Hasty treatment leads to arsenic leaching. (Letters).

As Arsenic Leaches, Pressure Builds on Treated-Wood Industry by Sara Hoffman Jurand [TRIAL, Nov. 2002, at 12] discussed the leaching of arsenic from CCA-treated lumber and identified the preservative used in the treatment as chromated copper arsenate. While the terminology is correct, readers need to know the difference between raw arsenic and the arsenate that forms when CCA is injected into and reacts with the wood.

When decking is treated with the "dip and ship" method--the lumber is dipped into the preservative and loaded wet on a truck for shipping and immediate sale--the chemical reaction cannot occur completely, and the free arsenic remains in the wet preservative on the surface.

I once saw treated decking being delivered to a home improvement store. The decking below the top planks was soaking wet with free, raw CCA preservative. (The top layer had evidently blown dry in transit.) I followed the drippings from the delivery truck into the store, where employees and customers were handling the wet wood with their bare hands. The wood should not have been available for sale until it had dried; I am sure there must have been considerable free arsenic on it.

I am a former timber products staff member for Bell Telephone Laboratories and, later, the Rural Electrification Administration, and I currently work as a timber products specialist. I wrote the specifications under which about a million CCA-treated utility poles were supplied to the Rural Electrification Board in Bangladesh between 1978 and 1999. I inspected hundreds of these poles in service. Not one had any decay. Samples revealed the stability of the CCA treatment, despite the poles' being treated with three to four times as much preservative as decking used in the United States receives.

The difference was that the preservative was pressure-treated deep into the poles and not merely put on the surface. The poles were held on a concrete drip pad until the wood surface was free of preservative. It took time for the entire boatload of poles to be treated, meaning most poles had a long drying period. The boat also took at least 45 days to reach the port in Bangladesh. The poles were then unloaded, reinspected, sorted, and stacked. Each pole had at least six months' drying time.

I am sure that what Ms. Jurand referred to is what I consider to be dip-and-ship lumber.

When a similar hue and cry over potential arsenic contamination went up in Bangladesh, the World Bank funded a study of the issue. The results showed no massive contamination, and the World Bank and other lenders continue to fund the purchase of treated wood.

James A. Taylor
Fairfax, Virginia