Day 33, Mat115H

• Sandra will take her exam tomorrow, and I'll return the exams on Friday.
• For homework
  • please read this short website about lead pollution.
  • Finish the work we start today and submit your data set -- physical locations and your estimated lead levels for the Newport Foundry location (due Wednesday, 11/11).

From these locations and samples, we seek to estimate at neighboring locations. How should one do this? This is the fundamental question which we wish to consider.

• The USA Today website has some limited data which we can use (via their "dig deeper" link).
• A better source for us to consider is this Superfund Final Report (KY EPA), which includes a detailed map.
  

  We will use their data to map the yard around the former smelter.

1. We need to get physical coordinates for the lead data in the vicinity of the smelter (Newport Foundry Inc) from the EPA study. (Why is the "1 inch = approximately 25 feet" a bad idea on this map?)
2. We need to get physical coordinates for the lead data in the vicinity of the smelter (Newport Foundry Inc) from the EPA study.
3. We can construct a soil lead profile, based on the tests at different levels.
4. We can construct distributions of lead levels in different ways (by soil depth, say, and for Newport as a whole).

This report contains a couple of graphs which show off the data values, the way I would like to for our data. Some quotes from their study:

• Most homes in St. Paul and Minneapolis are old enough to once have had substantial concentrations of lead in exterior and interior paint. The 2000 Census documented that 89% of the homes in Minneapolis and St. Paul were built before 1978, which is the year lead was banned in residential paint. The City of Minneapolis reports that levels of 350 ppm in soil collected near house foundations are typical throughout Minneapolis. Elevated lead is also found in residential areas from past emissions of leaded gasoline, especially near busy neighborhood streets.
• There are sites in Minnesota where it has been possible to attribute lead in the soil to emissions from former lead smelters. However, in this case it would be difficult, if not impossible to attribute lead concentrations in those two residential neighborhoods to the former smelters in the USA Today story. The heterogeneity of the lead soil sampling results reported in the neighborhoods surrounding the former smelter sites suggests that the lead is likely not due to area-wide contamination from air emissions from a former smelter stack. Determining the source of lead in soil may be possible through expensive lead isotope laboratory analyses, but such a project would take time, may not produce definitive results, and would not lead to different public health conclusions and recommendations.