Dive Brief:

• A researcher at Johns Hopkins University says he thinks there is very little risk to anyone offsite when Beatty Development Group LLC pierces a containment cap on a 27-acre Baltimore site where the company plans a development.
• The site will have air monitoring and a spraying operation to keep down dust, but Peter S. Lees, a professor at the university's School of Public Health says there is almost no chance of anyone offsite being exposed to quantities of Chromium 6 that are associated with cancer risk.
• State and federal environmental agencies have approved Beatty's development plan, and the company is awaiting approval of a revised plan for monitoring air quality and detecting any escaping contamination, which would close down the project immediately.

Dive Insight:

Lees has been following the health of people who worked at an Allied Signal plant that used to stand on the site and that used chromium, and those who had the lowest exposures had no more risk of developing lung cancer than the general public. Construction workers will need to take extra care, he said, but there seems to be almost no way enough chromium could be thrown up into the air to endanger anyone else.