Three years after Woodberry residents sued the owners of the TV Hill transmission tower whose botched repainting project showered their neighborhood with toxic orange lead paint chips, Baltimore City has joined their lawsuit.

The announcement came from the law firm that has been representing the residents, Murphy, Falcon & Murphy, founded by high-profile attorney William H. “Billy” Murphy, Jr.

“When a company undertakes a job like this in our city, they have to make sure their work does not put our residents in harm’s way,” Mayor Brandon Scott is quoted saying in the law firm’s press release this week.

Baltimore entered the suit “to ensure that the defendants clean up the hazardous materials that they spread, not only on city-owned properties but in our neighborhoods,” added City Solicitor Ebony Thompson.

The city, however, has a lead paint chip problem of its own.

After a cold snap in February, three city-owned bridges dropped a dense scattering of essentially the same toxic flakes on the community.

Six months later, the bridges are still covered with rusty patches of peeling lead paint – and still sprinkling bits of it.

The worst of what fell last winter is now gone. But The Brew easily found the health-harming orange paint flakes crushed in the dirt, nestled in the grass, and lying on the rocks and in the water of the Jones Falls.

The metal bridge structures looked just as rusty as they did six months ago, when tests confirmed they had dropped flakes with alarmingly high levels of lead:

• Falls Road below the 28th Street Bridge – 180,000 mg/kg or 36 times the standard limit, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment.

• Clipper Mill Road below the Jones Falls Expressway’s Exit 8 off-ramp – 63,500 mg/kg or over 12 times the standard limit, according to Blue Water Baltimore.

• The Orleans Street bridge overpass near Guilford Avenue – 27,300 mg/kg or more than five times the standard limit, according to Blue Water Baltimore.

Last winter, as The Brew first reported, large strips of peeled-off paint were draped in the bushes along Falls Road and scattered in the snow.

The mess remained for months afterward – with pieces strewn all over the roadway, the Jones Falls Trail and the Jones Falls waterway. The Baltimore Streetcar Museum tracks were also littered with orange paint bits. (Shown here and in video below from last March.)

City and State Response

The Brew asked the Baltimore Department of Transportation (DOT) if there are any plans to remediate these structures before this coming winter to prevent another discard of flakes into the environment.

Spokesperson Kathy Dominick said she was not yet able to provide a response. (It was a busy day at DOT, with the mayor’s office confirming that DOT’s director, Veronica Perry, is stepping down.)

We also asked the State Highway Administration if any of the state-owned bridges found to be shedding lead paint will be remediated before cold weather returns.

At least three state-maintained bridges with lead paint have been so identified: I-95 where it crosses above U.S. Route 1, Amtrak and Potomac Avenue; Putty Hill Road over I-695; and I-95 over the Patapsco River, CSX and Patapsco Valley State Park.

SHA spokeswoman Shanteé Felix responded, saying that construction is underway to complete painting on 30 bridges in 2026.

None of the bridges are in the city, Felix indicated.

Eight of them are in Baltimore County, including the so-called “Triple Bridges” of the I-70/I-695 Interchange, and the I-70 bridges over Rolling Road.

“These bridges were identified as likely containing lead paint,” she said, noting that an additional 58 bridge-painting projects are scheduled to start construction in 2027.

“The work will ensure the bridges are protected and will perform in accordance with current safety and environmental standards,” she added.

In February, the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) took action promptly after its test results came in, finding Baltimore in violation of state pollution laws and instructing the city to conduct a clean-up and “manage the paint chips as hazardous waste.”

But the city, turning to the state for help, reportedly found that none of the companies on a list provided by MDE were qualified to perform the full lead abatement needed.

Careful remediation is urgently needed, says nonprofit environmental watchdog Blue Water Baltimore, because the lead levels are “dangerously high,” and the material can harm both the environment and people who jog, walk and bike in the area.

“Fully remove all loose paint using environmental protection measures to stop chips from contaminating the environment” – Alice Volpitta, Blue Water Baltimore.

After initial clean-up, the focus should be on “fully removing all loose paint while using environmental protection measures to stop chips from contaminating the environment,” the group’s Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper, Alice Volpitta, has said.

“The city also needs to inventory its bridges and other assets to determine where lead paint exists so that they can stop this from happening again in other places,” she added.

Lead paint is known to cause brain damage in children – and a host of neurological and other medical problems in adults – if ingested or inhaled.

It was allowed for non-residential purposes in the United States for many years after it was banned for use in dwellings. Toxic flakes have started falling from bridges across the country, as time and the weather have begun taking their toll.

Under the Tobin Bridge near Boston, for example, protective netting was installed as part of a multi-million-dollar effort to remediate Massachusetts’ lead-painted bridges and overpasses.

TV Tower Victims’ Claims

It was not cold weather but rather a botched repainting project by an unaccredited out-of-state contractor that triggered Baltimore’s TV Hill tower episode in 2022. Legal fallout from the incident is ongoing.

A criminal case was opened by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, leading to a guilty plea by Skyline Tower Painting and a $50,000 fine to be paid to the Maryland Clean Water Fund.

MDE’s separate lawsuit, resulting in a $2.2 million settlement and consent decree, was filed against both Skyline and Television Tower Inc. (TTI), the company owned and managed by the three television stations that use the nearly 1,000-foot “candelabra” broadcast tower.

Recently amended, the residents’ class action lawsuit now includes as defendants the three stations that own the tower – WJZ-TV, WBAL-TV, WMAR-TV and their corporate entities.

The complaint notes the interests of the newly added plaintiffs, pointing to contaminated properties owned by the city, including the 41st Street Bridge and Rockrose Park in Woodberry.

The residents say the TV tower’s lead paint has never been fully removed or contained.

The suit seeks class representation of all property owners within a 4,000-foot radius of the broadcasting tower, located at 3723 Malden Avenue.

It also asks for an injunction requiring removal of all lead-based contamination, as well as monetary damages for alleged negligence resulting in a loss of property value and other harms.

The residents say the TV tower’s lead paint has never been fully removed or contained:

“To this day, the TV Tower remediation project remains incomplete,” the lawsuit states. “Lead paint chips continue to flake off the unshielded TV Tower.”

TTI has not responded to The Brew’s attempts to reach them by phone and email.