In some ways, the recent scandal over lead in drinking water in Flint, Michigan, was unique.
An appointee of Republican Governor Rick Snyder wanted to cut costs. So he switched from a clean and reliable source of drinking water – Lake Huron – to the more corrosive waters of the Flint River. This damaged the pipes, releasing toxic metal particles from old lead water lines and plumbing in homes.
Both the state and city then failed to add a required corrosion inhibiting chemical that could have easily and cheaply prevented what has become a national tragedy: the potential brain damage to thousands of children.
But in another way, the Flint story hints at a much broader problem with drinking water testing across the U.S., clean drinking water advocates and experts suggest.
As many as 96 million people across the U.S. live in cities and towns that still have old lead water pipes, and may be consuming water with dangerous levels of lead without knowing it, according to August 2015 article in the Journal of the American Water Works Association. Why? Because their state and local governments are not as vigorous as they should be in the methods they use to sample for lead.
Yanna Lambrinidou is an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech and founder of a nonprofit group called Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives. She served on a recent EPA expert advisory panel that examined testing procedures used with the 1991 federal Lead and Copper Rule, which is supposed to protect consumers from toxic metals in their drinking water.
“The testing protocol that is required by the lead and copper rule does not capture the water that has had prolonged contact with the lead service lines,” said Lambrinidou. “So it really misses water that we use on a daily basis to drink and cook with, and that is very likely to have extremely high levels of lead.”
Beyond Flint, there are numerous communities – including Philadelphia, Boston, Milwaukee, Denver, and Chicago – that still have lead pipes carrying water, according to an article by Richard Rabin in the American Journal of Public health.
As far back as the 1880’s, health experts recognized that lead pipes for carrying drinking water were a potential cause of lead poisoning. For this reason, many towns and cities started moving to prohibit lead pipes by the 1920s. But then a trade group called the Lead Industry Association “carried out a prolonged and effective campaign to promote the use of lead pipes,” according to Rabin’s article in the American Journal of Public Health. Because of propaganda about the safety of lead, many cities actually required builders to use lead pipes up until the 1970s and 1980s.
According to the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), the two largest water systems in the state, Baltimore and Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, do not have lead service lines. Some older towns in Maryland have reported lead service lines. But MDE said water tests show these towns are not exceeding EPA’s advised action levels for lead (which means the level at which the local government must issue health warnings and start replacing pipes). Baltimore’s most recent available tests for lead in water, in 2012, did not show any of 52 homes tested violating EPA’s action level, according to city and state records.
Seven small communities in Maryland exceeded EPA’s action level for lead in March 2015, according to MDE. The neighborhoods with the high lead levels were the Glen Meadows Retirement Community in Baltimore County; Woodbine Village in Carroll County; Rockbrook Village Mobile Home Park in Carroll County; Golden Kay Apartments in Cecil County; Bay Country Estates Mobile Home Park in Cecil County; the Town of Betterton in Kent County; and the Conococheague Apartments in Washington County, according to MDE.
So how do authorities test for lead?
Lambrinidou said that in Flint, Philadelphia, and other cities, authorities game the testing system by instructing people to run their water for a few minutes before testing. She said this gives a false test result, because it flushes out lead in the water that people might actually be drinking. In some locations, authorities instruct people to dismantle their faucets to remove aerators – filter like devices that often accumulate lead and release it into people’s water – before testing. In other cases, authorities tell people to take water samples using only a trickle of water into a bottle with a tiny mouth, when a more powerful flow of water would dislodge more lead particles and be more normal.
MDE said in a written statement that Maryland it is more vigilant and does not condone what some consider deceptive testing practices.
“While we are confident that our programmatic and regulatory process has numerous safeguards in place that would prevent a situation such as what happened in Flint, we're not complacent,” MDE spokesman Jay Apperson said in a written statement. “Our Water Supply Program has reviewed its processes to make sure there are no blind spots in our regulatory oversight of public water systems in Maryland.”
Maryland, like other states, tests only cold water for lead. This can underestimate lead levels because warm water tends to pick up more lead and -- in reality – both cold and warm water are sometimes used by people in cooking, Lambrinidou said.
Why do some municipalities test in ways that low-ball the results?
Lambrinidou said that state and local governments have a financial incentive to show low lead test results. If lead tests come back with high results, federal regulations can require cities and towns to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars replacing old lead pipes.
“I think it is reasonable to suspect that the high cost of finding high concentrations of lead in drinking water in a significant percentage of homes is one of the main disincentives for water utilities to conduct the sampling properly and to identify exactly what lead hazards exist in the drinking water that people use,” Lambrinidou said. “Replacing lead pipes can be a very expensive proposition. Washington D.C., for example, spent over $100 million replacing lead service lines in the city, and still the replacement is far from complete.”
Ana Navas-Acien, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies lead, said she does not believe municipalities are intentionally trying to manipulate testing to save money.
“People just say, okay let’s continue to do it in this way we’ve always been doing it,” said Acien. “The results are good and we feel the population is protected in this manner. But we are learning and it’s a good time for us to re-evaluate those methods we are using to decide is this the right way to be doing it or should be we doing it in a better way. So I think it’s a good time to think about this now.”
In other words, the drinking water crisis in Flint could be a useful alarm to convince governments everywhere to make their water testing more accurate and attuned to public health.
