Water departments that use controversial lead-testing practices have told the Guardian they will change their methods after an investigation revealed they were not following environmental guidelines.
Most of the water departments involved said they used the testing methods because state governments told them to, federal guidance was not clear, or they had not received any word that practices may underestimate lead content.
The investigation into lead testing methods comes after the lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan, where indictments against three government officials referenced water testing methods as part of an alleged coverup.
The Guardian requested records from more than 80 of the most populous cities east of the Mississippi river, which have some of the oldest homes in the country. Forty-three cities provided documents to the Guardian, and 33 were found to have used methods the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) advised against earlier this year.
The Guardian requested comment from all of the water departments in its reporting and received numerous responses.
“The last time we were required to perform testing for the lead and copper rule was in 2014,” said David Jones, director of the Lewiston, Maine, department of public works. “Since then, the EPA and state have changed their recommended procedures.”
Lewiston asked residents to remove and clean aerators and flush water out of plumbing before a six-hour federally mandated test period in its latest testing. The EPA recommended against aerator removal in 2006 because it can diminish lead detected in tests, a recommendation that didn’t make it to Lewiston but one that was acknowledged by the water department in Bangor, Maine.
“We had not told our customers to remove the aerators or clean them – that was not included in our sampling instructions,” said Kathy Moriarty, Bangor water district general manager.
“I guess we really didn’t feel like we were instructing our customers in any way that would be incorrect, and the [state] drinking water program had established recommended procedures for collections of procedures, and those recommendations did provide a pre-stagnation flush,” she said.
Officials in other cities said that they used testing methods warned against, but that the methods are “used throughout the drinking water industry” and not explicitly illegal.
“To make apples-to-oranges comparisons between Aurora, Illinois, and Flint, Michigan, would be not only factually incorrect, but irresponsible as well,” said Dan Ferrelli, a spokesman for the city of Aurora.
“We understand that this type of ‘pre-stagnation flushing’ has been used throughout the drinking water industry for lead/copper compliance sampling for many years,” he said. “We are not Flint, Michigan.”
In Augusta, Georgia, the water department advised residents to “gently” open taps to fill sample bottles. The EPA recommended against this practice in February. Officials there said they would maintain the practice, however, until the state told them to change it.
“As explained, the Augusta utilities department does NOT provide any other instructions to samplers in addition to the instructions that are received from the [Georgia environmental protection division],” said Kayla Cooper, a city attorney.
Instructions provided by water companies varied greatly, ranging from those that contained protocols the EPA advised against a decade ago to those that were periodically updated, such as in Chicago.
Philadelphia, for example, continued to ask samplers to remove aerators even in recent tests. The city declined to answer questions and said the newspaper’s reports “on this issue have contained numerous factual inaccuracies across several articles”. The city said that “most inaccuracies were never addressed” and that “we no longer feel comfortable assisting your reporting”.
The water department, in its most recent email, did not specify what inaccuracies the Guardian failed to address but provided a fact sheet developed after one of the newspaper’s first stories on Philadelphia.
That fact sheet said that the department asks residents to flush lines before a six-hour test period but doesn’t ask them to flush lines before filling sample bottles, something it felt the Guardian did not effectively explain in a January story. The water department also said federal compliance testing is only a “small fraction” of overall lead testing, that it “educates customers in high-risk areas” about ways to reduce lead exposure.
“While testing is a requirement, our primary motivation in all testing is not to meet regulations, but to ensure that we are providing safe, affordable drinking water for the 1.61 million people who depend on Philadelphia Water every day,” the department said in a fact sheet.
“Flint is unfortunate,” said Barry Parsons, the water supply manager in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, instructions told residents to “slowly” open taps, a practice the EPA recently warned against and which Parsons said his department stopped. “But it’s actually causing the nation’s water systems to look at their systems, so that’s a positive thing I think, not a negative thing.”
“The way we look at it, human health is most important to us, so whatever we can do – that’s our motto here, one or one million.”
