Remember when this happened?
I was living in D.C. when this story broke. We switched to spring water for drinking. Expensive, and maybe not necessary, but seemed the least we could do at the time to protect ourselves.
The discovery of widespread lead contamination in Washington, D.C. drinking water resulted in a U.S. Congressional investigation that damaged the scientific reputation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), left thousands of children with lifelong health risks, and led to a re-evaluation of the use of chloramine in public drinking-water systems.
2001
In 2001, more than half the water samples taken from 53 DC-area homes under the procedures required by the EPA's Lead and Copper Rule showed levels of lead exceeding the national standard of 15 parts per billion (ppb).
2002
The first media attention came in late 2002, when the Washington City Paper ran an article about a resident of American University Park whose water tested six to 18 times the EPA Lead and Copper Rule's action level. DC Water And Sewer Authority (DC WASA) found that homes in its service area with lead service lines averaged five times the EPA limit for lead during a year-long period. The results were unexpected; the EPA scientist overseeing DC's water suggested that drought conditions might have raised the alkalinity levels of the Potomac River, leading to a change in the pH of the water. As a result, WASA was required to start replacing seven percent of the district's lead service lines each year until the levels dropped below 0.015 milligrams per liter. At the time, about 23,000 WASA customers had lead service lines.
2003
After Seema Bhat, a water quality manager at WASA, told her superiors at the agency and at the EPA about the lead levels and warned that federal guidelines required aggressive action, she was fired by the agency. A federal investigator found that she had been improperly terminated
2004
In January 2004, the Washington Post reported that the mayor and several D.C. Council members had not been informed of the elevated lead levels. The Washington City Paper said that Carol Schwartz, the councilmember who chaired the Committee on Public Works and the Environment, was not informed of the lead issue until that newspaper contacted her during the last week of January 2004. Early communications from WASA limited the health advisory to pregnant women and small children in homes with lead service leads, but later tests showed the high lead levels were also present in homes with copper service leads.
At an oversight hearing before the House Committee on Government Reform in early March 2004, Marc Edwards testified that his studies showed the change from chlorine to chloramine was the cause of the elevated lead levels. He stated that the chloramine-treated water was leaching lead not only from the old lead lines, but also from brass fixtures in homes.
Letter to President George W. Bush
On March 23, 2004, Anthony A. Williams (the mayor of the District of Columbia) and Carol Schwartz (chair of the DC Council's Committee on Public Works and the Environment) wrote a letter to President George W. Bush, asking the federal government to reimburse WASA $24,093,700 and the District of Columbia $1,730,401 to cover expenses from the lead contamination. The letter justified the request for full reimbursement by saying "the regulatory decisions of EPA appear to have generated these costs" and that it would be "inherently unfair" for taxpayers and WASA customers to pay those costs. In 2005, President Bush proposed cutting the EPA's budget by almost a half-billion dollars, mostly from clean-water programs. He wanted to decrease spending on replacing aging water facilities by 83 percent.
Other cities investigated
In 1999, an EPA survey estimated that the United States's drinking-water systems were in need of $150 billion worth of repairs over the following 20 years. However, in April 2004, an EPA spokesperson told the Washington Times that "high lead levels are not a pervasive problem". At a Congressional hearing that month, the EPA testified that it had no current information on lead levels in 78 percent of the nation's water systems, and that as many as 20 states had not provided any data.
2005
By January 2005, a year after the high lead levels were publicized by the Post, advocates were calling for the firing of local and federal officials involved in the issue, saying that they had done too little to fix the problem. Eric Olsen of the Natural Resources Defense Council said that officials "have fallen down on the job" because thousands of residents still had unsafe water. The group Lead Emergency Action for the District called for an overhaul of WASA's management, an independent study of needed improvements to the water system, stronger laws, and action from the EPA. "We want fines and a criminal review," said Olsen.
There is much, much more to this story:
See the full WIKIPEDIA article here.
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