“Confusion mounts in another U.S. city grappling with lead in its taps”
REMINDER OF EPAs FLINT FIASCO: retesting 24 of the homes that had elevated lead concentrations earlier this year, two came back above the EPA’s threshold, said Syracuse’s Greg Loh….”
Confusion mounts in another U.S. city grappling with lead in its taps
Two officials in Syracuse were placed on leave after The Washington Post looked into how the city conducted lead tests.
In Syracuse, N.Y., there's growing concern about the safety of the water in existing lead pipes. Liam Rodewald conducts a scratch test to confirm that there is a lead service line in his basement on Monday. He has lived in the home for two years. (Amudalat Ajasa/The Washington Post)
By Amudalat Ajasa
November 1, 2024 at 3:57 p.m. CT
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — After assuring residents here for months that their tap water is safe to drink despite earlier tests showing high lead levels, city officials announced Thursday that some of their earlier assessments were done improperly.
The news in Syracuse — the latest U.S. city grappling with a crisis over contaminated drinking water — comes after officials first disclosed in August that samples collected in the spring found that dozens of homes had dangerous levels of lead exposure. The city said 10 percent of the homes it surveyed had levels more than four times the Environmental Protection Agency threshold that triggers government enforcement, or more than twice what officials found during the Flint, Michigan, water crisis a decade ago.
City officials, who disclosed the testing problems after The Washington Post made several inquiries, argue the high lead levels identified in August may have stemmed from a problem in testing and said they had placed two water department employees on administrative leave. After retesting 24 of the homes that had elevated lead concentrations earlier this year, two came back above the EPA’s threshold, Syracuse’s chief policy officer, Greg Loh, said in a statement Thursday.
For months, Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh has said the high lead levels were “anomalies.”
“We had one sample [set] where we exceeded the [EPA] limit,” Walsh said this week. “But based on historical data and our most recent data, we are below EPA limits and the water is safe.”
Still, environmental advocates, who have fanned across the city in an effort to notify residents about possible lead contamination, countered that the readings could still indicate a potential problem in Syracuse’s water supply that needs to be addressed. And as residents have learned more about the lead pipes in their homes, there’s mounting confusion about how the city conducted its testing and what officials are doing to address the potential issues.
Valerie Baron, a senior attorney at the advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said the improper sampling methods from employees “doesn’t prove that the water is safe from lead.”
City officials told The Post earlier this week that residents voluntarily took water samples from their homes for the city to test — a practice known as self-administered testing. But several interviews with residents revealed that many had not received or participated in the tests. Then, inquiries and reporting from The Post prompted the city to conduct further reviews of the assessments, said Sol Muñoz, a spokesperson for the city’s infrastructure department.
One resident told The Post that she saw someone take samples from outdoor water sources, which doesn’t meet EPA requirements. The requirements call for tests to be conducted from a kitchen or bathroom sink.
When initially asked whether the city collected water from outside faucets, Muñoz said the city itself did not do testing but had heard about instances of landlords sampling outdoor spigots.
On Thursday, Loh said officials are investigating reports that water was sampled from outdoor spigots and said “required sampling protocols were not followed.”
In more recent rounds of testing, the city sampled water from 115 properties — 45 of which number were part of the initial round of testing in the spring — reporting Thursday that the results came in under the EPA’s threshold.
Still, Baron said that there is no reason to think that water from outdoor spigots will contain less lead than a kitchen or bathroom sink.
The lack of clarity around testing practices has raised concerns about risks from the roughly 14,000 lead pipes that carry water to homes across this city of 150,000 people.
The city typically tests the water for lead every three years. The EPA recently lowered the threshold for government intervention from 15 parts per billion to 10 under the new Lead and Copper Rule Improvements.
Lead levels varied throughout homes in the area during the spring, according to data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the NRDC. The highest levels detected were 2,520 ppb — over 250 times the new action level. Other homes had 346 ppb, 225 ppb and 198 ppb, according to documents reviewed by The Post.
In recent interviews with nine Syracuse residents — after knocking on 21 of the 27 homes that tested with high lead levels — none knew how the city had collected samples of their water. At least one resident said she observed someone taking a sample from an outdoor spigot. One university student said he called the water utility after receiving the results and was told the sample could have been taken from an outside hose. Five other residents said they were unsure how the city had tested their water.
There is no safe level of exposure to lead, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And harms from drinking contaminated water could be irreversible. Low-level exposure can cause permanent cognitive damage, especially in children, and it is known to cause development delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems.
Mona Hanna, a pediatrician and associate dean of public health at Michigan State University who helped expose the widespread contamination of Flint’s drinking water a decade ago, said the situation in Syracuse gave her déjà vu.
“Every level of lead poses a potential danger,” Hanna said. “These levels are astronomical in Syracuse.”
Yet officials have called the higher lead levels outliers and said that previous years’ testing results have not exceeded the EPA’s threshold in over a decade.
In mid-October, national environmental groups, concerned medical providers and residents sent a letter to state and city officials, as well as the EPA, calling on them to declare a state of emergency and to better inform all Syracuse residents about potential risks.
In response, the city released a statement saying the “data does not support the conclusion of an emergency situation or comparisons to other U.S. cities.”
“The last thing we want to do is cause unnecessary anxiety or concern from residents who don’t have reason to be concerned,” Walsh said this week.
But the city stressed it is taking the situation seriously.
Baron said the city “has a lead-contaminated drinking water crisis that requires urgent action.”
“Yet city officials are downplaying the problem and have failed to ensure that residents are protected now from high levels of toxic lead in their tap water,” Baron added.
NRDC senior attorney, Valerie Baron, right, gives Rodewald a tap filter and shares information about lead water safety on Sunday. (Amudalat Ajasa/The Washington Post)
On Sunday, the NRDC and Syracuse University PhD student Kiara Van Brackle canvassed the area, handing out water filters to homes that had reported high lead levels and sharing information about water safety. As the group knocked on doors, it became clear how much confusion exists, as well as inconsistencies between their experiences and what officials had described.
Many residents said they were stunned to initially learn their homes had high lead levels. Some knew very little about the dangers of lead water contamination. Many didn’t know that the lead contamination was a wider problem across the city.
Liam Rodewald and Justin Schmidt had always wondered about the water quality in Syracuse given the relative age of homes here, but it was a letter from the city in July that confirmed the college students’ suspicions. The letter said that their home water had tested at 77.3 ppb — nearly eight times the EPA limit.
The students were confused. To their knowledge, the city never tested their water or dropped off a kit so they could test the water themselves. Their landlord confirmed he did not conduct the test and had no knowledge that tests were sent. The students have lived in the same home for two years.
“I’m wary to drink the water,” said Rodewald, who attends SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry with Schmidt. “How are they able to confidently say that the water is safe when they don’t know what’s coming out of the faucet?”
Rodewald and Schmidt thought their high lead levels could have been an isolated incident. Then last week, they heard people at school talking about it. They realized water contamination was a larger issue.
“If that’s the only way I found out about the information, how are other people finding out?” Rodewald said.
Lead pipes were initially installed in cities decades ago because they were cheaper and more malleable, but the heavy metal can corrode, causing lead to leach into drinking water. Congress banned their installation in 1986. In early October, the EPA finalized the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, a policy update that requires water utilities to replace all lead pipes within a decade — a move aimed at eliminating a toxic threat that continues to affect tens of thousands of American children each year.
Environmental advocates and health experts in the area argue the situation in Syracuse parallels the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. In 2014, Flint officials switched the city’s water source to save money but did not ensure there were corrosion-control chemicals in the new water supply. After a year of resident complaints, officials confirmed that the water coming through the taps was contaminated. Nearly 100,000 Flint residents, in the majority-Black city, were exposed to lead through their home water sources, according to the CDC.
A group of Virginia Tech researchers sampled water in Flint homes in 2015 and found that 10 percent of the homes tested at 31 ppb. In Syracuse, 10 percent of homes sampled in the spring showed a level of 70 ppb or higher.
The state of New York has doled out nearly $22.8 million from the bipartisan infrastructure law to the city to replace lead pipes — with $12.8 million released following the announcement of the high lead levels in August. Between the early 2000s and 2018, the city completed about 2,500 partial pipe replacements — a process that includes replacing pipes on the public side of streets. The city announced in September that they plan to do more than 3,000 lead service line replacements in the next year. Officials say they are on track to remove all lead service lines before the EPA’s deadline.
The White House estimates that more than 9 million homes across the country are still supplied by lead pipelines, which are the leading source of lead contamination through drinking water.
When they moved in two years ago, college students Rodewald and Schmidt didn’t know the water that served their home came from lead service lines. Earlier this week, Rodewald used a key to gently scratch the metal pipe that feeds water throughout the house for the first time. Shiny, silver streaks appeared. It was a lead pipe.
They had both hoped to stay in Syracuse after they graduate in the spring. Now they are considering leaving.