What does the EPA do?
Lead exposure can cause serious health problems, including lower IQs in
children and brain and kidney damage in adults.

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4oct4

Lead Levels in Water Misrepresented Across U.S.
Tue Oct 5, 1:21 AM ET

By Carol D. Leonnig, Jo Becker and David Nakamura, Washington Post Staff
Writers

Cities across the country are manipulating the results of tests used to
detect lead in water, violating federal law and putting millions of
Americans at risk of drinking more of the contaminant than their suppliers
are reporting.

Some cities, including Philadelphia and Boston, have thrown out tests that
show high readings or have avoided testing homes most likely to have lead,
records show. In New York City, the nation's largest water provider has for
the past three years assured its 9.3 million customers that its water was
safe because the lead content fell below federal limits. But the city has
withheld from regulators hundreds of test results that would have raised
lead levels above the safety standard in two of those years, according to
records.

The result is that communities, large and small, may have a false sense of
security about the quality of their water and that utilities can avoid
spending money to correct the problem.

In some cases, state regulators have helped the utilities avoid costly
fixes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to
ensure that states are monitoring utilities, has also let communities
ignore requirements to reduce lead. In 2003, records show, the EPA ordered
utilities to remedy violations in just 14 cases, less than one-tenth of the
number ordered in 1997.

Taken together, the records point to a national problem just months after
disclosures that lead levels in the District's water are among the highest
in the country, a problem the city's utility concealed for months.
Documents from other cities show that many have made similar efforts to
hide high lead readings, taking advantage of lax national and state
oversight and regulations riddled with loopholes.

The Washington Post examined 65 large water systems whose reported lead
levels have hovered near or exceeded federal standards. Federal, state and
utility records show that dozens of utilities obscured the extent of lead
contamination, ignored requirements to correct problems and failed to turn
over data to regulators.

Jim Elder, who headed the EPA's drinking water program from 1991 to 1995,
said he fears that utilities are engaging in "widespread fraud and
manipulation."

"It's time to reconsider whether water utilities can be trusted with this
crucial responsibility of protecting the public. I fear for the safety of
our nation's drinking water," said Elder, now a water
consultant. "Apparently, it's a real crapshoot as to what's going to come
out of the tap and whether it will be healthy or not."

Recent attention to the dangers of the District's drinking water has
prompted scientists and some members of Congress to call for revamping the
lead rules in the 30-year-old Safe Drinking Water Act, which was aimed at
limiting dangerous contaminants flowing out of the tap. EPA Administrator
Michael Leavitt declined to be interviewed for this article, but his agency
has said that a major overhaul to its regulations is unnecessary.

"We have not identified a systemic problem," EPA Acting Assistant
Administrator Benjamin H. Grumbles told Congress in July. In an interview,
Grumbles said, "We are going full throttle" to pinpoint lead levels across
the country. "So far," he said, "we have not seen anything that closely
resembles the District in the data we've received."

EPA data analyzed by The Post identified 274 utilities, which together
serve 11.5 million people, that have reported unsafe lead levels since
2000. Those numbers do not include cities where testing methods concealed
true lead levels.

Utility officials defend their testing methods, saying they are not
designed to intentionally deceive the government and that state regulators
approved their practices. Others argue that they should not have to spend
millions to remove lead that often leaches from their customers' own
fixtures.

Some suppliers have worked hard to avoid lead problems. Kansas City's
tested its water more frequently and treated it more aggressively than the
law required. And after the District's problem surfaced, several other
jurisdictions in the Washington region voluntarily tested their water and
found less contamination than in the city.

Lynn Stovall, a Greenville, S.C., utility manager and member of the
American Water Works Association, said many utilities are "hard-pressed"
and need more public funding to comply with mounting regulations and
improve aging plants.

"The drinking water community faces a complex array of expensive new
federal requirements and new standards," Stovall told Congress at this
summer's hearing on lead.

Lead exposure can cause serious health problems, including lower IQs in
children and brain and kidney damage in adults. Although health experts
agree that no amount of lead in drinking water is considered safe, there is
some dispute about how much tainted water has to be consumed to cause
permanent damage. Because the effect is cumulative, lead in water is
particularly problematic in older, urban areas where children are more
likely to also be exposed to lead paint, which utilities note is a more
prevalent threat.

Despite the health risk caused by lead in water, efforts to eliminate it
have run up against other realities, including the high cost of replacing
underground pipes that contain lead. Recognizing that states lacked the
resources to carefully monitor more than 90 contaminants covered by federal
law, the EPA issued lists of priorities starting in 1996. In both cases,
its top concern was microbes, which can sicken large populations overnight.
Lead did not make the list, and this year, the EPA dropped drinking water
altogether from its enforcement priority list, records show.

Competing interests were also in play in 1991 when the EPA wrote new rules
on lead. The compromise that emerged requires that, when lead levels exceed
15 parts per billion, utilities must inform the public, treat the water to
make it less corrosive or, in some cases, replace pipes.

Because of the cost, many utilities are reluctant to act. In the District,
where the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority is under order to replace service
lines, water customers are expected to pay for most of the $350 million
project over the rest of the decade.

Withholding Results
Water suppliers are required by law to test for lead regularly -- the
largest utilities must check the water in at least 50 homes once every
three years. They must follow a strict regimen, trying consistently to test
the same "high risk" homes most likely to have lead problems. High-risk
homes are defined as those with lead service lines or built in the 1980s,
before lead solder in plumbing was banned.

Because so few homes are tested, the results of just one or two can mean
the difference between passing and failing. Utilities are required to
report to regulators all their test results -- good and bad.

The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority knew in the summer of 2001 that its
water contained unsafe lead levels, but it withheld six high test results
and said the water was fine, records show. When it tested over the next two
years, records show, WASA dropped half of the homes that had previously
tested high for lead and avoided high-risk homes.

The EPA, which cited WASA for violations in June, called the utility's
practices unprecedented and a "serious breach" of the law.

Documents show that water systems across the country have used similar
practices.

In such cities as Boston and Detroit, records indicate that utilities have
failed to test the high-risk homes they were required to check. State
regulators and the EPA discovered in the spring that at least one-fourth of
the locations in the Boston area were not high risk and ordered the utility
to revamp its program, records show.

After several years of above-the-limit test results, New York water
officials reported that tests in 2000 showed lead had fallen to safe
levels. But the city had not reported all of its results.

Records obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed more
than 300 withheld test results that, if reported, would have given New York
water a failing grade for safety in 2001 and 2002. That would have required
the city to alert the public to the problem and take expensive steps to fix
it.

Christopher O. Ward, commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental
Protection, said his agency is "highly confident" the city's water is safe.
He said extra tests were taken to ensure that the city had a sufficient
number to report to regulators, though he said the agency did not formally
notify state and city regulators of this practice or seek their approval.
Ward said that he believed this complied with the rules and that it was
unfair now to count irrelevant results.

"In light of the issues that have recently been raised, DEP is in the
process of reviewing our lead and copper monitoring to ensure that all
requirements in the regulations are being met," Ward said.

In a similar situation, when WASA said the six test results it withheld
were replacement or backup samples, the EPA cited the utility and said it
was a violation of the law.

In Philadelphia, state and utility officials said they could produce none
of the required documentation for their decision to toss out a high test
result in 2002. The federal law does not allow utilities to discard high
tests except under very limited circumstances, and the utilities must
carefully document their reason.

Utility director Gary Burlingame said in an interview that the high test
result "didn't jibe" with past tests and that the utility decided it should
be discarded after learning the house had undergone plumbing work. Had that
test been counted, records show, it would have put Philadelphia over the
federal safety limit and required corrective steps.

The law prohibits throwing out tests for the reasons given in Lansing,
Mich., in 2001 -- that homeowners did not follow directions in collecting
them. Four discarded tests would have put the water over the federal lead
limit, documents show. In one case, the homeowner disputed the reason the
utility gave for tossing her sample -- that the occupants had been away
overnight.

"That's a big, fat lie," said Jennie Horiszny, an 85-year-old Lansing
resident. She said she had not gone out of town and had carefully followed
the utility's instructions not to run the water overnight. She remembers
pouring glasses of water before going to bed in case she or her husband
became thirsty -- and taking the sample first thing in the morning. "That's
what the directions said to do, and that's what I did," she said. "It was a
clean sample."

John Strickler, a spokesman for the Lansing water system, said, "I find it
hard to believe that any of our employees would have made that up." He said
the city has voluntarily embarked on an aggressive plan to replace lead
service lines, in part because "we started seeing news stories" about the
District's problem.

Federal law also requires utilities to try to test the same homes over time
and prohibits dropping any merely because they have tested high.

After exceeding the acceptable limits in 2000, the Ridgewood, N.J., water
system dumped "hot" houses that had tested high, records show. Frank Moritz
Sr., director of operations for Ridgewood's water department, said that was
not done by design. "Each year, we take out the previous year's list and
ask if they want to participate," he said.

But five residents whose homes showed high lead readings said in interviews
that the utility never informed them of the results or asked them to test
again.

"It would have been nice if someone had looked out for us," said Matthew
Criscenzo, whose son was 4 at the time. "Obviously, this news is causing
some alarm."

Bradley M. Campbell, New Jersey's commissioner of environmental protection
and an EPA official in the Clinton administration, said that his agency
is "actively investigating" testing irregularities uncovered by The Post in
Ridgewood and other communities in northern New Jersey and that it could
take action against some utilities. "The public has a paramount right to
know" the true lead levels in those communities, he said.

Just as dropping tests can lower the official lead figures, so can adding
tests.

The utility in Providence, R.I., exceeded safe lead levels in 2002. Instead
of informing the public, as required, records show that the utility waited
and, the next summer, sampled 30 more homes, most of which showed very low
lead and brought levels below the federal standard. Utility officials said
they believed that their actions complied with the law. June Swallow, the
Rhode Island official charged with overseeing utilities, said Providence
did not comply and that the state will in the future ensure that utilities
test within the requisite four-month period.

Frequent Irregularities
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, states must oversee utilities to ensure
that they follow the law and the EPA is required to step in when states
fail to correct problems.

For the most part, states take the word of utilities, doing little to check
whether they are testing properly. The EPA's most recent audits point out
that testing irregularities are common. Also, states frequently miss the
violations or fail to force utilities to take required steps to reduce
lead, according to the audits.

The latest EPA audit of Hawaii's program, for instance, found in 2001 that
regulators there "put an emphasis on 'helping' " utilities "rather than
enforcing the law."

Records show that regulators rarely force communities to replace lead
service lines, even in such cases as Yonkers, N.Y., where the law required
it because repeated tests showed excessive lead levels.

In Seattle, the city missed a 1997 deadline to reduce lead by making its
water less corrosive. The state of Washington gave it six extra years to
correct the problem, allowing high lead to persist until last year. Denise
Clifford, director of the state's office of drinking water, said the delay
gave Seattle time to build treatment facilities that will reduce lead and
other more serious contaminants.

"I know this doesn't look like a good decision to a lot of people," she
said, but "there are more acute public health risks than lead."

In the interim, more than 43,000 Seattle residents -- including Nimi
Sandhu -- gave birth, according to vital records statistics. Sandhu used
unfiltered tap water to make her babies' formula, unaware of the lead
levels.

"It's outrageous -- the state is supposed to be protecting us," said
Sandhu, whose children are 5, 4 and 10 months old. "I don't know how they
can live with themselves knowing that they were possibly endangering
children."

State officials say they are forced to engage in a form of triage.

"It's tough, given all the other priorities out there for drinking water,
to oversee this rule at that level of detail," said Barker G. Hamill, chief
of the New Jersey Bureau of Safe Drinking Water.

If states fail to enforce the law, the EPA is the last line of defense. But
the agency devotes four times the staff to enforcing the laws that govern
sewage released into rivers and lakes as it does to safeguarding the
nation's drinking water supply, records show. The agency has 72 enforcement
employees to oversee the nation's drinking water laws -- one employee for
every 2,238 water systems.

"We can't afford to do these kind of checks everywhere, and neither can the
states," said Jon M. Capacasa, water administrator in the EPA's mid-
Atlantic office.

Officials at EPA headquarters say the need for intervention has declined
over the years, because more utilities understand and comply with the law.
But sometimes the EPA is without the information it needs to act.

A March report by the agency's inspector general found that the data the
EPA uses to assess water quality are "flawed and incomplete" because states
are not reporting violations, despite legal requirements.

But even when it is aware of a problem, the agency does not always enforce
the law, records show.

It didn't do so in Portland, Ore., for instance, where excessive lead
persisted through much of the past decade. The state approved the city's
decision to launch a public education campaign on lead dangers rather than
build an expensive treatment plant to comply with the law.

Lead levels climbed, and in 2002 the EPA stepped in, but not to discipline
the city. Instead, the agency suggested testing more homes in the suburbs.
The utility dropped more than half the homes with lead higher than the
federal limit, replacing them with suburban homes that had, on average,
significantly lower levels, records show.

"That change in the sampling population helped" the city slip back under
the federal limit, said Mark Knudson, the Portland Water Bureau's director
of operations. EPA officials said that that was not their goal and that
they had recommended the changes to get a fuller picture across the area.

Although top EPA officials have contended that the law does a good job of
catching most problems, those charged with enforcing it do not always
agree. EPA regulators who met in the spring in Newport, R.I., noted in a
three-page memo a series of loopholes that weaken the law. Among them:
Nothing requires utilities to notify individual homeowners that their water
has high lead, and the regulation does not allow the same stiff sanctions
for high lead that it does for other contaminants such as bacteria.

At headquarters, the EPA's Grumbles has said in recent weeks that he will
push to ensure that cities are complying with the law when they test and
that he will consider changes early next year, such as stricter rules for
notifying the public. But critics fear that, without much tougher laws and
enforcement, unsafe water in other communities may not come to light.

"The problems we know about are just the tip of the iceberg," said Erik D.
Olson of the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, "because
utilities are gaming the system, states have often been willing to ignore
long-standing violations and the EPA sits on the sidelines and refuses to
crack down."

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