Lead on tap

An alarming return of lead in drinking water is being ignored by the EPA and municipal officials.

By Rebecca Renner

Read more: Politics, News, Lead

Nov. 27, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- In the spring of 2003, home inspectors from the District of Columbia's Department of Health came to Andy and Shelli Bressler's century-old house in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood, looking for lead. Like 300,000 young children in the U.S. each year, the Bresslers' 2-year-old twins had elevated lead in their blood, which their doctor picked up during a routine checkup. Lead affects neurological development in children, and twins Adam and Casey had taken a long time to reach milestones such as walking and talking.

The inspectors came in search of the usual suspects of childhood lead poisoning -- paint chips, dust and soil. After several hours of searching, they found some paint, but it was in good condition and the boys hadn't gone near it. "The inspectors agreed that the paint didn't seem to be the problem, so we asked about the water," says Andy Bressler, who had heard that D.C.'s water had a lead problem in the past. "They told us that the D.C. water was fine."

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."

Next page: "Amazingly, they had evidence that children were harmed"