structure, etc).

Most home sellers (at the recommendation of their realtors) might not approve a buyer’s offer that specifies a contingency on a hazard inspection, however, it is standard to have a sale be “contingent on inspections” and there is no reason you cannot have one of those inspections be for hazards (just keep that to yourself!).

A typical hazard inspection will look for hazards including Lead, asbestos, and mold. The process will use both visual inspection methods and scientific methodology that may include digestive dust-wipe sampling and XRF testing. An “expanded” home inspection may also include a radon test (which the seller will probably have to know about as equipment needs to be left on site to capture emissions over a specific time period).

A hazard inspection will let you know exactly where the current hazards are and where the potential future hazards may be (if you plan to renovate, for example). A hazard inspection will also typically generate a final report that will include a summary pricing out each solution required to address the existing hazards. It may even offer price options — on a range from temporary remediation/ covering up hazards to fully removing hazards.

I don’t necessarily suggest using the results of a hazard inspection to haggle the price down, because if you are looking at historic homes in a specific area of town and find one with hazards, it is likely that every house you might be interested in will have similar potential hazards. I DO recommend having a hazard inspection so that you can go into your home purchase with your eyes wide open and a financial and practical plan for addressing hazards. For our family, what this meant was taking two months after closing to fully address hazards before moving in. If you cannot afford the hazard remediation necessary before moving in, it may not be a good choice of home for you and your family. It is much easier and more cost-effective (not to mention safer for your children) to address any and all hazards before the house is full of stuff and children!

After all I have been through, I KNOW what hazards look like. So with our “new” home (where we moved after the children were poisoned), I waited until after the purchase closed to do the official hazard inspection and then spent two months cleaning up those hazards to make the home safe for our kids to move in. Steps we took included full window replacement and walling off a closet and attic crawl space that was covered with Lead paint and asbestos tiles. We also put a sheet of tempered glass in front of our Leaded glass and crystal window so that the children would not be able to touch it and it would not chalk Lead into our environment (but we could still enjoy the pretty purple and cut crystal decoration).

Renting a Home

If you are renting a home it is your landlord’s responsibility (by law) to make the home safe for children (and safe for any other residents, for that matter). A landlord cannot rent a home that might cause physical harm to the residents. Many landlords, however, are not aware of this responsibility — especially if they only have one rental home (for example) and it is more of a hobby/investment than a business. As Lead can cause physical harm (in the form of brain damage) this responsibility includes Lead, although many landlords do not realize this.

As a prospective tenant, look for potential hazards before agreeing to rent. Counter to what one might think, one of the MOST DANGEROUS potential hazards to your children in a rental property is a pre-1978 unit that was NEWLY RENOVATED (or a newer unit with new tile recently installed/ with old tile having been removed). This is especially dangerous because many landlords do not know they are required to hire EPA RRP-certified contractors to do work on a pre-1978 unit if renting to families with young children (and technically, they are not required to use EPA RRP contractors if the property is vacant OR they are not required to use EPA RRP Lead-safe work practices if they are doing the work themselves and the property is vacant*). If they used a non-certified contractor that did not use Lead-safe work practices, then that contractor may have contaminated the entire property — both inside the home and in the exterior soil, play yard, and garden areas. In a case like this, the only way to know if the home is safe is with appropriate clearance testing.

*Note: Any landlord doing work on a pre-1978 home with children in the home must either use an EPA RRP certified contractor OR must be EPA RRP certified to do the work themselves. In most cases, the safest option (and the only option recommended by Lead Safe Mama, LLC) is that families and their possessions should ALWAYS be moved out of the home before work is done — and clearance testing should always be done to confirm the home is safe for a family’s return.

What you can do as a prospective tenant:

  1. Be an informed consumer — spend as much time researching your potential future home as you might spend choosing a school or food or other personal items for your child.
  2. Make sure the landlord gives you THIS BOOKLET when you go to sign the lease on a pre-1978 home. If they do not offer you this booklet, DO NOT sign the lease (as this is a clear indicator the landlord is either uninformed/uneducated about the issue OR unethical).
  3. Ask the landlord what year the home was built (some cities have websites like http://www.portlandmaps.com where you can look that information up in advance).
  4. Ask the landlord if there was a recent renovation (they usually advertise this as a good thing)!
  5. Look around for evidence of sanding/scraping or improper containment. This may include fine dust in the home or paint chips in the soil.
  6. Ask the landlord if they used an EPA RRP-certified contractor to do the work.
  7. Ask the landlord if they got a clearance test once the work was done (to confirm that the home is safe for children to live in). Here’s more information about clearance testing and what that looks like.
  8. If the landlord is uncomfortable with any of these questions or cannot show you evidence of a clearance test or the use of Lead-safe work practices during the renovation, I would urge you to consider a different property for your children’s safety. 

Of course, renovation is not always a bad thing but recent renovation can mean Lead-dust and the amount of Lead-dust it takes to poison a child is invisible to the naked eye if spread around a room or a home.

In some states it is required for landlords to keep a Lead-hazard certificate/ de-leading certificate/proof of hazard remediation on file for the property, however, this does not guarantee there are no Lead hazards; it just means that at the time the certificate was issued, there were no Lead hazards, so it is worth being cautious.

If you have young children please consider renting newer construction homes or apartments — ideally homes built after 1985.

Additional Reading That may be of Interest

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