Lead Contamination in Washington, D.C. Drinking Water - 2004: Other Cities Investigated

2004: Other Cities Investigated

In 1999, an EPA survey estimated that the United States's drinking-water systems were in need of $150 billion worth of repairs over the following 20 years. However, in April 2004, an EPA spokesperson told the Washington Times that "high lead levels are not a pervasive problem". At a Congressional hearing that month, the EPA testified that it had no current information on lead levels in 78 percent of the nation's water systems, and that as many as 20 states had not provided any data.

On October 5, 2004, the Washington Post ran a front-page article reporting that cities across the United States were illegally manipulating lead testing results, such as discarding high readings or avoiding homes likely to have high readings. A former EPA official described it as "widespread fraud and manipulation" on the part of water utilities. That July, however, an EPA administrator told Congress that "we have not identified a systemic problem". Using data from the EPA, the Post identified 274 utilities that had reported unsafe lead levels between 2000 and 2004. Some utilities defended their testing practices as being approved by state regulators; others argued that the lead was actually leaching from customers' fixtures, not their plumbing.

Among the cities that the Post faulted through the EPA data were:

• Boston, where state regulators discovered that at least one quarter of the locations tested were not at high risk for lead contamination;
• Detroit, where the utility failed to test required high-risk homes;
• New York City, which reported lead falling to safe levels in 2000—but omitted 300 test results that would have marked the water as unsafe in 2001 and 2002 if reported;
• Philadelphia, which could not produce documentation for their decision to discard a high test result from 2002—despite being required by federal law to do so—that would have put the city over the EPA limit if it had been included;
• Lansing, Michigan, which discarded four tests that would have put the city's water over the limit because the homeowners supposedly did not follow the proper directions in collecting the samples—even though the law prohibits doing so;
• Ridgewood, New Jersey, which removed "hot" houses from its testing after exceeding the safe limit in 2000;
• Providence, Rhode Island, where high levels were found in 2002, failed to inform the public as required and instead waited more than the legal limit of four months to test again;
• Seattle, where state regulators allowed the utility to miss a 1997 deadline to reduce the corrosiveness of its water by six years, allowing high lead levels to persist during that period;
• Portland, Oregon, where the city and state decided to launch a lead-danger educational campaign instead of building a treatment plant as required by law—and the EPA later suggested the utility drop urban homes with high lead levels from its testing and replace them with suburban homes with significantly lower levels.

The Post article lead the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York to open an investigation into the city's drinking-water lead levels. Regulators in Michigan and Oregon also investigated utilities singled out by the Post in those states. Senators James M. Jeffords and Paul S. Sarbanes called for the EPA to impose tougher standards; Jeffords and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an investigation of the EPA following the Post's findings.

Seattle had already suffered widespread lead contamination in its public school system in 2003. One parent, a scientist who had initiated the investigation there, said "we continue to suffer from an epidemic of lead complacency" nationwide.

The EPA said that between 2003 and 2005, only four large water systems had unsafe lead levels: Washington, DC; St. Paul, Minnesota; Port St. Lucie, Florida; and Ridgewood, New Jersey.