2004: Washington Post
The issue became front page news when the Washington Post ran an article titled "Water in D.C. Exceeds EPA Lead Limit" on January 31, 2004 across six columns of page A1. Reporter David Nakamura was contacted by one of the homeowners whose water was tested by WASA during its survey after he received the test results. Nakamura—who had no prior experience with clean water issues—initially thought it was a minor issue, but agreed to help the homeowner get a response from WASA. When WASA would not give him a straight answer, Nakamura pressed them for full data on the tests. Nakamura says that, even though he was "stunned" at the facts reported in that first story, the Post "had no idea about the size and scope of what was to follow."
The article quoted Erik Olson, an analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, as saying "This is a really big deal... If schools go over 20 parts per billion, they immediately take the water out of production." WASA recommended that residents let the tap run for 30 seconds to one minute before using it to reduce the risk.
This first Post article was the first public mention of the theory that the lead levels were tied to chloramine. The traditional use of chlorine had been stopped four years earlier, out of concerns that it could produce harmful chemicals in the pipes. Long-term exposure to the byproducts from chlorine treatment has been linked with cancer. The paper quoted officials as saying that it was possible chloramine was more corrosive to lead pipes. (In fact, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the Washington Aqueduct that supplies water to WASA, rejected a recommendation to add phosphates to the water to prevent lead leaching in the mid-1990s.) The change to chloramine was made after the EPA issued regulations concerning disinfection byproducts formed when chlorine reacts with organic matter in drinking water; the EPA considered these byproducts to be a potential health threat. Chloramines do not produce disinfection byproducts.
After the first article, the Post formed a core team of reporters to investigate the issue. Nakamura was joined by reporters Carol Leonnig, Jo Becker, Avram Goldstein, and D'Vera Cohn; editor Marcia Slacum Greene provided daily oversight. Nakamura was the lead reporter for the breaking news coming from WASA and City Hall, and wrote profiles of key players. Leonnig reported on the federal and EPA response to the contamination. Cohn investigated the Washington Aqueduct angle and worked with water quality and environmental experts. Goldstein covered the DC Department of Health. Becker looked at water quality nationwide.
After the first article appeared, residents inundated WASA's water hotline with calls and overwhelmed water testing laboratories with requests to have their tap water tested for lead contamination. District elected officials immediately called for an emergency public meeting, and established an inter-agency task force with the EPA to investigate and manage the problem. However, messages to the public at the time were often confusing and contradictory: while WASA was suggesting running taps for 90 seconds to flush out any lead, the EPA was demanding that recommendation be changed to ten minutes.
The Post article lead WASA to hand out over 30,000 free water filters, hire health experts, and offer free blood tests to residents. Some water fountains were turned off due to lead levels. In 2004, the D.C. Council held 11 oversight hearings on the issue; the US Congress held four. American University claimed that its water was safe to drink, because the larger water mains feeding commercial sites like the college were not made of lead.
After Nakamura's first few stories for the Post on the issue, he was contacted by Seema Bhat's attorney. Bhat, who was then fighting her dismissal from WASA, shared thousands of internal documents with Nakamura. The documents, Nakamura said, "provided a fairly clear picture" that WASA had been trying to find a way to avoid the cost of replacing pipes and adding additional chemicals to the water. He said Bhat's documents were critical to the Post's investigation. He recalls that, while reading the documents, the team found WASA memos indicating that they tried to find "clean" houses to test to reduce the apparent average lead level from the testing, but the more they tested, the more "dirty" houses they found.
By April 2004, there were reports of some DC-area homes reaching lead levels of 6,000 ppb to 48,000 ppb.
In June 2004, the EPA cited WASA for a "serious breach" of the law, including withholding six test results showing high lead levels in 2001, dropping half of the homes that had previously tested high for lead levels in subsequent testing, and avoiding homes known to be at high risk for contamination. In July, a WASA-commissioned report supported the Post's claims that the agency had known about the high lead levels for years, but had failed to notify regulators or the public.
In August 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers started adding orthophosphate to the water in hopes of preventing lead leeching. By November, WASA's board of directors had committed to a plan that would replace all of the agency's 23,000 lead pipes by 2010, at a cost of $300 million—starting with 2,800 lead pipes to be replaced in 2005. WASA estimated that the repairs would cost residents $6 to $7 a month. The agency was not legally responsible for the portion of the lead service lines within a homeowner's property lines; however, they offered to perform the work at a set rate, and arranged a low-interest loan program with Wachovia Bank to help homeowners afford the cost.
By January 31, 2005, the Post had run over 200 stories on the issue, amassing thousands of pages of correspondence through the Freedom of Information Act. Gloria Borland, a District resident, testified before Congress: "If the Post had not exposed this scandal, our children today would still be drinking lead contaminated water".
Post reporters Nakamura, Leonnig, Cohn, Becker, Craig Timberg, Monte Reel, and Sarah Cohen won the 2005 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for the articles. Michael Parks, director of USC Annenberg's School of Journalism and Pulitzer Prize-winning former editor of the Los Angeles Times, said "The Washington Post's work was a very important piece of journalism—important to every man, woman and child living in the District of Columbia, drinking its water and thinking it was pure. And it was important to the residents of other cities whose water is contaminated by lead and other toxic substances". The award's cash prize of $35,000 is believed to be the largest in journalism. According to Nakamura, some at the Post were surprised to win the award, because of the atypical nature of the Post's investigation. Most winners conduct a long-term investigation and then publish long articles over a few days with the results; the Post covered the investigation as a series of beat stories. Nakamura said he had never heard of the Selden Ring Award until the day his editor told him that the team had won it.
Read more about this topic: Lead Contamination In Washington, D.C. Drinking Water