Government, Regulate Thyself

SF International School water fountains
after lead testing (Chronicle photo)

Yesterday's post was about asbestos concerns. If I had a child about to enter school (as does my acquaintance), I'd be much more worried about lead in the school drinking water.

Chronicle: 3 San Francisco public schools show high levels of lead in water.

District officials immediately shut down the taps and this week notified parents at West Portal and Malcolm X elementary schools and San Francisco International High School that water samples from at least one faucet or fountain at each site were too high — or above the recommended federal threshold of 15 parts per billion...

The water flowing into the school is safe, officials say. The lead is in the plumbing — the fixtures and pipe solders — and leaches into the water.

Average SF home price from Zillow.

Since antiquity lead has been suspected as a cause of brain damage. In the latter half of the 20th century plumbers and builders reduced the use of lead until it was banned by the Safe Water Drinking Act of 1986.

With some of the highest home prices--and property tax revenues per capita in the nation--one would think that San Francisco would have addressed this problem long ago. But one would be wrong.

Information Costs and Benefits

The line between hypochondria and health fanaticism has been blurred for a long time. From the Foundations of Personality, 1922:

The faddy habits [hypochondriacs] form are the sustenance of those who start the varied forms of vegetarianism, chewing cults, fresh-air fiends, wet-grass fanatics, back-to-nature societies, and the mild lunacies of our (and every) age.

A 1-sq-inch sample (in bag) was sufficient for testing.

An acquaintance is very health-conscious and insisted that a ceiling repair be tested for asbestos, which had been used in post-war construction and is a known carcinogen.

[Aside: according to a conversation I had with an expert, California banned the purchase of asbestos in 1976.

Lobby display

A grandfather clause made it theoretically possible for a contractor who made a large purchase of asbestos-containing material in 1976 to still be using this inventory in 1984, when the subject building was constructed. Such a contractor who possessed such poor inventory management would be unlikely to be in business 8 years later, but the acquaintance insisted that the materials be tested].

And so it was that your humble blogger, who had a business interest in the matter, found himself in Berkeley to have the ceiling tile analyzed. As expected, the materials were asbestos-free.

The result was good, but even prior to the excursion I knew that the half-day trip wasn't worth the time and expense. (I wouldn't have gone if it were my ceiling.) We take greater risks every day--we live near the San Andreas fault--and this was one risk that wasn't worth obsessing over.

Negative results were a positive thing.

The silver lining is that I learned useful information for future dealings with this acquaintance and the name of an efficient testing lab that I will be happy to use again.