Lead paint revisited

PROVIDENCE — Twenty years ago, Rhode Island made history with a landmark public-nuisance lawsuit against the manufacturers of lead paint.

It didn’t turn out the way its supporters wanted, but the case put the state front and center in the fight against childhood lead poisoning.

A story being nationally broadcast on PBS looks back at the lead crisis in Rhode Island and shines a light on the state’s efforts to find a solution. The story is featured in an episode of the series "Retro Report" that airs Monday night on WGBH. ("Retro Report" is not part of the Rhode Island PBS lineup.)

It comes at a time when lead poisoning has made it back into the national discourse with drinking water controversies in Flint, Michigan and more recently in Newark, New Jersey.

Liz Colon, whose middle son was poisoned as a baby, says that the problem has never gone away.

“I think we’ve made a significant impact, but there’s still a long way to go,” she said.

Lead is most dangerous to young children whose brains are still developing. Once poisoned, they can suffer long-term consequences that include a lower IQ, reduced attention span and learning difficulties.

The problem is pervasive in Rhode Island because 80 percent of the homes in the state were built before 1978, when lead was banned from paint products in the United States.

State law requires health-care providers to test children under the age of 6 for blood lead levels and report the results to the Rhode Island Department of Health. According to the department, new cases of children with elevated levels have dropped from 14.5 percent of all children tested in 2005 to 1.8 percent in 2018.

The staff of "Retro Report" decided to work on a story about lead because of what happened in Flint, where starting in 2014 officials took a series of shortcuts to save money that ended up tainting the city’s water supply with lead from corroded pipes.

As they started digging into the problem, they found that lead poisoning can be more intractable when the cause is paint. It can affect generations of children.

“The children most profoundly affected are poor children whose parents can’t remediate the properties they live in or their landlords won’t,” said Jill Rosenbaum, producer of "Retro Report."

The reporting led to Rhode Island in part because of the 1999 lawsuit but also because of the wealth of data available in the state from years of testing children’s blood lead levels.

The story features work by Peter Lord, The Journal’s longtime environment reporter who died in 2012. Lord’s six-part series from 2001, “Poisoned,” is credited with helping to change state laws regulating lead paint, including passage of a far-reaching statute that places greater burden on property owners and landlords for making properties safe from lead.

Colon, who started working with the Childhood Lead Action Project after her son, Sam, was poisoned, also appears in the story. So too do June Tourangeau, who runs the lead clinic at St. Joseph Health Services in Providence, and Bob McConnell, a Rhode Island lawyer who was a member of the trial team in the state’s historic lawsuit.

In 1999, then-Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse, who is now a U.S. Senator for Rhode Island, filed the original suit, which ended in a mistrial. His successor, Patrick Lynch, tried the case again, and in 2006 a jury found three paint companies responsible for cleaning up what at the time was estimated to be 240,000 houses with lead paint in Rhode Island.

The victory, however, was short-lived. Two years later, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned the verdict, ruling that landlords, not the paint companies, are responsible for lead paint hazards.

McConnell, a lawyer with the firm Motley Rice who specializes in cases of lead poisoning victims, is still disappointed in that decision.

“As much progress as we’ve made, if the verdict had gone through, we’d be 10 years ahead of where we are now,” he said.

But he said the lawsuit, which was the first of its kind in the nation, was important in raising awareness about the dangers of lead. It also helped lay the groundwork for a case in California against three paint companies that resulted this past July in a $305-million settlement.

Colon argues that the ruling in California wouldn’t have come without Rhode Island’s lawsuit.

“I can see that we made a difference,” she said. “We made a big difference.”

But she and others who are trying to keep Rhode Island’s children safe from lead say the fight is far from over. The key, they say, comes down to money. It’s why the City of Providence offers forgivable loans to make properties lead-safe. And why RIHousing and the City of Woonsocket last month were awarded more than $12.4 million to clean up lead paint through a program created by U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, of Rhode Island.

“Until there are no children poisoned, we have to keep working,” said Tourangeau.

akuffner@providencejournal.com

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