Any certainty that residents of Washington state wouldn’t need to worry about lead in our drinking water — as the residents of Flint, Michigan, have had to endure — has evaporated with recent stories from across the state that testing has found high levels of lead in water from home taps in Tacoma and in 34 other water systems across the state.
Is your mouth feeling a little dry?
While long replaced in home construction and in municipal water supply systems, a legacy of bits of lead pipe remains buried deep and unseen in systems across the country.
Last week, the The News Tribune in Tacoma reported that high levels of lead were found at four homes, the problem linked to a section of lead pipe that connects water mains to some homes’ supply lines. Tacoma Water officials believes that as many as 1,700 of their 92,000 customers could be affected. Tacoma, and later Seattle, while they continue testing, advised their water customers to run their taps for two minutes before using the water if a particular tap hadn’t been used in the last six hours.
Everett Public Works also announced last week that it is retesting its water, but did not issue the same advice to run taps. Everett, which supplies water to about 80 percent of the county, has not found high lead levels in its system during previous tests.
But lead has been found in as many as 34 smaller, rural water systems, USA Today reported in March, including Tulalip Bay Water District No. 1. The levels of lead found in the Tulalip system were measured at 16 parts per billion, just over the 15-parts-per-billion standard that the federal Environmental Protection Agency considers as requiring action. Other water systems in the state were much higher, including a Pasco water district where lead was measured at 270 parts per billion. For comparison, about 90 percent of 271 homes tested in Flint had an average level of 27 parts per billion.
Lead’s dangers cannot be dismissed. There is no known “safe” level of exposure. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, even at lower levels of exposure, lead produces a spectrum of injuries to the body including high blood pressure, kidney disease and reduced fertility. In children lead can affect brain development, causing reduced intelligence and attention span, behavioral changes, antisocial behavior and reduced success in school.
Years after political battles were fought to remove lead from paint and gasoline, we now must more closely examine the water that we drink, cook with and bathe in.
On the same day that Tacoma’s lead problem was reported, legislation was proposed in the U.S. Senate that would provide $70 billion over the next 10 years for grants, loans, tax credits and other efforts to fund work to remove lead pipe and other sources of lead from water systems and assist schools and communities dealing with the effects of lead poisoning. The bill also would establish nationwide requirements for states to test for lead in water systems and to monitor and report elevated blood-lead levels in children.
The legislation, co-sponsored by 25 senators, including Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, should be considered a public health imperative, but it would have the side-benefit of aiding the economy by creating jobs. Supporters of the act said that every dollar spent on upgrading the nation’s water systems will add $6 to the gross domestic product.
In recent years, states, rather than the federal government, have been given greater responsibility for ensuring that the water we drink and use in our daily lives is clean and safe, which has resulted in a range of successes and failures.
In Michigan, Flint’s water supply was switched from Detroit’s system to the Flint River in a cost-cutting move. The acidity level of that river’s water caused more lead to leach from pipes, a condition that wasn’t properly monitored nor responded to for months.
Washington state’s Department of Ecology is now in the process of updating its clean water rules and is reviewing public comments regarding a set of water quality standards, prior to federal review and adoption.
Regulation, testing and monitoring of water supplies, from the local level on up to the federal level, is a necessity, and not something that we should allow to be done on the cheap.
It’s something to think about the next time you fill a glass of water for a child.
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