I worked as a painter one summer and we painted several houses which had lead paint (either still or at some point in the past) For the most part we would try to do something about it but when you are 40 feet up on a ladder and scraping paint off a windowsill that hasn't been touched in as many years it's very difficult to contain.
For one, you have to wear protective suits and respiratory gear, neither of which was really that effective. They really inhibited my ability to move so a lot of times I would just go gloves and mask. Second, you have to prep ground beneath with thicker than usual plastic sheets to catch the paint scrapings that fall down. This just doesn't really work that well and there isn't always an effective solution. People have bushes against the house most of the time and you can't really control where the paint falls so most of it just ends up on the ground and then gets cleaned up later.
The fines for avoiding regulation are extremely high but I never once saw an EPA person the entire summer and on the occasions where it might have been possible we were warned ahead of time. There is an unspoken agreement that you try to contain the lead paint but you can't really do that much about it.
The main difference that you notice about lead paint is the thickness of the paint. After main years it kind of "cakes", but also that it still looks relatively nice after a long time. In comparison to latex paint it just has a much nicer look and I can see why they used it.
Edit: as a response to other comments, it's relatively easy to detect lead paint, I could usually spot it when we showed up/based on the type of house. I don't know about other sources like pipes though.
When I was a youngster, my dad, a house painter, said the future of painting was lead abatement. In the mid-80s when I started working for him, it was a small sliver of what we were doing. In the early 90s we started getting bid documents that were basically 100% lead abatement.
This certainly is the case in some areas even these days 20+years later, particularly those parts of town that have been lower income for a long time, and are now being renovated. Smart guy to think ahead on that.
It sounds like your company at least tried to follow the regulations. A lot of times, on homes in the Los Angeles area, I see painting crews that don't even take half the precautions your crew took.
Once I saw a worker remove an entire living room's "popcorn ceiling" with a paint scraper. He was wearing regular clothes (jeans and a t-shirt - no Tyvek suit). He just let the material fall on to the floor. All the other workers just paraded through and tromped it all over the place.
Eventually someone swept it up and left it on the back patio in a big uncovered heap.
Surely, they carried out asbestos and lead content tests on the ceiling paint and material beforehand ...
With that sort of tool, it sounds nice but you have to consider how much the tool costs, how many times you use it, how long it will last, etc. One thing that the job taught me was how to wisely allocate money towards a business and not buy stuff like this that you don't need.
As long as the client was happy and we were complying with regulation, we used the cheapest tools possible. You could spend spend 1000 or whatever it costs on this thing that vacuumes up paint and put the job in the red or you could spend 10 bucks on some paint scrapers and get shit done in the same amount of time. These kinds of tools also don't always work or take a lot of overhead to set up which is lost money in wages as well as time on the job that could be spend painting the house. The difference between 50% profit and a loss is surprisingly thin.
For a house with a huge amount of lead paint this kind of tool might be useful but that job would be quoted differently and likely would go to a specialist that charges more accordingly and maybe even contracts someone else to do the actual painting. These days most houses that need it have been done.
"You could spend spend 1000 or whatever it costs on this thing that vacuumes up paint and put the job in the red or you could spend 10 bucks on some paint scrapers and get shit done in the same amount of time."
Ideally, you would reuse the vacuum for other jobs in the future.
We tried one of those when we repainted the original lap siding of our 1920 house a few years ago.
It did not work well. Everything had to be just right for it to work properly. If the paint was not a uniform thickness, if there were any old paint drips hanging over the edge of the siding, or if the siding was not laid straight the same width across the wall, it wouldn't shave off the paint evenly.
We found the best tool for the job was a radiant heat gun made from an old toaster oven and a paint scraper. You'd heat the paint until it started to soften, then scrape it off with a putty knife.
Like the parent said, it was difficult work requiring at a minimum a ventilator and gloves, and try the best we could, it was impossible to contain all the paint chips. But I think a few paint dust chips left behind is probably trivial compared to the amount of lead in the soil around our house from decades of cars and trucks going by our home burning leaded gasoline.
I did the same and either we never painted houses that had lead paint or we were never told about it. It's not even something I thought about.
Probably the worst thing I did was kilz an entire bathroom. (Very little ventilation and I had to use a ton of kilz.) That made me feel terrible for quite a while afterwards.
For one, you have to wear protective suits and respiratory gear, neither of which was really that effective. They really inhibited my ability to move so a lot of times I would just go gloves and mask. Second, you have to prep ground beneath with thicker than usual plastic sheets to catch the paint scrapings that fall down. This just doesn't really work that well and there isn't always an effective solution. People have bushes against the house most of the time and you can't really control where the paint falls so most of it just ends up on the ground and then gets cleaned up later.
The fines for avoiding regulation are extremely high but I never once saw an EPA person the entire summer and on the occasions where it might have been possible we were warned ahead of time. There is an unspoken agreement that you try to contain the lead paint but you can't really do that much about it.
The main difference that you notice about lead paint is the thickness of the paint. After main years it kind of "cakes", but also that it still looks relatively nice after a long time. In comparison to latex paint it just has a much nicer look and I can see why they used it.
Edit: as a response to other comments, it's relatively easy to detect lead paint, I could usually spot it when we showed up/based on the type of house. I don't know about other sources like pipes though.