Rebecca Renner

In the end, the inspectors blamed the paint, and the Bresslers had it removed. But six months later the boys’ blood lead levels were still too high, according to their doctor. Then, in January 2004, Bressler read in the Washington Post that thousands of homes in D.C. had high lead in their drinking water. The problem constituted one of the worst episodes of water contamination in U.S. history and signaled a potential crisis in metropolitan areas across the country. In Washington, tens of thousands of people unwittingly drank tap water contaminated with lead for several years; in a few cases, the tap water contained enough lead to be classified as a hazardous waste. When tests confirmed that their tap water contained high lead levels, Bressler says, “we immediately stopped drinking and cooking with tap water. Finally, the boys’ lead levels came down.”

To this day, officials involved in the D.C. crisis contend that no one was significantly harmed by D.C.’s lead problem. But Salon has recently learned that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the “no harm” conclusion has been falsely represented. During the crisis, the city’s Water and Sewer Authority and Health Department sent inspectors to the homes of children with elevated blood lead to look for the source. At a 2004 congressional hearing investigating the causes of the exposure, D.C. water authority general manager Jerry Johnson testified that in every case the assessments showed that water was not the source of the child’s lead exposure.

But a recent examination of the assessment reports reveals that water is the sole source of the blood poisoning in some homes and that assessors found high levels of lead in tap water in many other homes. The reports were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by Virginia Tech environmental engineer Marc Edwards, a leading authority on water corrosion, who first called attention to D.C.’s lead problem. Since then, Edwards has been conducting his own investigation of the crisis and has established a clear connection between lead-contaminated water and elevated blood lead levels in some D.C. children. “The assertion that no one was harmed in D.C. contradicts decades of scientific research on dangers of lead in drinking water,” he says.

Numerous studies confirm that very low levels of lead in kids’ blood are linked to short attention spans and reading problems. In adults, low levels are linked to high blood pressure and an increased risk of death from heart disease and stroke.

All of the agencies involved in the lead crisis — D.C.’s water authority, the city’s Health Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — had reasons to downplay the crisis. Every agency blundered by first ignoring the problem. When it got too big to hide, they tried to cover up their mistakes by blaming every case of lead poisoning on paint, a widely recognized hazard of lead exposure that predominantly affects children in poorly maintained low-income rental housing. But water as a source of lead is more insidious and pervasive. This summer, dangerous levels of lead in drinking water popped up in Maine; and Providence, R.I., and Bristol, Conn., joined the ranks of Boston, Lansing, Mich., and Portland, Ore., which have had long-standing problems with lead in tap water.

“Public health experts are trying to comfort people who are anxious without having to directly address the problem of lead in water,” says pediatrician Bruce Lanphear, director of the Cincinnati Children’s Environmental Health Center and one of the country’s foremost researchers on the effects of lead exposure on children. “They are overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.”

The problem began when the D.C. water authority made a seemingly innocuous water treatment change to comply with a new EPA regulation. The same regulation has prompted cities nationwide to change their water treatment methods, often with lead-laden consequences.

In 2000, just months before the Bressler twins were born, the Water and Sewer Authority stopped using chlorine to disinfect the pipes that supply the city’s water and switched over to chloramines, a mixture of chlorine and ammonia. WASA did this to comply with the EPA’s new “Disinfection Byproducts Rule.” Disinfection byproducts, which are suspected to cause a range of problems including bladder cancer and miscarriages, form when chlorine reacts with dissolved organic matter in water.

The switch unexpectedly and rapidly started leaching lead into the water from lead pipes, solder and brass plumbing. A few weeks after the switch, technicians saw high lead levels in water samples required by law, but discounted them. “D.C. officials said and continue to say that there was no public health threat from the lead contamination,” says Eric Olson, director of advocacy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “Amazingly they had evidence that children were harmed in some cases and ignored it.”

The EPA not only knew about many of these problems but also directly oversaw and approved many of the water utility’s actions, according to an investigation by former U.S. deputy attorney general Eric Holder Jr. in 2004. When the Post publicized the bad news, the EPA was on the defensive, as its regulation had inadvertently caused the problem, and its officials had approved many of the WASA actions that hid the danger from the public.

Rick Rogers, who supervised the EPA’s efforts in Washington, tells Salon the agency wasn’t involved in a coverup. The problem started small, he says, and the EPA only realized how massive it was a few months before the public knew. “At first we didn’t think it was a big problem and WASA for the most part complied with the rules,” he says. As for possible health effects, “We’re not the experts; we just followed what the health people told us.”

Lead is almost never present in when water leaves a treatment plant. Instead the water picks up lead from corrosion of lead pipes in old water systems, lead solder that plumbers used until the mid-1980s, or faucets and other fixtures that can contain up to 8 percent lead. The EPA’s long-standing lead regulation is designed only to indicate whether anticorrosion methods are working, not to figure out if drinking water is lead-free. A water utility could meet all of the EPA’s corrosion requirements even if 9 percent of homes served had hazardous levels of lead in their water.

When at least 10 percent of homes have elevated lead in their water, the water authority is required to inform the public about the problem. But a recent EPA survey determined that 40 percent of water utilities did not conduct the required public education activities. This means that people were not given enough information to reduce their exposure to lead from drinking water.

Edwards has uncovered other irregularities in how public agencies handled the D.C. lead case. In 21 of the 93 reports, assessors found no problems with paint, dust or soil lead levels. In two cases, water was the only obvious source; in one instance, a child attended an elementary school where water samples contained lead levels almost 500 times higher than the EPA’s target. Despite knowing about the water problem, in 25 cases the assessors did not take samples from a tap. When they did sample the water they often flouted standard sampling procedures. The assessors almost certainly would have found more lead if they’d followed standard protocols, says Edwards.

Marie Sansone, a senior administrator at the D.C. Health Department, says that Lynette Stokes, the official who directly oversaw the department’s response to the lead problem, no longer works for the department. She may have had other information about the children or may have made a mistake, adds Sansone, who says that the Health Department is currently investigating the matter.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got involved in the D.C. lead problem when the D.C. Health Department asked for help during the peak of public outrage. The only published scientific report about the crisis is a collaboration between the CDC and Health Department workers. This report, described by lead expert Lanphere as “a quick and sloppy study to address public health concerns,” is routinely cited as evidence that no one had been harmed. But “if this article were submitted to a journal to ‘prove’ that lead in water wasn’t an important source, it would have been rejected,” Lanphere says.

But the CDC will not be evaluating the newly revealed home inspection reports, according to a spokesperson, who says that apparent discrepancies between public statements about the assessments and the assessments themselves are none of the CDC’s business.

The NRDC’s Olson wants to know whose business it is. He is calling for an independent investigation. “Years after the fact, we find out that public officials withheld public health data,” he says. “Major public health issues cannot be based on secret information.” Any thorough investigation should be independent, he continues, and “not just for D.C., but for other communities where lead is a problem.”

Greenville, N.C., is just such a community. In March 2004, John Morrow, director of public health in Pitt County, which encompasses Greenville, wanted to find the source of lead in a blood-poisoned infant, 1-year-old Conner Jackson. Inspectors had looked all over Jackson’s house but failed to find a source. As the child’s blood lead climbed higher, Morrow, who had heard about the D.C. lead crisis, started to wonder if water could be the source of Conner’s blood poisoning. Conner’s health was good, but Morrow wanted to head off any problems in the future.

Morrow turned for advice to experts in Washington. He found materials on the Web from Tee Guidotti, director of occupational medicine and toxicology at George Washington University and the Washington water utility’s paid advisor on lead. Information from Guidotti downplayed the role of water. “These all indicated to me that drinking water lead and blood lead are not related,” says Morrow.

It wasn’t until 11 months later, in February 2005, when Conner’s mom, Laura Jackson, showed Morrow a letter from the Greenville water company saying that her lead levels were high, that water was even considered as a possible source. When inspectors did sample the water, they found it contained an unsafe amount of lead. Ironically, Conner’s blood lead stayed high after he stopped drinking the water.

It now appears that food cooked in the water had become laced with minute particles of lead solder. Tests conducted on pasta cooked in the water revealed that a single serving had more lead than a dime-size chip of lead paint. Over a year after Connor’s problem was identified, the Jacksons finally stopped using the contaminated tap water for cooking and Connor’s blood lead finally started to come down.

Just as it did in D.C., the lead from solder got into the Jacksons’ tap water because the local water utility switched water treatment to comply with the EPA’s Disinfection Byproducts Rule. This caused the water to attack solder in the Jacksons’ home. Greenville water treatment plant manager Barrett Lasater says that although the EPA’s new rule had indirectly caused the lead problem, he had to solve it on his own. “We made these changes to reduce disinfection byproducts. We had no idea they would affect lead,” he says.

Morrow, the public health official, was also surprised by the experience. “It was a new education to me to find out that what I thought about lead in drinking water wasn’t the case,” he told Environmental Science and Technology magazine. “Particles of lead are the real issue. They are just like chips of paint and they can get into the water and elevate blood lead levels,” he added.

Following the Greenville experience, North Carolina now requires health inspectors to sample tap water when they look for lead. Thanks to this common-sense change, public health officials in Durham linked a child’s lead poisoning to drinking water just a month after his problem was identified. An inspection of the child’s house found unsafe levels in tap water and no other source in his mother’s apartment, according to Durham County health officer Marc Meyer. Further testing found elevated lead in dozens of Durham homes. Drinking fountains at eight schools were disconnected when sampling found high lead there.

An apparently minor difference in Meyer’s sampling procedures compared with those of the water authority may explain how the city water passed the compliance monitoring and yet was responsible for the child’s lead poisoning. The faucet that had the high lead values had an aerator or faucet screen that was clogged with lead solder particles. When water came out of the tap, some of these small particles got into the water. Meyer was able to pick this up because the Health Department took samples with the aerator on.

“We kept the aerator on because we wanted to get a real-world sample that reflects what people are drinking,” says Meyer. But the water company took the aerator off when it sampled for EPA compliance testing. Salon’s inquiries to other water companies reveal that taking the aerator off before sampling water is not uncommon. The aerators were taken off for water sampling in the D.C. school system during that city’s crisis and water samples have been collected in Providence, R.I., and Boston with the aerator off.

Lead solder, banned in the mid-1980s, is generally considered a widespread but minor source of lead in drinking water. Over time, scientists have believed, the solder gets coated with mineral films that form a barrier between the water and the solder. But evidence from Durham, Greenville, Washington and other places shows this assumption to be false.

Virginia Tech’s Edwards has found chunks of lead solder in the screens at the end of faucets in all these places in the wake of a change in water treatment. When these particles get trapped behind a faucet screen, they are constant sources of high lead at the tap because flowing water grinds them against the faucet screen and scrapes off bits of the particles, just like carrots on a grater. Last month, the EPA started advising water companies to keep the aerator on when they sample tap water for lead. Some water companies are also advising customers to check and clean their faucet screens.

Morrow says his firsthand experience of water as a source of lead worries him. “I am concerned that infants may be the ones who would most likely be affected by particulate lead from a water source and we as a nation are not doing a good job of screening these infants to identify if the problem even exists,” he says.

Edwards says that public health officials will continue to ignore the risk of lead in water, and that the CDC and the EPA will downplay the risk. But as the case in Washington, D.C., proved, the misinformation can no longer be ignored. “Now that we know the agencies were wrong and the science was right, we can stop debating whether lead in water is a real public health concern, and start determining how to better detect and mitigate the hazard,” he says.

But the results of thousands of blood tests that measured lead contamination in children were missing from the report, potentially skewing the findings and undermining public health. Further, the CDC discovered in 2007 that many young children living in D.C. homes with lead pipes were poisoned by drinking water and suffered ill effects. Parents wondered whether the water could have caused speech and balance problems, difficulty with learning, and hyperactivity. Yet the health agency did not publicize the new findings or alert public health authorities in D.C. or other federal agencies that regulate lead, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or Housing and Urban Development.

“This is a disaster of accountability from CDC’s point of view,” says John Rosen, a pediatrician and national expert on lead poisoning at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. “This raises troubling questions about CDC’s complicity in passing on dubious data — and further questions about why CDC did not publicize the 2007 results more broadly.”

CDC scientists and press representatives did not respond to requests for an explanation about why the results were not widely publicized. George Hawkins, director of the District Department of the Environment, in Washington, says he became aware of the 2007 study only on April 2 this year, when Salon showed him an abstract of the study. Scientists from other agencies, including EPA and HUD, also say they were never told about the results. “CDC never told us,” says an EPA scientist, “and they never asked our help or any other water expert’s help when they did their studies. That’s a shame and a waste, because when it comes to lead in water, you need engineers, chemists and health people to figure it out.” The scientists requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Salon raised questions in 2006 about the influential 2004 CDC report of lead contamination in the D.C. area. New scrutiny of CDC’s work has been sparked by a scientific study published in January that contradicts CDC’s conclusion of minimal harm. Environmental engineer Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech, and pediatrician Dana Best of Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, used Best’s data for children’s blood-lead levels and found a jump in high-level results among kids who were infants and toddlers from 2001 to 2004. The authors conclude that hundreds, possibly thousands, of children were adversely affected.

Edwards and Best raised further health concerns about the 40,000 Washington children who were either in the womb or using formula during the crisis, for whom health effects are expected to be the most severe. These children (now 4 to 9 years old) are at particularly high risk for future health and behavioral problems linked to the lead exposure.

In February, a D.C. resident filed a $200 million lawsuit against the D.C. water company, claiming that lead-contaminated tap water poisoned his twin sons as infants, causing them to have ongoing learning and behavioral problems. The D.C. Inspector General is investigating the reasons behind the apparently conflicting results of the two CDC reports.

Mary Jean Brown, head of the CDC Lead Poisoning Branch and principal author of the 2004 study, acknowledges that thousands of blood tests were lost and not included in the study. But she defends the paper’s conclusion — that children’s exposure to lead and consequent harm was slight — on the grounds that only low-level test results were lost.

In a written memo to Salon, explaining the missing data in the 2004 report, Brown writes that the issue became apparent in 2004. The D.C. Health Department had reported testing the blood of 15,755 children in 2002, 18,038 in 2004, but only 9,765 children in 2003. When questioned, D.C. Health Department staff attributed the gap, according to Brown, to a commercial laboratory that failed to submit some test results in the last quarter of 2003, a year when lead levels in the water were high. Specifically, the lab was said to have omitted results below 10 micrograms per deciliter. (This is CDC’s current level of concern and a level that many pediatricians and public health experts classify as lead poisoning.)

Brown accepted this explanation. She states that the highest results in 2003 were reported accurately and that a comparison with blood-lead trends in the city suggests that the loss of low-level results did not introduce a bias in CDC’s analysis.

“This is just a circular argument, and it doesn’t wash,” says a government scientist who requested anonymity. “When CDC learned the data was missing, someone could have called the lab and asked for it. If it was the lab’s mistake, they would have sent the data,” the scientist adds.

Edwards, who examined the data used by CDC for the 2004 report, says that numerous high results were also omitted. Since 2004, he has made a number of attempts to question CDC scientists about apparent problems with the 2004 study. In 2007, Edwards filed a complaint of scientific misconduct with the CDC, alleging that Brown must have known about serious flaws with the data but failed to acknowledge them when writing the 2004 CDC report.

In a message to James Stephens, CDC’s associate director of science, he wrote, “Why is it that every child I have personal knowledge of, who had a strong chance of having elevated blood lead from water, is either deleted or otherwise misrepresented in the data that CDC has and used for this publication?” Edwards did not receive an answer. In March 2008, Stephens wrote to Edwards, informing him, “We have examined CDC’s role in the study and have found no evidence of misconduct.”

CDC scientist Jaime Raymond presented the 2007 results at the American Public Health Association’s 2007 annual meeting in Washington. The study used data from a total of 22,981 children under 6 years old who lived in Washington from 1998 to 2006. Twenty-nine percent of the children lived in houses with lead water pipes and were more likely to have contaminated tap water; the rest lived in houses without lead pipes.

Starting in 2001, when the lead levels in the city’s drinking water soared, this CDC study shows that the number of kids with high blood-lead levels (above the CDC line of concern) also increased — and the problem is more severe for kids living in the lead pipe houses. The number of affected kids went down in 2004 as the lead in water decreased. Raymond and colleagues showed that the link between the water and the lead was strong and couldn’t be explained by other factors.

“Why has CDC kept quiet about these results?” asks Yanna Lambrinidou, president of Parents for Nontoxic Alternatives, a D.C. activist group “It makes no sense if they are concerned about public health. Are they trying to cover up the harm that lead contaminated water caused in D.C.?” Raymond would not respond to any questions posed by Salon.

Bruce Lanphear, a pediatric epidemiologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who has studied lead effects on children, says, “It is critical to investigate how and why these earlier studies failed to show any increase in children’s blood-lead levels.”

The House Science and Technology Committee Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee is beginning an investigation into CDC’s handling of the D.C. lead crisis. Subcommittee chair Brad Miller, D-N.C., wrote the CDC on March 13, requesting all “records that indicate possible, probable or actual forgery, fabrication or other intentional misrepresentation of data,” concerning lead in the water.

“It would be easier to understand CDC’s nonchalance about losing almost half the results for 2003 if its conclusions were consistent with what other scientists found,” Miller says. “It’s also difficult to understand why the loss of so much data didn’t merit a caveat or even a footnote in CDC’s report.” He adds, “If the CDC tells parents that they shouldn’t worry about their children’s health, its evidence had better be rock solid. It’s hard to win back lost trust.”

1. Call your water company and ask if there are lead pipes or lead service connections in the distribution system. Then ask about your house. The company should be able to tell you or at least tell you they are not sure. Lead pipe inventories can be unreliable. Also, if you had plumbing work done before 1986, you probably have lead solder, perhaps the biggest source of lead in drinking water nationwide. There are also rare cases in which plumbers used lead solder illegally after 1986. Be sure and ask your plumber about it.

2. Find out if your childs school or day care has tested each faucet for lead in the past few years. If not, push them to test, especially if the water company has changed its treatment process significantly.

3. Test your water yourself by using an inexpensive kit from a company like Clean Water Lead Testing. Kits usually come with complete instructions and samples for both first and second draw water, which is necessary to detect potential problems with lead pipes.

4. At home, use a lead filter like those made by Pur or Brita. In fact, many types of filters can be attached to your faucet. Pick a filter based on how much water you use and your preference. The brand is not important, but check the label to make sure the filter is certified by the National Sanitation Foundation.

5. Once every two weeks clean the aerators on your faucets. Lead deposits are often dark gray or dark red, but relatively harmless particles of rust or degraded rubber can also look like this. Use Leadcheck or similar lead-test kits sold at most hardware stores to see if these particles contain lead. If so, call your water company and use a NSF-certified lead filter.

6. Run your taps before drinking or cooking with the water. If your first or second draw water has lead above about 5 parts per billion, there is a chance of a problem, but it can usually be solved by letting the water run two or three minutes. If your first draw water is above 15 ppb, you might need to do additional sampling to determine how long to flush your water, or whether you have to buy a lead filter. In general, five minutes of flushing is sufficient to eliminate lead hazards as long as the aerator is clean.