GIS MAPPING OF HOMES CONTAINING PROBABLE LEAD-BASED PAINT CONTAMINATION IN BREVARD, TRANSYLVANIA COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA

A Brevard College Senior Project identified more than 1,500 residences in the City of Brevard, in Transylvania County, North Carolina as having a high potential for lead-based paint contamination. The Transylvania County Health Department provided access to pertinent databases and websites.

Using the county 911 Excel spreadsheet database, addresses of residences constructed prior to the 1978 ban on lead-based paint and their GIS locations were filtered from a total of more than 6,000 buildings. The pre-1978 addresses were converted to Lat/Lon coordinates and mapped in the ESRI ArcGIS for Desktop application, ArcMap 10.1, using the Geocoding Toolbar. This required creating an address locator file, using data downloaded from: U.S. Department of Commerce 
Economics and Statistics Administration 
U.S. CENSUS BUREAU 
Address Range Feature Shapefile (2013) - "tl_2013_37175_addrfeat.zip", downloaded from: http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html. Transylvania County roads are organized, in this file, at a detail level of one-block segments, with first and last address per block with information stored in the associated attribute table. The ArcMap "Create Address Locator" function was run on this file to produce the address locator file.

The Excel spreadsheet was processed with the "Geocode Addresses" tool on the Geocoding Toolbar, using this address locator, and produced the file (shapefile) of points for the map. The scalable map locates each of the addresses of concern.

Final results will be presented to the Transylvania Health Department for potential use in identifying homes where resident children may be at risk of lead poisoning. The next step in this project will be to expand mapping to cover all residences in Transylvania County.