US authorities distorting tests to downplay lead content of water

[kscarbel2]

The Guardian / January 22, 2016

Documents seen by the Guardian reveal questionable practices that mean people’s drinking water is at risk in ‘every major city east of the Mississippi’

Water authorities across the US are systematically distorting water tests to downplay the amount of lead in samples, risking a dangerous spread of the toxic water crisis that has gripped Flint, documents seen by the Guardian show.

The controversial approach to water testing is so widespread that it occurs in “every major US city east of the Mississippi” according to an anonymous source with extensive knowledge of the lead and copper regulations. “By word of mouth, this has become the thing to do in the water industry. The logical conclusion is that millions of people’s drinking water is potentially unsafe,” he said.

Documents seen by the Guardian show that water boards in cities including Detroit and Philadelphia, as well as the state of Rhode Island, have distorted tests by using methods deemed misleading by the Environment Protection Agency (EPA).

There is no suggestion that EPA regulations have been broken, but the agency’s guidelines have been systematically ignored.

The revelation comes as the growing crisis in Flint, Michigan, has prompted an emergency EPA order, the condemnation of Barack Obama and the resignation of a top agency official.

The documents show a pattern of behaviour in addressing public health concerns about water across the US where “gamed” tests help ensure that water utilities don’t breach federal lead and copper rules.

Dr Yanna Lambrinidou, a Virginia Tech academic, has disclosed what she considers to be evidence of deceptive practices by city water authorities after she sat on an EPA taskforce that reviewed federal rules on lead and copper poisoning that have been in place since 1991.

The taskforce ended its work last year, shortly before the full extent of the city of Flint’s problems with smelly, brown water hit the headlines, with Lambrinidou criticising the final report for failing to step up protections to prevent the corrosion of pipes, which leads to lead leaching into water supplies.

The documents were obtained by Lambrinidou under freedom of information laws and direct requests to water authorities.

They show that several cities have advised residents to use questionable methods when conducting official tests for lead content. These include encouraging testers to run taps for several minutes to flush out lead from the pipes or even removing the filter from taps. Such methods have been criticized by the EPA for not providing accurate results, with the agency telling authorities not to use them.

The Philadelphia water department’s instructions to residents in November last year were to “remove the aerator from the faucet. Leave the aerator off until sampling is completed”. This practice was deemed “against the intent of the monitoring protocol” in 2008 by the EPA, which advised against in 2006.

In an email to Lambrinidou in November 2015, a senior official at Philadelphia Water said: “We are trying to stay up on the latest science as best we can. We get confused by it and wish that a national forum of experts could get together and agree. But it’s often left to us to try and make sense out of everything that is published and talked about.”

Philadelphia also asks testers to “run only the cold water for two minutes” before taking a water sample. This practice of “pre-flushing” the pipes before testing water is repeated in instructions given to Michigan residents, between 2007 and 2015, by cities including Detroit, which requires water to be run for five minutes before testing, Grand Rapids, Andover, Muskegon, Holland and Jackson.

Rhode Island department of health documents ask testing residents to run their water “until cold” before sampling. In an email to Lambrinidou, a senior environmental scientist at the department said: “I know that the idea of flushing six hours prior is controversial but, as of now, within the regulations.”

Many of these cities also advise residents who conduct tests to put test water into a container in a slow and steady stream from the tap. Containers with small openings are provided to ensure this. Again, this tactic is thought to influence the amount of lead found in a typical sample.

Lambrinidou warned that the issue of misleading test results was widespread. “There is no way that Flint is a one-off,” she said.“There are many ways to game the system. In Flint, they went to test neighbourhoods where they knew didn’t have a problem. You can also flush the water to get rid of the lead. If you flush it before sampling, the problem will go away.

“The EPA has completely turned its gaze away from this. There is no robust oversight here, the only oversight is from the people getting hurt. Families who get hurt, such as in Flint, are the overseers. It’s an horrendous situation. The system is absolutely failing.”

The Centers for Disease Control is very clear about lead’s impacts on children. The agency emphasises that lead has no biological function in humans, and even the smallest exposure can developmentally impair children.

Multiple studies over decades have shown wide-ranging and serious health consequences, including death in cases of acute poisoning. One of the most insidious characteristics of lead exposure is the heavy metal’s accumulation in the body: over years lead is stored in kidneys, the liver, teeth and bones, and can be released during times of stress, when bones are broken and during pregnancy.

In children, acute lead exposure can be lethal, sending them into a coma, causing loss of motor control or causing “stupor” and hyper-irritability.

Lambrinidou’s Virginia Tech colleague Marc Edwards was one of the first scientists to highlight the risks posed to Flint residents by their drinking water. The duo have previously helped illuminate suspect lead testing procedures in Washington DC and produced evidence that the disturbance of pipes in Chicago was causing lead to seep into water flows.

In 2008, Cynthia Doughtery, director of the EPA’s office of ground water and drinking water, wrote to Alliance for Healthy Homes, which raised concerns about water in DC. Doughtery stated: “We do not understand why DC Water and Sewer Authority believes it should be necessary to request flushing only in households participating in the sampling.

“While this may fall within a strict legal interpretation of the regulations, we believe that it goes against the intent of the monitoring protocol.”

Federal regulations set a lead content limit of 15 parts per billion in drinking water. If more than 10% of “high risk” households are found to be above this limit, various procedures such as public information and water treatment are supposed to kick in.

The water is tested from the tap by residents who follow instructions from water departments. A report published last year, commissioned by the American Water Works Association, found that if the water was tested directly from lead pipes, up to 96 million Americans could be found to be drinking water with unsafe levels of lead.

The EPA has yet to decide whether to implement the recommendations of the lead and copper rule working group that Lambrinidou sat on. Paul Schwartz, national policy coordinator of Water Alliance, who assisted Lambrinidou during the taskforce, said the regulatory regime was inadequate.

“The industry’s own reports show that if large water utilities followed the EPA standard for sampling, they would routinely exceed the lead limit,” he said. “The EPA has been in a very cosy relationship with the state regulators and the water utilities. They’ve allowed themselves to be captured and they haven’t followed the science.

“What we have is a recipe for a public health disaster that is much larger than what we’ve seen so far. It will take us years to get out of this situation.”

The EPA was given a day to respond to the revelations but has not yet responded.

The revelations come after Susan Hedman, a regional EPA director for Michigan, resigned on Thursday. The head of the EPA, Gina McCarthy, also issued an emergency order requiring Michigan and the city of Flint to take immediate steps after determining that the response by the local governments has been “inadequate to protect human health”.

[TeamsterGrrrl]

I take the samples from our towns water system. Our lab does not test for lead, only for coliform bacteria and to confirm the proper level of chlorine. Because we have newer plastic piping, we're not too concerned about lead. We are told to remove the aerator and run the tap for a couple minutes as well as sterilizing the faucet with flame or alcohol not to produce fake tests, but to avoid false positive tests from contaminants built up in the pipes.

[kscarbel2]

At least 33 US cities used water testing 'cheats' over lead concerns

The Guardian  /  June 2, 2016

At least 33 cities across 17 US states have used water testing “cheats” that potentially conceal dangerous levels of lead, a Guardian investigation launched in the wake of the toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has found.

Of these cities, 21 used the same water testing methods that prompted criminal charges against three government employees in Flint over their role in one of the worst public health disasters in US history.

The crisis that gripped Flint is an extreme case where a cost-cutting decision to divert the city’s water supply to a polluted river was compounded by a poor testing regime and delays by environmental officials to respond to the health emergency.

The Guardian’s investigation demonstrates that similar testing regimes were in place in cities including Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee.

Thousands of documents detailing water testing practices over the past decade reveal:

Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water.

Officials in two major cities – Philadelphia and Chicago – asked employees to test water safety in their own homes.

Two states – Michigan and New Hampshire – advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels.

Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming it was a security risk.

The disaster in Flint, sparked when authorities failed to treat drinking water for lead, prompted criminal charges against three government employees: Mike Glasgow, Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby.

Marc Edwards, the scientist who first uncovered the crisis in Flint, described water testing in some of America’s largest cities is an “outrage”.

“They make lead in water low when collecting samples for EPA compliance, even as it poisons kids who drink the water,” Edwards, a Virginia Tech scientist, said. “Clearly, the cheating and lax enforcement are needlessly harming children all over the United States.

“If they cannot be trusted to protect little kids from lead in drinking water, what on Earth can they be trusted with? Who amongst us is safe?”

For 25 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has required water utilities to test a small pool of households for lead contamination at least every three years. Typically, city water departments ask residents to collect these water samples. But the way residents are instructed to sample their water, as well as which households are chosen for testing, can profoundly impact how much lead is detected.

Testing methods that can avoid detecting lead include asking testers to run faucets before the test period, known as “pre-flushing”; to remove faucet filters called “aerators”; and to slowly fill sample bottles. The EPA reiterated in February that these lead-reducing methods go against its guidelines, and the Flint charges show they may now be criminal acts.

The arrest warrant for Glasgow, Busch and Prysby states that the men “did properly manipulate the collection of water samples by directing residents to ‘pre-flush’ their taps by running the water for five minutes the night before drawing a water sample and/or did fail to collect required sampled included in the tier 1 category of service lines.”

The tactic of pre-flushing, which helps clear lead from home plumbing prior to a test, is rampant across many large cities. In their most recent test cycles, Philadelphia; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Buffalo, New York, tested water for lead in this way.

The EPA has warned since 2008 that pre-flushing is problematic and go against the “intent” of regulations designed to detect lead. Nevertheless, the federal agency failed to properly police state agencies who included the method in sample instructions for years, including at the Maine and Rhode Island departments of health.

Further distortion is achieved through the removal of “aerators” – the small metal filters at the tip of faucets. These filters can collect lead particles and add to lead detected in tests. The EPA has warned against this practice since 2006, when it became clear that a lead poisoning case in Durham, North Carolina, was missed by the water department at least partly because it routinely removed the filters.

Philadelphia, a city accused of having the worst water testing in the US, asks testers to pre-flush their pipes, remove aerators and slowly pour water into a sample bottle. The EPA has warned against all these testing methods, which could “mask the added contribution of lead at the tap”.

Documents show some authorities have also removed high-risk homes from testing or sought to obscure their dangerous lead levels. In Michigan, a department of environmental quality (MDEQ) official told the director of a town water department in a Detroit suburb called Howell to “bump this one out”, referring to a sample with high lead levels, by taking additional samples.

“I would suggest at least five more samples,” Adam Rosenthal, an official at the MDEQ drinking water office wrote in an email in 2008.

New Hampshire offered similar advice to water system officials in that state, advising water departments to test early so any high results could be re-tested.

“If your water system samples early in their compliance period, then time remains for you to collect a second set of samples,” reads advice from New Hampshire’s department of environmental services to local water systems. “This may result in a 90th percentile below action levels.”

Thousands of Flint’s children are expected to suffer developmental problems as a result of the lead contamination. Hundreds of thousands of bottles of water have been distributed to the city by the national guard, deployed in January. Barack Obama called Flint’s lead contamination a “man-made disaster” and a symptom of urban neglect suffered by poor, largely black communities across the US.

Since the crisis in Flint prompted a federal state of emergency, the city, state and its new water supplier, Detroit, phased out water testing distortions. But other cities have failed to do so – against the advice of EPA guidelines..

In the nine years since the EPA last updated lead regulations, a substantial body of peer-reviewed science has shown no level of lead is safe for humans. Tiny amounts are associated with impaired development and behavioral problems in children, and exposure is linked to a propensity to commit violent crimes.

Also in that time, peer-reviewed studies by EPA scientists and academics showed how testing methods that flout guidelines miss lead contamination. Some of these studies even stemmed from previous lead contamination crises, such as in Washington DC in 2001.

“What on earth can you do when the environmental policemen at EPA have condoned open cheating on the water lead rule for more than a decade now?” said Edwards, the author of several studies.

In a statement, the EPA did not respond to the widespread testing distortions but said it is currently working on “long-term revisions” to its lead and copper rule, expected in 2017.

“During our review, EPA has been evaluating critical issues related to increasing public health protections under the rule while maintaining an approach that can be feasibly implemented by the states and drinking water utilities,” the regulator said.

“As we develop the proposed revisions to the rule, we are also focusing on enhanced oversight of the states, including implementation of the existing rule. In EPA’s recent letter to the states, we make clear that approaches are not to include aerator removal or allow pre-stagnation flushing prior to collection of samples by residents.”

The crisis in water testing could be even more widespread than evidence unearthed by the Guardian shows. Several large cities sell water onto almost 400 adjacent cities and towns. Many of these locations also test their own water as part of EPA recommendations.

As part of its investigation in the wake of the Flint disaster, the Guardian sought water testing documents from 81 of the largest cities in states east of the Mississippi River. Eastern states are considered to have a high risk of lead contamination due to their aging infrastructure. Forty-three cities provided information, and 33 of these used distortions in their water testing in the past decade.

Several cities do correctly follow EPA guidelines on testing, according to documents provided to the Guardian, including: Cincinnati, Ohio; Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; and Mobile, Alabama. Several said they intend to change protocols when they next test, including Mount Pleasant, South Carolina; Buffalo, New York; Worcester and Boston, Massachusetts; Lewiston, Maine; and the Rhode Island and Maine health departments. Chicago stopped aerator removal and pre-flushing by 2012.

In response to the Guardian’s investigation, many water departments said the EPA had not issued clear guidance on the issue in the past. Some said they had never received a previous EPA memo regarding testing protocols, or that the practices are not illegal.