Notre Dame cathedral had a massive lead roof that is now apparently completely destroyed. When such a roof burns, are lead fumes released into the atmosphere? I know that lead fumes are a concern when simply using lead based solder. Are the first responders and nearby observers at a significant health risk?
Lead doesn’t burn until it’s over 3,000ºF. I doubt that wood fire got that hot. Mostly what happens is that the lead on the roof melts and drips down onto the interior or the grouns.
After a little poking around:
from this site. Well within the temperature in a wood fire, so I don’t think the risk can be dismissed out of hand.
Or onto mobs trying to kill the bellringer.
Soldering electronics with an electrically-heated soldering iron doesn’t generally result in airborne lead particles; the smoke generated by the flux/rosin is the hazard.
Soldering pipes with a gas torch does result in higher temperatures that could, if you were using lead-based solder, generate airborne lead particles. But since lead solder was banned from household water piping years ago (at least in the US), you shouldn’t be using lead-based solder for this purpose. However, as with using an electrically-heated soldering iron, a hazard does still exist from the smoke generated by heating the flux/rosin, regardless of the type of solder used.
This article in The New York Times talks about the contamination from the lead. The first paragraph, “The April fire that engulfed Notre-Dame contaminated the cathedral site with clouds of toxic dust and exposed nearby schools, day care centers, public parks and other parts of Paris to alarming levels of lead.”
Smoke is toxic. Either firemen are taking precautions to protect themselves from smoke, or they are at a significant health risk.
I’m see3ing a lot of reputable government sites referring to lead ‘fumes’, but it’s all third-hand information. I’ve not seen any reputable second-hand information about lead fumes, so I haven’t found any actual factual research reports talking about ‘lead fumes’. Sometimes documents that talk about inhalation have general headings about "dusts and fumes’, so that may be a source of confusion.
However, lead reacts with acids to form ‘salts’: organic acids form lead organics. Particularly when there is a fire generating toxic acrid smoke, some of that smoke may include volatile lead compounds – it seems reasonable, but it’s not an industrial process, and the smoke is obviously toxic anyway, so it’s not going to be the subject of a lot of OHS documentation. I haven’t found anything.
Also, there is a well know problem of lead dust being generated by fires like that, so it would be hard to separate out the effects of lead-compound fumes (if they exist) and lead-dust-inhalation, except by careful experimentation.
The risk of lead soldering and exposure to the smoke from the lead/flux - is usually an cumulative one - which is why this is mostly a concern for those working with soldering every day. At my place of work, those who work with soldering are checked annually for lead levels, so far no negative finds. (Granted, in the past decade the transision to lead-free solder and more effective fans have lessened the risk concidereably, but we do have people working for us who have soldered every day for the past 40 years, thankfully without any heightened lead levels).