Don Cole, left, watches his son, Dean Cole, both of Lawrence, take target practice Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2008 at the Douglas County Rifle/Pistol Club Range at the Community Building, 115 W. 11th St.

There is a room in the Lawrence Community Building that is closed off to the public — not even a ventilation system runs between it and the rest of the structure. Before the door is ever opened, a level of cleanup akin to that for asbestos and methamphetamine labs is needed.

“The door is locked and nobody’s going in until we get it cleaned, so I think we’re safe and should be doing what we’re supposed to be doing,” said Ernie Shaw, interim director of the Lawrence Parks and Recreation Department.

For decades, the approximately 1,400 square-foot space housed a gun range that has left behind high levels of lead contamination. As patrons fired their weapons over the years, bits of lead from those bullets built up. A test found the presence of lead in some areas that was 17,000 times greater than what is considered safe by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to a report provided to the Journal-World by the Parks and Recreation Department.

The Community Building was constructed in 1940, and was originally designed to be an armory. Shaw said that, as far as he knew, the space in the basement had always been a shooting range.

The Douglas County Rifle & Pistol Club leased the space from the city and operated the gun range. In February, the club was ordered to cease operations after city leaders realized its location violated the federal Gun Free School Zones Act, enacted in 1990. Since then, the primarily concrete room in the basement of the Community Building, 115 W. 11th St., has been locked up.

Testing for lead contamination

As the owner of the building, the city subsequently tested the area for lead contamination. The results of those tests showed that each of the four samples taken from the room — and one from the public stairway leading down to it — had excessive levels of lead contamination.

HUD guidelines state that lead levels above 40 micrograms per square foot are hazardous, and the five wipe samples taken from the floor within and right outside the room ranged from about 400 to 681,000 micrograms per square foot.

One of the reasons units for lead test are so small is because even low levels of lead are toxic if ingested. Lead is especially harmful for infants and children, and even low levels of lead in blood have been shown to affect IQ, ability to pay attention and academic achievement, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The effects of lead exposure cannot be corrected.

However, when the building was renovated — updates that included the installation of a central heating and cooling system — the shooting range was not included. For that reason, Shaw said it kept the contamination mostly localized.

“It’s not connected to any ventilation systems or heating systems or anything like that — it just stands alone,” Shaw said. “So the recommendation was to shut it off, and before you start using it again it basically needs to be cleaned, probably professionally, since it has fairly high lead levels in it.”

Lead hazard in public areas

The lowest result — which was still 10 times the limit — came from the one public area in the building that tested above the hazard level. The stairway to the basement where the gun range was located was found to have about 400 micrograms of lead per square foot, which is about 10 times the limit of 40 micrograms of lead per square foot.

Shaw hypothesized that most of that contamination could have happened after those with the club were told to vacate the space, and subsequently used the stairs when taking their equipment out of the building. However, Shaw said that a similar level of lead was likely to have regularly left the room while the range was in operation.

“When they’re shooting and down there and they’re coming and going, there has probably been for 40 years people tracking a little lead out into the hallways and stuff,” Shaw said. “There’s no doubt that that has been happening with that (level of) concentration.”

After the Parks and Recreation Department received the results of the lead test, officials were advised to do another test on the rest of the building, Shaw said. The results of that text came back this week and showed that samples taken from 11 areas throughout the building — including the community room, elevator, art room and gym — are all below the HUD hazard levels. All areas resulted in less than 10 micrograms per square foot.

“Unless it’s tracked out or actually gets in an air ventilation system, it usually doesn’t go very far,” Shaw said.

Cleanup

The Parks and Recreation Department is currently accepting bids for decontamination services to clean the room, and Shaw said he expects it to cost thousands of dollars. He noted that any porous surface, including a sand pit and foam padding, will also need to be removed. Tests of the sand found it to contain as much as 310,000 micrograms of lead per square foot. The HUD limit for soil or sand samples is 400 parts per million.

Shaw said that Community Building staff were never in charge of cleaning the room. And Shaw, whose office was in the building for several years, wasn’t sure what level of cleaning was done by the club, but that he understood that some who frequented the range monitored the lead levels in their blood. The number previously listed for the gun range is no longer in service.

Titan Environmental Services conducted the testing. The company’s website focuses on testing and removal of lead-based paint, as well toxins such as asbestos and radon and those found in meth labs. Kyle Gunion, a project manager for TES, said that while a firing range isn’t a contamination area they commonly work with, it was expected that some level of lead contamination would be present. Gunion said that once the space is decontaminated, they will retest to ensure it is safe.

“It’ll be cleaned to where either the contaminants discovered are below an acceptable threshold or cleaned up entirely,” Gunion said. “We’ll know more when the clearance testing is done.”

Money to decontaminate the room wasn’t a budgeted expense, but Shaw said it will have to be accounted for this year.

“When things like this happen that you don’t plan for, you figure out what isn’t going to get done in order to do that this year,” Shaw said. “So that’s what we’ll have to do, depending on what the bid comes in at.”

Shaw said once the room is decontaminated, the Parks and Recreation Department plans to use the space, perhaps for an archery range, golf range or spin room for stationary bikes. But until test results confirm is has been decontaminated, the basement room is remaining sealed.

“We’ll see, once we get it cleaned up, what we want to use it for,” Shaw said.