[fuzzfactor]

Also, real ppm for this kind of thing is supposed to be by weight, so that would ideally be pounds per million-pounds.

IOW if they dumped a million pounds all over the place, and there was 1 ppm of trace lead content, then there was one full pound of unwanted lead scattered across the same acreage as the 900,000+ pounds of active ingredient.

However, ppm for environmental laboratories conventionally means milligrams per liter since that's a close equivalent to weight ppm, but realistically only for water samples. So for test material having a density different than water, some correction is needed which can often be neglected, but the real number is usually within the same order of magnitude.

[Jabbles]

If there were 280 drops of the DC-10 mentioned in the article, that is a maximum of 280 * 45000 = 12.6M litres of this, spread of 20 square miles.

That is 7.5 kg (16 lbs) of lead.

But what does that tell you? Is that a lot? The EPA warns against soil that is > 400ppm lead, which is a limit almost 1000 times higher than found in this.

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/documents/le...

[fuzzfactor]

Looks like you've added some realistic data.

The more the better.

>But what does that tell you?

It's a lot of raw data, but mainly reveals it's all estimation "all the way down".

Definitely pounds to kilos of heavy metals were dispensed widely which were not there before.

Probably a lot more kilos than people think when you consider all the kinds of heavy metal that's popular today, not only Led ;)

And that's just the initial application.

Contamination migration will be a much less accurately determined phenomenon, while being potentially much more toxic in those areas of concentration, and less so in areas benefitting from dilution.