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Water Infrastructure Bill Passes U.S. Senate

The Water Infrastructure Funding Transfer Act would give states facing public health crises from lead in drinking water the flexibility to make a one-time transfer, up to $100 million, of the federal funds in their Clean Water State Revolving Fund to their Drinking Water State Revolving Fund for projects that will remove lead from drinking water. Read More.

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University Park, IL schools shut off drinking fountains due to lead contamination issues

The water samples drawn Aug. 8 at Crete-Monee Middle School found numerous school drinking fountains that tested well above the EPA action level, including one that was 90 times above the level on first draw and 30 times above the level after a 30-second flush, according to district-supplied data. Read more.

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Lead Filters In NJ Failed as Was the Case in Flint, MI

Residents in Flint, MI said over and over that the filters were not reliable to keep lead out of their tap water. EPA the state and some scientists said that activists were just creating a crisis that didn’t exist.  Well, now we see the same thing in NJ. Read about the problem.

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New York Students May Be Drinking More Lead Than Is Safe

Currently, the action standard for lead for New York schools is 15 ppb— but research from the NRDC suggests that this is too high, as no level of lead intake is safe for children. They propose lowering New York’s lead action standard in schools to 1 ppb, in order to protect children from the affects of lead poisoning. <Read more>

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EPA Strengthening Lead Dust Standards to Protect Children

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced last Friday that the EPA is strengthening standards for lead dust, especially in schools and work places, throughout the county. Their updates include reducing the amount of dust considered to be a hazard in an attempt to better reflect the amount of lead that can impact children. These new standards focus on lead dust on floors and on windowsills. <Read more>

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Backyard Talk

Is Drinking Water Safe in the United States?

by Summer-Solstice Thomas, CHEJ Science & Technology Intern 
In the small town of O’Brien, Texas, residents drank water that violated drinking water quality standards for months before one resident found out and altered his community. Facing financial stress, the city had switched from a treated reservoir to a groundwater source with violatingly high levels of nitrates to provide drinking water for its residents.
Nitrate pollution usually comes from fertilizers, as in agricultural towns like O’Brien, and can cause methemoglobinemia, or “blue baby” disease in infants. Nitrate levels in O’Brien schools were found to be 40% above EPA standards. Upon hearing the news, many residents switched to drinking bottled water or purchased individual water filters, but not all were financially able to.
O’Brien is just one example of residents suffering from public water quality violations, but they are not alone. In fact, millions of Americans consume unsafe public drinking water everyday.
Is US Drinking Water Safe? 
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US has “one of the safest public drinking water supplies in the world”. Recent reports, however, have challenged that statement. In March, EPA’s Administrator Andrew Wheeler assured that 92% of public water in the US meets EPA standards.
Given that 90% of Americans, or 300 million people, rely on drinking water from a public source, the 8% that doesn’t currently meet EPA standards indicates that over 26 million Americans consume unsafe water daily. Additionally, while the EPA sets legal limits for over 90 drinking water contaminants, ensuring that these limits are not breached is dependent on proper funding and oversight. Based on the 22% decrease between 2009 and 2014 in funding for public water distribution by state and local governments nationwide, it is possible that more than 8% of the nation’s water is unsafe.
Lead Violations
While the CDC has determined that there is no safe blood level of lead for children, the EPA lead rule determines action must be taken if 10% or more of taps sampled have a lead level of 15 ppb or greater. Recently, this rule has come under scrutiny as many companies find ways around the regulation, by selectively testing certain taps, “pre-flushing” or sampling slowly to reduce samples’ lead concentrations.
Additionally, in 2016, CNN found 5,300 US water systems, serving more than 18 million people, to be in violation of this rule. When the lead rule was first implemented by EPA in 1991, 10 million lead lines served public water nationwide. While this number has decreased to 6.1 million lead lines, there are still 15-22 million Americans served by lead lines, predominantly in the Midwest.

Bacterial Violations
Of the 10,000 public systems violating EPA drinking water standards in 2015, 72% of them were bacteria violations. Bacterial drinking water illness outbreaks have been rising since 2000, with 42 outbreaks between 2013-2014, causing over 1,000 cases of illness. Such violations often occur from contamination of water supplies by animal manure from agricultural operations or sewage, causing 16 million cases of acute gastrointestinal illness annually.
Disparate Impact
Violations of water quality are not experienced equally across the nation, and instead they disparately impact communities of color and low socioeconomic status. Research has determined that the prevalence of nitrates and pesticides in drinking water supplies in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s agricultural powerhouse, is significantly higher in Latinx and low-income communities. After the well-publicized water crisis in Flint, Michigan, children residing in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods were found to have greater elevation of blood lead levels when compared to their peers.
water

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Homepage Water News

New Resources Lead & Water Schools or Infrastructure

New EPA Drinking Water Grant Programs
For More Information, Click Here!
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the availability of nearly $87 million in grant funding to assist states, tribes, and territories with improving drinking water. States, tribes, and territories are eligible to receive funding from two new EPA drinking water grant programs established by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN):

  • Under EPA’s new Voluntary Lead Testing in Schools and Child Care grant program, EPA will award $43.7 million in grants to fund testing for lead in drinking water at schools and child care programs. Testing results carried out using grant funds must be made publicly available.
  • Under EPA’s new Assistance for Small and Disadvantaged Communities grant program, EPA will award $42.8 million in grants to support underserved communities with bringing public drinking water systems into compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Funding can also be used for conducting household water quality testing, including testing for unregulated contaminants.

For more information, please visit: https://www.epa.gov/safewater/grants.
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Homepage Water News

MN Preventing Lead Poisoning

It would cost more than $4 billion to get the lead out of Minnesota’s drinking water, but it could bring a 2-for-1 return on the investment.”As we see in many other areas of public health, preventing a health problem is more cost effective than waiting for a health problem to develop and then treating it,” Minnesota Health Commissioner Jan Malcolm said. Read More.

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How This Entrepreneur Is Taking On America’s Water Crisis

Harvard alum, an accomplished entrepreneur, data scientist, and businesswoman, Doll Avant is now taking on America’s water crisis.
Read more.

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Trump Administration Unveil Strategy to Fight Lead Exposure

Today, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler, U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson, and U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Deputy Secretary Eric Hargan unveiled the Trump Administration’s Federal Lead Action Plan to Reduce Childhood Lead Exposures and Associated Health Impacts (Lead Action Plan). <Read more.>