It's a day of the week ending in "y", so yes, there's another story about how fcked the American infrastructure that services our drinking water really is. This time, it's The Guardian, which has demonstrated that Flint was not the only American city that was fudging the test results regarding how much lead was in its water supply.
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.
Experts seem rather displeased.
Marc Edwards, the scientist who first uncovered the crisis in Flint, described water testing in some of America's largest cities as 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?"
Who, indeed?
Some of the ways that city and state officials have used to cheat the system would be laughable, if the consequences weren't so serious.
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."
You will note that, in all of these cases, the officials were advised to make sure that the lead levels were lower than they appeared to be. If this were a couple of cities, you could make a case that the cities were breaking all this rock to avoid public panic. But 33 cities? There's a tangle of motives there—lassitude, inertia, underfunded regulators, greed.
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.
There is no question that, between this story and what happened in Flint, something is amiss at the EPA regarding its oversight policies on water quality. I suspect that whatever it is can probably be solved by a judicious increase in its regulatory budget.
However, I would almost guarantee you that, some time in the next week or so, you will hear something from someone about how this proves that the EPA is useless and should be done away with and its functions handed over to some private entity that will guarantee pure water for everyone—at a decent profit, of course.
Update (2:52 PM): It seems that the folks in Philadelphia are taking things into their own hands. Good on them.
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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
