The residents of Exide, a battery factory in Lille that for decades released fumes laden with lead dust into the neighbourhood, were expecting bad results. But not on such a scale. In June, around a hundred soil samples were taken in the vicinity of the site, located in the south of the city. A little over 40% of those taken on private plots revealed lead levels above the alert threshold set by the High Council of Public Health (HCSP) to trigger systematic screening for lead poisoning in children aged 6 months to 6 years.
Worse still, 17% exceeds the 1,000 mg/kg limit retained by the prefecture – and questioned by residents and elected officials – to delimit the “Exide zone” affected by the public service easement (SUP), where decontamination of industrial construction sites must be ensured.
75% of the samples were taken outside the SUP perimeter, “where, in theory, everything is fine”, “Except for one sample (463 mg/kg), the concentrations of the twenty samples taken in public spaces are below the HCSP threshold,” said Anne Delvigne, president of Après! 59, the neighbourhood association that made the results public on Thursday 12 September. “Outside this perimeter, in fact, some samples show record levels: 2,818 mg/kg, 3,566 mg/kg and up to 4,574 mg/kg, or 15 times the HCSP threshold. With the exception of one sample (463 mg/kg), the concentrations of the twenty samples taken in public spaces are below the HCSP threshold.”
“There is an underestimated health risk”
“There is an underestimated health risk that must and can be addressed with more energy and transparency,” My dear Alexander Van Geen, an environmental chemist at Columbia University in New York. The American researcher, who spends part of the year in Paris, was working on the issue of lead contamination linked to the Notre-Dame fire when he discovered the dismay of the inhabitants of Lille and the neighbouring town of Faches-Thumesnil, learning from reading an article by World, published in the fall of 2023, that their land was contaminated.
They are residents of the Exide factory, formerly Tudor, which has been making lead-acid batteries for more than a century. In March 2022, the Northern Prefecture informed them, to their great surprise, that they were now banned from growing fruit and vegetables, that new rules were imposed on them in case of sales or work, or that children, babies and pregnant women had to be tested for lead poisoning.
You have 56.97% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
