Paint Firms Sued Over Lead Poisoning

The city of New York, seeking to make paint manufacturers pay all costs of removing lead paint from city-owned buildings, Thursday charged in a civil suit that five leading makers and their trade association deliberately covered up damaging medical evidence about lead poisoning.

New York’s lawyers said it was the first such case in the country and was expected to spark similar lawsuits.

The city asks for recovery of more than $50 million various city agencies have spent over the years in efforts to reduce the risks posed by lead paint, particularly to children. The city is demanding reimbursement for inspecting, testing, paint removal, treating lead poisoning victims and other costs.

More than 6,500 incidents of lead poisoning in children have been reported in New York from 1983 to 1988. Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities, mental retardation, behavioral disorders, permanent brain damage and even death. The greatest danger to youngsters comes from eating peeling or flaking lead paint chips.

“At least as early as the mid-19th Century, the hazards of lead paint, including the hazards of lead paint to children, were well known to the medical and scientific communities, as well as to lead producers and painters,” the suit charged.

” . . . Notwithstanding defendants’ extensive knowledge of the hazards of lead paint, particularly the hazards to children, and defendants’ opposition to the use of lead paint on toys and children’s furniture, defendants continued from the 1920s until at least the mid-1950s to advertise and/or promote lead paint as appropriate for uses which might foreseeably result in the exposure of young children to lead through inhalation, ingestion or absorption.”

Use of Lead Paint Banned

Since 1960, New York has prohibited the use of lead paint in homes and apartment buildings.

“For many years, these defendants or their predecessors hid the dangers of lead paint,” charged Peter L. Zimroth, New York’s corporation counsel. “They have caused great pain to thousands of victims.”

Mayor Edward I. Koch said, “If we have the right to demand that Exxon pay the price for cleaning up the environmental disaster it caused in Prince William Sound, we also have the right to demand that the lead pigment industry clean up the environmental catastrophe they have caused in buildings throughout our city and other urban areas.”

Named as defendants in the suit filed in New York state Supreme Court were NL Industries, Inc. of New Jersey, Eagle-Picher Industries Inc. of Ohio, Atlantic Richfield Co. of Delaware, Sherwin-Williams Co. of Ohio and the Glidden Co. of Delaware and its successor SCM Corp. Also named was the Lead Industries Assn., the industry’s New York-based trade association.

Efforts to reach the trade association late Thursday for comment were unsuccessful.

The city is being assisted in its suit by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, a Washington-based public interest law firm, and Thornton & Early, a Boston law firm. Trial Lawyers for Public Justice and the Boston firm have filed lawsuits against the same defendants on behalf of children who allegedly suffered lead poisoning.