InsideSources

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — After the Flint, Mich. lead water crisis, cities and towns across the country are looking to replace their drinking water pipes. Many communities are looking at plastic pipes as a safe, easy, cost-effective solution. Yet, the alternatives might not be as safe as people think. Two experts detailed the possible health risks plastic pipes pose at a public meeting in Cambridge, Mass. on Tuesday.

The city just across the Charles River from Boston is starting the process of replacing their old pipes, which have been around for more than 100 years. The Cambridge Water Board held an open forum at the Walter J. Sullivan Water Treatment Facility and invited Andrew Whelton, environmental engineer and professor at Purdue University, and Joan Ruderman, a biologist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, to discuss their research with residents.

Cambridge is looking to implement cured-in-place-pipe (CIPP) water infrastructure repair technology to replace their current pipe system. CIPP involves felt liners being injected with resin and cured inside existing pipe, essentially a pipe-within-a-pipe.

“Plastics are being used across the country for a number of different technologies,” Whelton said, and they’re commonly being used for drinking water pipes “because you don’t have to dig up and remove that pipe. You chemically manufacture a pipe within a pipe.”

The technology has existed for several years, but cities and towns have only recently started implementing CIPP in their water systems.

While there are benefits to replacing existing pipes with plastic, like an improvement in water pressure or better water clarity, it is possible for the CIPP technology to fail, leading to negative health effects. In some of his research, Whelton found that the plastic pipes, which are supposed to last between 20 to 50 years, only lasted for nine years.

“What happened was when they [piping contractors] went in to spray the plastic coating, the plastic coating basically didn’t have the strength and slumped down to the bottom of the pipe,” he said. “You’re supposed to see equal thickness of coating around the pipe.”

When that happens, Whelton said, the chemicals could leech into the drinking water that goes to businesses, schools, and households. The chemicals mixing with the water could be used by organisms to grow; it can transform into disinfected byproducts not meant for human consumption, and it can change the pH level of the water making it not safe to drink.

The material that is used to create the plastic pipe is usually an epoxy resin, which is mostly made from bisphenol A (BPA), commonly found in most household objects like eyeglasses, DVDs, and water bottles. The negative health effects of BPA on humans has been well-documented, leading many companies to create BPA-free objects.

Ruderman said BPA has the potential to mimic estrogen in women, interfere with testosterone, and lead to abnormal prostate growth or changes in mammary glands, which could lead to cancer.

“The effects of BPA on human development, fertility, cancer, and behavior are only just starting to be understood,” she said.

The problem is that there aren’t enough studies being done in the United States to seriously examine what health issues could arise due to BPA from plastic pipes leeching into drinking water.

Ruderman said there are some countries in Europe, including Germany and Sweden, that have restricted or discouraged the use of epoxy-based materials in drinking water pipes. However, they are commissioning more studies on the health effects than the United States.

“The plastic industry has done a terrible job about identifying the chemicals that leech out into the water and understanding what happens to them, at least publicly,” Whelton said.

There hasn’t been any complaints or issues of lead contamination in Cambridge’s water supply, but a Boston Globe report published on the same day as the meeting found that more than 1,000 Massachusetts schools had at least one sample showing lead levels above regulatory limits, with some cases rivaling or exceeding levels measure during the crisis in Flint. The Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group recently gave the state a “D” letter grade for its efforts to prevent lead from entering the water at schools and day-care centers.

The District of Columbia is still grappling with lead contamination in drinking water. A Flint whistleblower told InsideSources last year that D.C.’s lead water crisis between 2000 and 2004 would have a long-term impact that’s significantly worse than what happened in Michigan. Yet, lead pipes remain in the system.

If Cambridge decides to move forward with CIPP, Whelton said the city should come up with specific requirements and tests that contractors should meet in order to implement the technology. He suggested they hear bids from several companies and to push back if the contractors try to make any changes to their plans.

Residents who attended the meeting had concerns about the potential health effects of the CIPP technology, asking why the city would move forward on this even if there was just one concern about the health impacts of the plastic pipes. Others said they would be willing to pay more taxes to implement a better system that wouldn’t involve plastic.

Ann Roosevelt, president of the Cambridge Water Board, tried to assure residents that this was only the first step in a long process before the city approves of any project.

While the experts at the meeting focused on the possible health effects of CIPP technology, there was no speaker who advocated to keep the pipes the city currently uses. Plastic pipe representatives were sitting in the audience, but largely remained quiet during the whole discussion.

Attendees were able to voice their opinions during the Tuesday forum, but when someone asked if city residents would get to vote on the measure, Roosevelt said they would ultimately not get a say in the matter since the Water Board is given statutory power to make its own decisions.

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SAN JUAN, P.R. – When Rep. Luis Gutierrez pulled up to a house in the Candelaria neighborhood of the Toa Baja municipality in Puerto Rico, you wouldn’t have recognized him as a congressman. He was wearing a light pink, short-sleeved button-up shirt with black dress pants, loafers — not his typical suit attire he’s used to wearing in Washington D.C. with a pin identifying him as a member of Congress.

But Gutierrez is not the representative for Puerto Rico. He’s a Democrat from Illinois’ 4th Congressional District in Chicago, which has a significant Puerto Rican and Mexican constituency. Gutierrez is of Puerto Rican heritage and lived on the island during his high school years.

Gutierrez wasn’t campaigning when he went to the outskirts of San Juan, P.R. on Tuesday. He attended a community meeting with Toa Baja residents and environmental group advocates to discuss the landfill crisis and to see how it’s impacting people with his own eyes.

“It’s not unusual to have a congressman at a community hearing,” said Mark Magaña, president and CEO of GreenLatinos, a Latino environmental and conservation group, during the meeting. “He’s spent his whole career fighting for people and he’s a proud Puerto Rican. He is known as someone who will get dirty, get arrested, and speak to the president as he would you or I. It doesn’t surprise me at all that he’s here.”

He mostly sat in a plastic chair during the meeting, listening intently to the 20 residents and activists list the ongoing problems with the landfills and asking questions occasionally to better understand the situation.

“This is my island and one day, I want to come back here,” he told reporters in Spanish after the meeting. “But there needs to be a place to come back to. I wanted to see with my own eyes what was going on here and to tell the people they are not alone. I care that the people here don’t have the same quality of life as the people in Chicago. That’s not right.”

The municipalities and companies that run these landfills are not properly maintaining the site and have broken several federal regulations put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to residents and environmental activist groups.

A view of the Toa Baja landfill from the Candelaria neighborhood, just outside of San Juan, P.R. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz)

Puerto Rico Limpio, a citizen’s action group for safe trash disposal, published a scathing report in August that said 19 out of the 27 active landfills in Puerto Rico are non-compliant with federal rules and the EPA has ignored these problems.

In 1994, the EPA gave Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board local control over the landfills. Then, without EPA approval, the EQB changed some of its rules and regulations to make it easier and more profitable to dump trash at the landfills.

When the EPA found out about it in 2005, they threatened to take control away from the EQB if they did not bring their landfills into compliance. To this day, many of the landfills are over capacity and are not following EPA rules, such as requiring a plastic lining between the garbage and the soil, covering the trash each night and properly maintaining leachate lakes — the dirty water runoff from the trash.

“The municipalities and landfills are located in low-income, rural and low-educated areas,” said Hiram Torres Montalvo, cofounder of Puerto Rico Limpio. “We exposed them and everyone can see that this landfill [Toa Baja] should be closed today. It’s time for [EPA Administrator] Gina McCarthy to end the dereliction of duty to the people of Puerto Rico.”

The EPA announced last week that they would close the Cayey and Arroyo landfills in Puerto Rico within two to three years. Torres Montalvo said those closures aren’t enough and the EPA is just making false promises again. Several other landfills were supposed to have closed in previous years, but they remain operational today.

Adelaida Gonzalez lives in the home where the meeting took place. She said she lived there for 44 years and the landfill has been there for 30 years. When they started to build it, she voiced her concerns to authorities, but no one seemed to listen.

“The smell of the landfill was really unbearable for over a year,” she said in Spanish. “It is almost impossible for us to live here. Mosquitoes at night are alarming due to the Zika virus. We do not know what to do. Some of the people here have cancer and it’s not helping.”

How the landfills are affecting people’s health is one of the greatest concerns of environmental advocates. There has been virtually no testing on air quality or water contamination from seepage leaking into communities drinking water supply, the group alleges.

Dogs were able to pass by the unfinished fence near the Toa Baja landfill and were playing in the trash. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

After the meeting, Gutierrez went to the fence to see the landfill up close. There were trucks bringing in more garbage to dump and other trucks were moving the trash around. A small leachate lake, of dirty trash water, was visible near the fence and could create the perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes and the Zika virus.

The Centers for Disease Control diagnosed about 16,000 Puerto Ricans with Zika, including at least 1,000 pregnant women. For expecting mothers, the concern with Zika is that their babies could be born with the birth defect microcephaly, which causes infants to be born with shrunken heads and other health issues.

As many as a quarter of Puerto Ricans may contract the Zika virus, which has spread at alarming rates.

An unfinished fence near a resident’s home in Toa Baja. The landfill is right next to their house and the space between the fence and the natural mountain is big enough for people, dogs, and other animals to pass through. (Photo Credit: Kyle Plantz/InsideSources)

Gutierrez also went to another side of the Toa Baja landfill, where the fence stops right near a resident’s home. There is enough space between the end of the fence and the start of the mountain that people and animals can easily fit through it.

Trucks were passing by, dogs were playing in the trash and sewage water and the smell was significantly worse.

Gutierrez said the federal government should take back responsibility of the crisis.

“The government is failing the people of Candelaria,” he said. “If you had to live next to this landfill, is the government really protecting them? I would have to say no. We have to tell the federal government to assume its responsibility to them.”

Congress recently approved $1.1 billion in federal funding to fight the Zika virus. It’s unclear how they will spend it and how much Puerto Rico will receive to stop their outbreak.

And Congress also just passed in June the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as PROMESA (promise in Spanish), which aims to tackle the island’s billions of dollars of debt.

But Gutierrez has been very outspoken about his disapproval of PROMESA, saying the appointment of a fiscal control board could lead to another Flint, Mich. water crisis.

“You can see the manipulation. It’s a pretty word, but if they aren’t going to take responsibility of it, then what’s the point?,” he said. “When I make a promise, it’s for something good, not bad. You should have the same standards as they do in Chicago. It just doesn’t make sense.”

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More than a decade after a water-contamination crisis that exposed thousands of Washingtonians to toxic levels of lead, there remain at least 20,082 “identified” lead pipes on public and private property in the nation’s capital, according to information released Thursday by the District of Columbia water authority.

DC Water told InsideSources some of those pipes identified as lead may actually be reclassified once they are physically inspected. But the 20,082 figure — 12,302 lead pipes in public space plus 7,780 in private space — is still more likely to go up than down because 1) homeowners don’t have to report lead lines to the water authority and 2) there are an additional 16,276 public property lines in the water authority’s records identified as “unknown.”

Despite the confirmation that the city still has thousands of lead pipes, water officials were quick to note that tap water in the system has for years met all federal Lead and Copper Rule safety standards set and monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The quality of drinking water in the nation’s capital is under intense scrutiny again this week after Washington’s lead-contamination crisis of 2000-2004 came up during Capitol Hill hearings on Flint, Michigan, where more than 100,000 residents were exposed to lead-contaminated water after the insolvent city switched suppliers to save money in 2014.

Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor credited with sounding the alarm on toxic water in both Washington and Flint, testified Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the long-term health impact of lead-tainted water in the nation’s capital will be “20 to 30 times worse” than what’s happened in Flint.

That assessment, the Virginia Tech professor said, is based on lead contamination levels in the District’s 2000-2004 crisis three times higher than the levels seen in Flint, with 6.5 times as many people in Washington exposed for twice as long. Edwards is one of the authors of a 2009 study that calculated as many as 42,000 District children were exposed to the contaminated water during the worst years of the crisis and are at risk of future health and behavioral problems linked to lead.

After Edwards told InsideSources this week that he has lingering concerns about the thousands of lead pipes that remain in the District’s water system, InsideSources’ Publisher Shawn McCoy set off a Twitterstorm of criticism on Thursday — mostly from media types — by teasing an upcoming story with: “DC RESIDENTS: Do not drink your tap water. Story breaking soon.”

DC Water spokesman John Lisle called the tweet “highly irresponsible.” But McCoy said the water authority’s record of deception during the 2000-2004 crisis (the EPA ruled in 2004 the water authority knew about dangerously high lead readings as early as 2001, but withheld the information) doesn’t inspire much confidence. Especially after Edwards, the Flint whistleblower, told InsideSources DC Water had been slow to respond to his latest batch of Freedom of Information Act requests.

“I read the story, and I have no intention of drinking D.C. tap water again,” McCoy told The Washington Post in an email.

In his email to InsideSources on Thursday, Lisle said the water authority is “very upfront about the dangers of lead in drinking water, which we consider to be a serious health risk.”

DC Water General Manager George Hawkins, who was hired in 2009, provided his own update on the water authority’s lead remediation efforts last week in a letter to Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s delegate in the House of Representatives.

Lead levels in Washington water have declined since 2004 due to the addition to the water supply of orthophosphate, a “food-grade” anti-corrosion chemical, Hawkins wrote.

“In the District, drinking water is essentially lead-free when it leaves the Washington Aqueduct’s treatment plants,” Hawkins wrote. But lead “can still enter drinking water that travels through a lead service pipe, lead solder or household plumbing containing lead.”

Hawkins notes in his letter that while the anti-corrosion treatment “has proven effective at reducing the presence of lead in water, the complete removal of all lead sources remains the fail-safe method to prevent lead poisoning.”

In 2004, at the height of the D.C. crisis, the water authority — then known as the Water and Sewer Authority (WASA) — announced a $300 million plan to replace all public lead lines — then estimated at 23,000 — by 2010.

According to the information DC Water released Thursday, six years after that deadline passed, there are still more than 12,000 lead pipes carrying water on public property.

The renewed interest in the District’s water problems comes as lawmakers threaten to turn the crisis in Michigan into a partisan political fight, with Democrats calling for the resignation of Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, and Republicans insisting President Barack Obama’s EPA chief Gina McCarthy needs to be fired.

But the country’s problems with lead-tainted water systems extend far beyond Flint.

USA Today, citing an analysis of EPA data, reported on Thursday that “about 350 schools and day-care centers failed lead tests a total of about 470 times from 2012 through 2015.”

According to the paper, “That represents nearly 20% of the water systems nationally testing above the agency’s ‘action level’ of 15 parts per billion.”

The Virginia Tech professor credited with sounding the alarm about poisoned water in Flint says the District of Columbia’s own long-running problems with lead exposure dwarf the crisis in Michigan.

One day after appearing before Congress to blast federal officials for their handling of the Flint crisis, Marc Edwards told InsideSources that District of Columbia residents were exposed to higher levels of lead-tainted drinking water for a longer period of time than the Flint residents he and his team have been helping over the past year.

Asked Wednesday to compare the health emergency in Michigan and a similar, years-long crisis that unfolded in Washington beginning in 2000, Edwards said by email the long-term health impact of lead-tainted water in the nation’s capital will be “20-30 times worse” than what’s happened in Flint.

Contamination levels in D.C. peaked in 2004 at three times the levels seen in Flint, with 6.5 times as many people exposed for twice as long as in Michigan, Edwards told InsideSources, calling the Washington crisis — and the way it was handled by local and federal officials — “a nightmare.”

Edwards, a civil and environmental engineer, has been involved in water-quality issues throughout his career and before Flint was best known for bringing attention to lead contamination in the District after he began finding unusually high lead levels in area homes beginning in 2003.

He was one of the authors of a 2009 study that calculated as many as 42,000 District children were exposed to the contaminated water during the worst years of the crisis, 2000 to 2004, and are at risk of future health and behavioral problems linked to lead.

Edward’s 2009 study contradicted public assurances issued by federal and D.C. health officials who acknowledged record levels of lead in city water but downplayed impacts on public health. A congressional investigation a year later confirmed, as Edwards had already predicted, that remediation efforts then underway by the District of Columbia’s Water and Sewer Authority (WASA, now known as DC Water) could make lead contamination worse in some homes.

Edwards told InsideSources he has lingering concerns about the estimated thousands of lead pipes that remain in the District’s water system.

DC Water officials, asked to comment for this story, requested more time to provide a detailed response to Edwards’ remarks. But in a standing feature on the water authority’s website, General Manager George Hawkins defends the quality of the District’s water supply in a letter to consumers: “Testing has shown our water to comply with federal lead standards since 2005, and the results have even improved over time. This is good news, and we believe it is the result of changes in water treatment that reduce the release of lead from pipes and other sources.”

Elsewhere on the site, the authority has an anti-bottled water page, complete with an animated YouTube video, that encourages consumers to drink DC Water’s “safe, affordable, high-quality” tap water instead.

Another page features tips on reducing exposure to lead, including using only filtered water for drinking and cooking water, letting the cold tap run for two minutes for any water intended for consumption and regularly checking and changing aerators in faucet heads for sediment.

Appearing Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Edwards ripped the Environmental Protection Agency, testifying that the EPA’s handling of the Washington lead crisis created the conditions for Flint.

“EPA and other agencies caused a similar lead-and-water crisis in Washington, D.C., from 2001 to 2004 … they completely covered that up for six years, and wrote falsified scientific reports. And it created a climate in which anything goes across the United States, anything at all to cover up health harm from lead in drinking water.”

“I was not surprised when Flint occurred, I was expecting a Flint to occur,” Edwards told Republicans and Democrats on the committee.

The Oversight hearing comes amid lawsuits, several investigations and a huge public outcry over revelations that the more than 100,000 residents of Flint — including between 6,000 and 12,000 children — were exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water after the city switched its water supply to save money in 2014.

In January, President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in the city and two weeks later the EPA official in charge of the region, EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman, stepped down under heavy criticism.

Michigan officials, including Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, who appointed the financial manager to oversee the insolvent city, have also come under fire.

Both Democratic presidential candidates have called for the governor, who is set to testify Thursday before the Oversight Committee, to resign over the state’s handling of the disaster.