Washing your deck could make it toxic to children

New research from the University of Florida has found that pressure washing a wooden deck can be hazardous for small children and pets, Futurity reports.
If your wooden deck was manufactured before 2004, chances are, it’s made from CCA-treated wood, which contains arsenic and chromium. Both of these are carcinogenic, and wet wood releases more arsenic than dry wood, according to the study.
Bleach makes things even worse, according to the source—it reacts with the chromium and causes the wood to release chromate, which is also carcinogenic. Since millions of homes still have decks made of CCA-treated wood, and they can last for up to forty years, millions of families are at risk for continuous arsenic exposure.
Testing the danger
To test this, the researchers applied water to CCA-treated wood and wiped it away to see how much arsenic was released, repeating the process and varying the kind of water used—tap water, bleach-water solution, and so on. They also tried pressure washing.
Water caused three times as much arsenic to gather on the surface of wood, showing that a wet deck is not a good deck for your pets and children.
That doesn’t mean you should live with a dirty deck all the time, though—you just have to be careful. Make sure that you avoid skin contact with a wet deck, especially if you clean it with a bleach water mixture. Additionally, normal rainfall will cause the arsenic in the deck to contaminate surrounding soil.
According to Futurity, you can protect yourself, your children, and your pets by taking precautions such as not growing vegetables in soil near CCA-treated decks, keeping children and pets off of a wet deck, and if you want to be extra safe, cut your losses and have your CCA-treated deck removed and replaced. Nothing is better than that new-deck smell.
—–
Image credit: Thinkstock