Thomas Breen
75 Sherman Ave.
An independent lead inspector found 10 improperly abated lead hazards and over 20 dangerously high lead dust samples at a West River home that had been cleared as safe by the city’s Health Department over a month ago.
Those findings were reported by Anthony Minalga, a state certified lead planner and project designer for the Windsor-based TRC Environmental Corporation, in a letter he sent to New Haven Assistant Corporation Counsel Roderick Williams about TRC’s final assessment of the lead abatement work completed to date at 75 Sherman Ave.
A judge had ordered the independent inspection after city inspections were shown to have failed to catch some problems.
The two-family West River home is at the center of two ongoing lead-related lawsuits that have been playing out in New Haven housing court over the past two months.
The first lawsuit started out as an attempted eviction for non-payment of rent initiated by the landlord, 35-year-old New Yorker Abdullah Soliman, against his first-floor tenants, Maajid Muhammad, Raihana Akdhar, and their four young children.
After Muhammad argued in his defense that he had stopped paying Soliman rent in April 2017 because of his child’s high blood lead levels and because of the presence of unabated lead paint hazards throughout the interior and exterior of the unit, the court case quickly came to center upon the apartment’s habitability.
After New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) picked up Muhammad’s defense, the case turned even further towards an examination of the city Health Department’s compliance with city and federal law when inspecting homes for lead hazards, drafting lead abatement plans, and conducting post-abatement inspections.
The landlord wound up dropping his attempted eviction against the first-floor tenants, but the case continues to work its way through housing court, now as a dispute over how the April 2017 rent that Muhammad had paid to be held by the court for the duration of the suit should be distributed: to the tenant, to the landlord, or split between the two.
That dispute hinged, yet again, on the habitability of the unit. City lead inspector Glenda Buenaventura conducted a post-abatement inspection of the property on May 16 and, two days later, wrote to Soliman that he had adequately abated the property and that the first-floor unit was safe for Muhammad’s family to move back into.
NHLAA Attorney Amy Marx argued in court that the abatement work that Soliman had hired a contractor to complete in mid-May had been incomplete, and that the unit still presented a lead hazard to Muhammad’s young children.
On June 7, Superior Court Judge Anthony Avallone remained unconvinced that the property had been adequately abated. He ruled that the city had to pay for an independent reinspection of the unit, and also had to pay the continued hotel bill for the displayed first-floor tenants.
That’s where TRC comes in. According to Minalga’s June 28 letter, Elise Barrieau, a state-licensed lead inspector and risk assessor who also works for TRC, conducted a reinspection of the first-floor unit of 75 Sherman Ave. on June 22.
According to the letter, Barrieau set out to review the abatement work that had been performed to date, determine whether or not the abatement was complete according to city, state, and federal law, and then determine which steps, if any, were needed to successfully complete abatement for the interior and exterior of the apartment.
Barrieau keyed her reinspection off of Buenaventura’s initial April 16 lead inspection report and amended June 6 abatement plan.
Despite Buenaventura signing off on the property’s abatement for a second time on June 7 in a letter in which she states that she visited and inspected the property on 10 separate occasions between May 25 and June 7, sometimes accompanied by Environmental Health Director Paul Kowalski and fellow Health Department colleague Jennifer Sanjurjo, Barrieau found 10 inadequately abated components of the exterior and the interior of the unit.
Click here to read Minalga’s letter to the city and Barrieau’s full report.
In the rear entry door stop of the kitchen, she found that a component had been encapsulated when it should have been outright replaced or at least stripped of paint.
In one of the bathroom windowsills, she found chipped paint that needed to be stabilized and re-encapsulated.
And on the front porch’s white railings and the first-floor exterior’s wooden sidings and window casings, she found chipped paint, loose paint chips, puckering and blistering paint, and places where encapsulated did not properly adhere.
She also identified several components of the exterior that were inappropriately left off of the initial inspection, lead abatement plan, and lead abatement work, including the wooden siding and associated wooden trim components of the second and third floor.
“All components/surfaces on 2nd/3rd Floors were not abated,” her report reads. “These components should be included in the LAP [Lead Abatement Plan] as they are part of the ‘Exterior’ or ‘Common Areas’, which are also associated with the 1st Floor Dwelling unit.”
In addition to citing 10 examples of unsatisfactory lead paint abatement in the interior and exterior of the unit, Barrieau also found over 20 different surfaces where lead-in-dust exceeded the safety thresholds identified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Lead Hazard and Health Homes (OLHCHH).
The federal government’s threshold levels for lead-in-dust are 10 micrograms per square foot (mg/sf) for interior floors, 100 mg/sf for window sills and wells, and 40 mg/sf for exterior porch floors.
Barrieau found lead dust levels of 972 mg/sf in a front room’s window well, 612 mg/sf in a first-floor rear common stair floor, 1,142 mg/sf in a rear storage window well, and 1,165 in an exterior first-floor rear porch.
Previous coverage:
• Judge: City Dragged Feet On Lead
• 2nd Kid Poisoned After City Ordered Repairs
• Judge: City Must Pay
• City Sued Over Handling Of Lead Poisonings
• City’s Lead Inspection Goes On Trial
• Eviction Withdrawn On Technicality
• 2nd Child Poisoned; Where’s The City?
• Carpenter With Poisoned Kid Tries A Fix
• High Lead Levels Stall Eviction
• 460 Kids Poisoned By Lead In 2 Years
• Bid-Rigging Claimed In Lead Cleanup
• Judge Orders Total Lead Paint Clean-Up
• Legal Aid Takes City To Task On Lead