Lead in our Park City soil may not be harmful

When we moved to Park City years ago, we heard all about the “lead contaminated” soil in Prospector. It was one of the reasons we weren’t too excited to look for homes in the Prospector area. Since that time, we continue to hear about all of Park City’s lead problems. The soil on school ground on Kearns is poisoned with lead! Dirt, contaminated with lead, has infiltrated the air ducts of Treasure Mountain Junior High! Lead has been found in the soil along the Rail trail!

Everywhere, it seems, the spectre of lead is haunting Park City.

But should it be? We’re beginning to think we’ve been completely wrong on the dangers of Park City’s lead.

What we’ve learned is that all lead isn’t created equal. Some lead can be absorbed into the body and is dangerous while other lead can’t be and isn’t dangerous. The concept is called bioavailability. Before your eyes glaze over, all we are really saying is that with oxidized lead, if you ate a spoonful, it would be absorbed into your bloodstream and could hurt you. Sulfide lead, if you ate a spoonful, is not absorbed into your bloodstream and wouldn’t hurt you.

Guess which type of lead we generally have in Park City?

According to local mining expert Keith Droste, Park City generally has lead sulfide. That is the one that won’t hurt you. Mr Dostre is an expert on mining and has been in the business since 1955. He was the manager of Park City’s Mayflower mine starting in 1961. He has spent his lifetime in the business and has probably forgotten more about chemistry than we will ever know.

According to Mr. Droste, the process of smelting lead is what often made the lead oxidized and made it harmful. However, in the case of Park City’s mining, that smelting was done in Salt Lake and later in Montana. Smelting of lead did not occur in Park City.

So, we are left wondering whether the hubbub that seems perpetuated about lead contamination in Park City is actually much ado about nothing. We understand that the EPA is involved around Park City and they often talk about the dangers of lead. However, what you’ll rarely hear is the EPA talk about bioavailability of lead. They tell you that some soil sample in a baseball diamond at the Kearns Campus had a certain PPM (parts per million) of lead but they never tell you the percentage of that lead that could actually be absorbed by your body and hurt you.

It’s like seeing a snake out when you’re hiking. You see a snake move and it startles you. You quickly assess whether it’s a rattlesnake or a garter. Your action taken then depends on that assessment. That’s what should happen with lead around Park City?

The reason it matters is that this impacts most people who live in our community. If you live in Prospector and have been told you can’t disturb your lawn or you’ll unleash deadly lead on the community, it may make a difference to you if it turns out the lead isn’t harmful. If you are a citizen in the Basin and decisions about how to rearrange schools are partially based on lead in soil, you may form different opinions if the lead actually won’t hurt kids.

If you’ve been in Park City for any time, you’ve likely heard about our lead “problem” so often you likely just accept it as fact (like we did). That may not be the right way to look at it. However, we don’t expect you to take our story (or Mr Droste’s) word for it. What we do ask is if you hear the media or other people talk about “lead problems” in Park City you ask the question, “what’s the lead’s bioavailability?” If they can’t answer that, there’s not enough information to know whether there is a problem.

Likewise, if our public officials make a decision based on lead, without knowing whether the type of lead is absorbed by the human body, they could be wasting money and delaying projects that could help the greater Park City area.

It turns out the concept of lead contamination is nuanced. Whether lead is a problem depends on a number of factors. To hear that there is a certain amount of lead somewhere is meaningless. What we should be caring about is the lead’s bioavailability percentage. We as citizens and community members need to demand that number in any discussion of whether the lead is dangerous. To do anything less is doing ourselves a disservice.