Five Questions to Ask Before Getting Tested (for Lead)

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Lead testing has been a very popular service for us in the last 6 months. Many school districts want to have testing done on the painted surfaces along with the water. Over the last few months – we have gotten increasing requests to perform site wide & campus wide water testing for Lead. There are even some maverick facilities managers that want us to perform a thorough lead inspection as well. Lead paint inspections are straightforward and any issues that are discovered can be solved relatively easily. But, water testing isn’t as straightforward.

While we love to help our clients out – we want to make sure our clients aren’t creating an issue for themselves by testing & being surprised with results.  To perform district or facility wide testing without having a plan in place to deal with the results can be considered a significant risk for you. Essentially, when you perform a facility wide test, your results will fall under few categories.

Scenario 1:  No results come back above the threshold

Scenario 2:   Certain results come back with positive results – up to 50% of locations tested

Scenario 3:   Approximately 10%-50% of the locations tested were positive beyond the levels

Scenario 4:   Over 50% of the locations tested come back with high levels of lead

When you are performing testing, we recommend that you have a plan for each scenario. The plan needs to include everything from corrective action, disclosure policy & media management.

So, based on our experience, here are the top 5 questions you need to answer before you do any testing:

  1. How will you select the locations that you will test? 100%? 50%?
  2. Do you know which areas are highly used? Or hardly used?
  3. What would happen if a certain result comes back high for Lead?
  4. What would be your policy to inform parents?
  5. Are you aware of the conditions of the areas you will be testing?

Testing can be an important part of knowing whether or not you have any issues but testing should be only 1 piece of the puzzle. With significant planning before any test is performed the objective of being aware of any issues can be accomplished.

If you have any questions about testing, procedures & results, don’t hesitate to contact our offices for a free consult with one of our experts.