Paint flakes falling from the 28th Street Bridge contain lead and are hazardous, MDE says
Maryland orders Baltimore officials, who initially denied the chips were lead or posed a hazard, to remove them from the ground and the Jones Falls and to prevent more paint from falling
Above: Baltimore’s 28th Street Bridge, found to be dropping hazardous lead paint flakes on the Jones Falls below. (Mark Reutter)
The orange paint flakes that have been falling from Baltimore’s 28th Street Bridge onto Falls Road and the Jones Falls do contain lead, the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) says.
Newly released tests results show a lead concentration that is 36 times the standard level.
“The lab report noted the presence of elevated lead concentration of 180,000 mg/kg,” said an MDE inspection report made public yesterday.
“The standard limit is 5,000 mg/kg in paint chips,” the report notes.
“Remove all paint chips from the ground and stream,” the agency instructed the city. “Based on the lead content of the paint, you are advised to manage the paint chips as hazardous waste.”
• Flaking orange paint from the 28th Street Bridge is littering Falls Road and the Jones Falls (2/7/26)
The MDE inspectors found paint chips “ranging from large flakes approximately 10 inches across, to tiny chips too numerous to count” in the area below the bridge near 2801 Falls Road.
They found the flakes approximately 200 feet along the span of the bridge and “tons of paint chips along the stream banks and clearly visible in the Jones Falls stream.”
Paint flakes found on Falls Road below a Baltimore city-owned bridge contain lead at 36 times the threshold level for paint chips – Maryland Department of the Environment.
MDE found the city in violation of state pollution laws, and subject to unspecified penalties for each day of the violation.
Alice Volpitta, of Blue Water Baltimore, called the lead level “dangerously high” and the presence of the flakes in the waterway, as well as the Jones Falls Trail where people walk and bike, “a serious issue.”
“The results are clearly indicative that this is lead paint and it should be treated as a hazardous material,” she said, in an interview with The Brew.
“I’m concerned for wildlife in the stream that may end up feeding on tiny particles of paint and I’m concerned about potential health impacts for anyone exposed,” said Volpitta, the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper.
How the Jones Falls Trail below the 28th Street bridge has looked this month, strewn with orange paint flakes. BELOW: Large paint chip collected near the Jones Falls along Falls Road. (Fern Shen)
City Dismissed Danger
Earlier this month, Baltimore transportation officials, informed by The Brew that the city-owned bridge was flaking, had said “there are no lead-related concerns regarding this structure.”
They concluded that the flakes could not contain lead and advised that their presence posed no health hazard because the 65-year-old bridge “underwent a full rehabilitation and repainting in 1988.”
“Because the use of lead-based paint was discontinued in 1979, there are no lead-related concerns regarding this structure,”a spokeswoman for the Department of Transportation (DOT) wrote in an emailed response.
That assumption misses a fact well-known in government and public health circles for years:
Lead paint was suspended in the U.S. for residential use in 1978, but was allowed for commercial and industrial use for many years afterwards.
City officials have not yet returned a request for comment on the state’s findings.
Blue Water Baltimore, also alerted to the orange flakes by The Brew, collected its own samples and had them tested at an independent lab. The results showed a lead level of 26,500 mg/kg and a PCB level of 1,650 ug/kg.
Volpitta said she is still looking forward to insights from experts on the precise environmental and human health risks of the paint flakes.
But she said the state’s finding already point to several urgent actions that should taken:
• Immediate site cleanup, removing all paint chips from the steam and from the ground. This has to be done following protocols that protect worker safety.
• Next, fully remove all loose paint while using environmental protection measures to stop chips from contaminating the environment.
• Then the city needs to inventory its bridges and other assets to determine whether lead paint exists to ensure this doesn’t happen again in other places.
To that last point, The Brew recently noticed some other orange paint flakes in the city – scattered along Guilford Avenue near the Bath Street intersection.
They were in the grass and roadway below the Orleans Street Viaduct, the elevated roadway overpass above the Jones Falls Expressway that connects East and West Baltimore.
The paint on the underside of that structure – like what’s falling from the 28th Street Bridge – is orange on one side and white on the other. Blue Water Baltimore is testing chips from that location too.
Peeling paint on Baltimore’ Orleans Street Viaduct. BELOW: Paint flakes scattered under the structure in the grass along Guilford Avenue. (Fern Shen)
Lead paint on 90,000 U.S. Bridges
Other cities and states have already confronted the problem of aging bridges shedding lead-based paint flakes and endangering communities below.
Chelsea residents couldn’t believe it in 2023 when green-and-rust-colored bits from the Tobin Bridge, outside of Boston, started turning up on homes, yards and streets – and turned out to be lead paint.
“With all of the work that has been done on the Tobin Bridge over the last number of years, we all believed that the bridge was de-leaded,” Roseann Bongiovanni, executive director of the local community group GreenRoots told the Boston Herald.
“To learn that the lead is still falling off the bridge 45 years after lead was banned from paint,” Bongiovanni marveled. “It’s unbelievable to us all that this is a major problem now in 2023.”
They discovered that paint containing lead, known to cause brain damage in children a host of neurological and other medical problems in adults, was allowed for non-residential purposes in the U.S. for many years after it was banned for uses in dwellings.
“Lead-based paint for most steel structures, including bridges, was ended in the United States and Massachusetts in 1992,” the fact sheet from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation noted explained.
“Lead-based paint for most steel structures, including bridges, was ended in the United States in 1992” – Massachusetts Department of Transportation.
An estimated 90,000 bridges in the United States are coated with lead-based paints, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded.
In Connecticut, where state highway officials found lead paint flaking off hundreds of bridges, also in 2023, “recent extreme swings in temperature” were said to be the cause.
In both cases, there was a major state government response to protect the public.
Connecticut transportation officials “swiftly deployed contractors to safely clean up the lead paint chips” and coordinated with environmental officials to finalize cleanup efforts across the state.
Massachusetts addressed the falling chip problem as part of a four-year $128 million project to repaint and make structural repairs. Protective netting was installed on the Tobin Bridge and a professional contracted service was hired to pick up the chips.