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Criminal investigation of a police dept....
Over claims that lead fragments may have escaped its shooting range.
I'm quite open to the argument that neighbors who want the range closed are spreading lead around. Hard to see how lead fragments (not dust) could travel a fair distance (i.e., to somewhere on a school described as across a street). The rest is just the usual hysteria.
UPDATE: the comment is quite perceptive. I am president of a gun club where folks tried to drum up a hazmat issue. Bottom line: lead does not dissolve in water. Without such, it can hardly affect a human. Nor get to the water table, here several hundred feet down, thru rock. I found an account of excavation of a Roman-era lead smelter in Britain: in 1-2 millenia, its lead had migrated two or three feet downward. The other side investigated lead dust transport by wind. No, no evidence there, either. And it turned out that the ordinary soil in the area (edge of mountains) was higher in lead and arsenic than EPA standards. So they fell back on the fact that everyone inadvertently ingests a bit of dust daily, and argued some range users might (if somehow they ingested all their dust from the backstops, which had almost all of the lead) in twenty years be in some trifling danger.
Our response: there were a few retired folks who virtually lived at the range house. It was their club house, they went there seven days a week and spent most of the day there. We had a doctor run their blood levels, and they were way BELOW the national average. Doc commented that most of our lead exposure comes from ... driving a car. Roads have lead dust from decades of leaded gas. These folks were spending their day at the range, rather than driving, and so wound up with lower lead levels.
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Meanwhile, we have the principal of the school writing notes evidencing that she never fully learned English grammar.
"Meanwhile, the school's then-principal sent a letter to parents reassuring them. "Neither Towers staff nor myself have ever seen anything on our campus to indicate that unsafe material was making its way to our site," Joyce M. Hallgren wrote."
Neither staff nor myself have ever seen...??? WTF kind of awful writing it that? What is it with people using "myself" all the time these days? People are afraid of using "me" when it is correct, and don't realize when "I" is correct, so they fall back on "myself" which rarely is correct.
Feh. I see the same kind of writing coming home in notes from my daughters' teachers and principals.
And as usual, the range has been there since forever. People who moved into the area later think they have the entitlement to request that something be removed that was there before the neighborhood was built.
Here in NJ there are lots of people who built homes, usually large homes, right near the small county airports that have been there since before WWI (yes I not II) and are complaining about the noise and smell of fumes.
You know, there had to be a reason why the land was so cheap :)
I'd like to see some of those "fragments"; I'm betting the people are salting the area, which could be determined quite easily if anyone actually tried.
Besides, IF one ingests lead the HCl in the stomach will cause the lead to form PbCl2 which is insoluble. The PbCl2 will coat the lead fragment and tehn pass out of the digestive track.
The lead issue is stated thus: lead levels of >10 ug/dL may cause an IQ decrease of up to 4 points on a IQ test with an sd of 15. There are some other lead associated issues if lead levels in the blood get elevated. You can check out the 1995 ABC special with John Stossel, Are we scaring ourselves to death? for more on lead.
I looked at the site on Google Earth. Why don't the cops just get the place covered?
This is another case of the government creating hobgoblins to frighten the people into crying for protection. The hobgoblins are always imaginary.
FYI, I am a PhD environmental chemist with 30 yrs research and teaching in the fate of chemicals in the environment. I currently direct a lab that tests water, soils, and wastes for metals and other toxins. I deal with this BS daily. The people are scared to death of the world.
Pb is one of the most ubiquitous elements. The EPA allows 400 ppm levels in playground soils. Lead metal in the environment is quite stable as is evidenced by the miniballs that can still be found at Gettysburg, many showing teeth marks. In most soils, and esp western soils, Pb is not mobile and in other places, phosphate fertilizers can be added to "fix" any Pb ions. There are numerous research studies on the stability of lead in the environment.
Those must be some HARD lead bullets to fragment like that. Most of the rounds I recover after shooting are simpy "smushed", rarely fragmented.
Tiochfaidh ar la!
@bobg
"The people are scared to death of the world."
this. this is the problem with... well, damn near everything anymore.
whoops, above should be "@fwb"
David, how would you argue against the laws requiring REMOVAL of lead from a shotgun range's soils?
My former club (Douglas Ridge in Boring, OR) has been sued repeatedly by a disgruntled former member.
The first four lawsuits were without merit, and were dismissed. He than sicced the Department of Environmental Quality on the club, and, desiring to cooperate, the club let them inspect the soils. Now the club has to close all their shotgun ranges and they're worried about the rifle range backstop area also.
I left the club after only two years because I felt that the club members' liability was getting too large.
This "inspection" by the DEQ (and the Federal EPA may be involved also) has now stretched into a multi-year thing.
The best gun club in the region has found itself perched on the edge of a legal cliff now, mostly due to the overbearing power of these regulatory outfits to set regulations that are NOT based on science, but on fear factor.
"A group of about six people called Concerned Residents Against Pistol Range Redondo have complained for several years about noise from the firing range."
Are they kidding? Man, they need to get a better name. Didn't they realize the acronym they have created? CRAPRR? Maybe they should have tried Safety and Health Initiative Team or something.