CLAREMONT — Last March, Ashlee Little, her husband and two sons moved into the 1914 Claremont home her husband lived for part of his childhood.
In October, blood tests showed their sons, ages 1 and 3, had elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream.
Little was surprised. When the couple bought their home, lead paint wasn’t on their radar. The lender they worked with did not mention needing to get the home inspected for lead contamination.
“We weren’t thinking about it at that point,” Little said. “We were just thinking about the process of getting it ready to go.”
Little was put in touch with state workers to learn about what she could do to help her boys.
She was told to stop sweeping and change to wet cleaning so lead dust wouldn’t be airborne. She was given WIC benefits — a federal program to help ensure nutritious diets for women, infants and children — to pay for food rich in iron and calcium to push the lead from their bloodstream.
The family also looked into the cost of lead paint abatement, but it became clear that they could not afford the work on their own.
“I wanted to get started on everything right away,” she said. “It’s definitely surprising we’re the first people know that there is lead in there and question it.”
Little learned about programs in Granite State that could help. She and her husband received an interest-free loan through the New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority for $55,000 to cover the cost of the work. The loan will be repaid when they sell their home.
The Littles are far from alone in their lead troubles. The majority of homes built before 1978 contain lead-based paint, according to an estimation by the Environmental Protection Agency.
While lead paint was banned for residential use that year, abatement and removal efforts since then have been spotty.
New Hampshire, with its particularly aged housing stock, is especially at risk.
This year, Sullivan County started administering funding from a $1.7 million federal grant, in addition to $150,000 in a local match, to help homeowners and landlords with low- and moderate-income residents remove or seal lead in their properties.
Since the Sullivan County Lead Abatement Program launched in January, 25 housing units have been inspected, 10 have had work completed, 11 are in the pipeline, and 12 applications are being processed.
The grant called for doing 60 units in 3½ years, and the program is ahead of schedule already.
“It’s been amazing,” Kate Kirkwood, program manager, said of the response.
The majority of the properties have been in Claremont, but homeowners in all of Sullivan County’s 15 municipalities are encouraged to apply.
Sullivan County is the first county in New Hampshire to qualify for Housing and Urban Development’s lead abatement money. In the past, the funding has been limited to the cities of Manchester and Nashua.
New Hampshire Housing also has a statewide grant that covers the rest of the state. Applying for and receiving the grant sprung out of years of activism from residents of Claremont who were concerned about lead in their homes and apartments, County Manager Derek Ferland said.
“Collectively we discovered that to get the resources necessary to merely make a dent in this issue really meant having to go to HUD for a direct grant,” Ferland said. “The reality was the city of Claremont was too small to pull that off.”
Claremont, along with Newport, are in the top eight communities in New Hampshire where children are at risk of developing lead poisoning, said Beverly Drouin, section administrator of the Healthy Homes and Environment Section in the Division of Public Health Services at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
While that can be attributed in part to the towns’ older housing stock, it’s not that simple. Communities that have more poverty, more rental properties and lower education levels, are more at risk.
“Lead poisoning is not a health issue,” Drouin said. “It’s a housing issue.”
With the addition of Sullivan County, there are now four HUD grants in New Hampshire. Communities can continue to reapply for funding to keep the programs going.
When Claremont Mayor Charlene Lovett started thinking about lead in August 2016, her focus was on pipes, not paint. In the wake of the Flint, Mich., water crisis, Lovett was meeting with then-city manager Guy Santagate along with other city and state officials to discuss the sampling requirements for lead in the city’s water lines. Then a state official in the meeting mentioned lead paint is the primary culprit for childhood lead poisoning in New Hampshire, and Lovett went home to do research on the topic. “What I discovered honestly kept me awake at night,” she said.
She found that elevated lead levels in the blood can damage a child’s brain development and nervous system, leading to irreversible lifelong problems. Lead can impact a child’s brain, kidneys, nervous system and blood, according to information from the Sullivan County Lead Abatement Program.
Children can suffer from headaches, stomachaches, nausea, tiredness, seizures and irritability. Lead poisoning can lead to lifelong learning disabilities, behavioral issues, seizures and even death.
“All the data had already been compiled, the studies had been made about the dangers of childhood lead poisoning,” Lovett said. “We knew it was preventative. We just needed to take action.”
Lovett and others began an effort that involved health care providers, Southwestern Community Services, school district officials and the city’s planning, development, public works and code enforcement departments.
In 2017, the school district became the only one in New Hampshire to require lead testing for all children attending pre-K and kindergarten.
In 2018, the Legislature passed a bill that mandated lead testing for all 1- and 2-year-old children. The legislation also aligned the state’s standard for lead contamination in children with those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lowering it to 5 micrograms per deciliter as of this past July.
The group also focused on outreach to parents, pushing for funding and ensuring the community met the requirements of the new law.
“I think people really want to do this, but if they don’t have the resources they’re limited in what actions they can take,” Lovett said.
Education is a huge piece of the puzzle. In New Hampshire, building codes for renovation work are weak, even though a third of children with elevated lead levels develop them due to home construction, Drouin said.
Real estate agents and home inspectors are also not as well-versed in lead paint hazards as they could be.
And due to low vacancy rates, people are buying or renting homes or apartments “as is” and might not be considering lead risks. New Hampshire also lacks tax incentives for lead abatement work.
When Drouin bought an 1840 cape house around 30 years ago when she was pregnant with her first child, she wasn’t really thinking about lead either.
“I accidentally poisoned two babies. I didn’t know,” Drouin said.
She wished someone had told her how she could rearrange her furniture to prevent her children from getting to the window sills or showed her wet cleaning methods.
“If someone have given me that education 30 years ago, I might not have poisoned my children,” she said.
Lead testing rates among children were down during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ferland said. That’s because pediatricians were not doing as many wellness visits.
“We’re probably going to find more kids that have concentrations of lead above the 5 (micrograms per deciliter),” he said. “The silver lining is we actually have the money now.”
Kevin Lacasse was one of the first landlords to enroll his Claremont properties in the program, and work on four units in his Trinity Street building was completed last month.
“I didn’t have it inspected, so I didn’t know 100% sure if they had lead,” Lacasse said.
The Trinity Street project cost $78,600. The grant covered $48,000 — $12,000 per unit — and Lacasse paid the remaining $30,600.
Ideally, tenants would have been displaced for only 10 days when the work — including new windows and painting trim — was completed; the grant covered hotel stays.
But because of supply delays attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, it took around a month.
“It’s really good because it protects the children living in the apartment, which is obviously the No. 1 benefit of it, and No. 2, from a landlord’s perspective, it makes the unit a bit more salable for residents who are concerned about having their child living in a place with lead,” Lacasse said.
Amber Gould, a tenant at the Trinity Street property, spent 10 days visiting her mother in South Carolina before returning to a hotel in Springfield, Vt., while the work was completed on the unit she shares with her sister and 9-year-old daughter Ella. They were out of their apartment for 24 days, which was frustrating and difficult.
Gould moved to Claremont when Ella was 5 and had to have her blood tested for lead before starting kindergarten. She was fine.
“If she had been younger, I would have had a higher concern,” Gould said. “For the next family who moves in, they won’t have to go through the same thing.”
If a child living in a rental unit has elevated levels of lead in the bloodstream, the landlord is required by state law to address it. The same does not apply for individual homeowners.
Lead paint was banned in 1978 for residential use by the EPA, but its problems persist. The ban did not have a clear-cut way for treating — or funding — lead paint abatement in the nation’s homes.
In talking to people, Lovett said there was a misconception that since it was banned, that meant it was already dealt with and went away. There are also misunderstandings about how lead poisoning happens in the first place.
“I think people had these images in their head where they had to eat lead-based paint to be poisoned,” Lovett said. “That’s not the case. It’s the dust.”
If lead paint is left intact — meaning it remains on the walls — it is generally safe. The problems usually arise when it breaks down, said Mickey Laskey, who has worked as a lead risk assessor for 21 years and is working closely with Ferland on the Sullivan County project.
“Some properties had already had windows replaced, but that leaves the trim on the inside that’s leaded and in a lot of cases chipping and peeling and that needs to be replaced,” Laskey said. “Almost always the exterior needs some work, siding or trim work or soffit and fascia.”
There are two strategies: Removing and replacing the parts that contain lead, or using other materials to encapsulate the lead to cover it. The work can be expensive because it is specialized and labor-intensive.
“Lead is what’s holding my house together,” Drouin said. “It’s not feasible that we’re going to remove all the lead here in New Hampshire. We want to make the lead safe so people can live in a house of lead. It’s understanding how to live with lead hazards to make it safe.”
For Laskey, the work is personal. More than 20 years ago, he was renovating an old home when his then-2-year-old son was tested and found to have elevated levels of lead. As a contractor, Laskey thought he had been taking the necessary precautions.
In the years since he has worked to educate people — particularly parents — about the dangers lead poses.
“People make mistakes in thinking they’re doing the right thing and sometimes you can do more harm than good if you’re not armed with knowledge how disturbing the lead paint can hurt kids,” Laskey said. “Sometimes it’s not the (objects) themselves; it’s when you disturb them that it causes harm.”
While the program has been off to a successful start, it has faced the same challenges besetting the construction industry as a whole. They’ve struggled to find contractors, supply delays have made projects run long, and the cost of supplies has gone up.
“HUD has not been nimble to spin on a dime to adjust to that,” Drouin said. “Their business model is pre-COVID.”
When the first project went out to bid, it drew eight contractors. Later, that number dropped to three, Kirkwood said. The county has partnered with the state to offer free training to contractors interested in lead abatement.
They’ve also seen delays from the number of approved applicants outpacing projections.
“We’re ahead of schedule, but we have to ask property owners and tenants to wait,” Kirkwood said in August. “We can’t start the work right away because the contractors are busy with other projects.”
In the last month, the program has added two new companies, which has helped with the backlog.
Another challenge is the cost and availability of supplies. The price of vinyl siding, for example, has risen 15%. Window orders have been delayed up to 45 days.
Construction was finishing up on the exterior of the Little’s Claremont house last week. During the roughly monthslong renovation, the family spent 10 days staying with Ashlee Little’s mother as workers replaced windows and baseboards. On the exterior of the house, porch railings have been replaced and the siding is being worked on. At the boys’ last lead test, their lead levels were both below 10 micrograms per deciliter, proof that the cleaning techniques and diet changes were working to push the lead out of their blood.
“It was a very, very long process and it got frustrating at times, but we just kept pushing and now our house is lead-free,” Little said. “It looks really good in there. We’re happy it’s now lead-free and safe for the kids.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
