Bill vows new look at lead in NYCHA

MAYOR DE BLASIO on Thursday promised to reinspect thousands of NYCHA apartments that were exempted from inspection in the 1990s after new tests revealed high levels of lead in some of the homes.

“I think we need to go back through all of them and look to see if that was done properly,” he said. “We’re talking about going back over something that happened over a quarter-century ago — but I think it’s the right thing to do.”

The mayor was responding to the Daily News’ revelation Thursday regarding three of these “exempted” developments — Ingersoll in the Bronx, Berry on Staten Island and Queensbridge South in Queens.

During the 1990s, NYCHA began testing random apartments in some older developments where lead paint was used before it was banned in the city in 1960.

If the random tests came up negative, the entire development was declared exempt from annual lead paint inspections required by federal regulation.

But last month, state health inspectors took 191 samples from a random sampling of developments in all five boroughs.

In 23 apartments, they detected levels of lead, including at least four apartments in the three exempted developments that had years ago been declared “lead-free.”