You have no real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier--it may, in fact, be the norm---but because no one has enough data to say for sure.
Five state and local officials in Flint face involuntary manslaughter charges for failing to alert the public to the looming health crisis there. Yet a recent Reuters report found 3,000 geographic areas in the US with lead poisoning rates twice that of Flint. But you would be hard-pressed to determine whether you lived in one of them because the United States lacks the data---and data collection requirements---needed to know for sure whether people are being poisoned by their drinking water. President Trump’s proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency’s could make it even harder to know.
“The data gaps are so huge. It is abominable. We have a huge number of people in this country living completely in the dark,” says Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public health and founder of the public health website ToxinAlert.org.
Some 170,000 public water systems provide water to Americans. The federal government regulates that water under laws like the Safe Water Drinking Act and the Lead and Copper Rule, but leaves it to states, utilities, and property owners to test that water and enforce the laws.
Yet the number of taps that must be tested remains woefully small. The rules require water systems serving at least 100,000 people, for instance, to test 100 taps every six months. The requirements decrease from there. Systems that serve, say, 90,000 people must test just 60 taps. Smaller systems, only five. And certain systems qualify for reduced testing. In some cases, that means testing once every nine years.
“Would you really rely on a sample of 100 people in New York or Boston?” says Feigl-Ding. “In no universe is that going to give you a statistically significant result. That’s just ludicrous.”
Lead is measured in parts per billion, or ppb. If more than 10 percent of a given system’s taps exceed 15 ppb (referred to as the “action level”) the system operator must inform the public of the risk and report the violation to the state, which reports it to the EPA. But some researchers worry that even that threshold is too high and creates a cycle in which water systems worry more about compliance than keeping people safe.
“The system detects violations. It’s not set up to be useful,” says Jeffrey Griffiths, professor of public health at Tufts University. “If you had nothing but lead going straight to your house, nobody would know that, because all that gets captured is there was a violation.”
Griffiths says something as simple as GPS technology could vastly improve the ability of ordinary citizens to monitor their own risk levels. The hurdle to establishing such a system at the national level is each state has the authority to address the problem---or not---as it sees fit. “There’s a common understanding around what water contamination is,” he says, “but the degree to which they are enforced or there’s real help from the state is completely variable.”
Private property owners have no obligation to test their taps, a situation that includes privately owned wells serving small towns across the country. That said, if private property owners do detect lead in their water systems, they must address it. That can quickly get expensive. For that reason, most property owners skip testing entirely, says Angel Hsu, director of the Data-driven Environmental Group at Yale University. (The same problem applies to lead paint, another common cause of childhood poisoning.)
“This problem demonstrates the need for a federal program to underwrite lead clean-up,” Hsu says. “Cash-strapped people and municipal governments do not have the resources necessary to remedy such a broad and persistent hazard.”
The EPA stores much of this data on water contamination, but the Center for Disease Control measures the damage already inflicted on those living with lead in their water. The data there are even patchier. The CDC compiles data on blood lead levels, collected from children 1 through 5 by pediatricians nationwide because lead is most damaging in children. But nothing requires states to report that data, which explains why so much of it is outdated. Several states report no data at all.
“You’re talking about only 25 to 30 states that consistently report blood lead levels. And poor and rural people who don’t go to the doctor are less likely to be reported,” says Feigl-Ding. “By the time kids have elevated lead levels, gosh, it’s almost too late.”
Feigl-Deng created ToxinAlert.org to be a central repository of crowdsourced data about lead and other water contaminants. It aggregates data from the EPA and the US Geological Survey, which measures toxins in groundwater, and adds data from states and independent researchers. The portal allows anyone to order a test and have the results logged on its national risk map.
“It’s a public alert warning system,” Feigl-Ding says. “People can type in your address or zip code and it gives you all the alerts around the area.”
The goal is to give ordinary citizens the ability to hold local leaders accountable, because often, as was the case in Flint, the problem goes beyond inadequate information to a lack of political will to address the problem. A recent USA Today investigation found seven water systems in Ohio failed last year to notify the public of heightened lead levels within 60 days last as mandated by the EPA. Several more in Arizona that reported unsafe water levels to the government years before only alerted the public after USA Today began its investigation.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schruette determined last week that local health officials' failure to alert the public to a Legionnaires' disease outbreak warrants charging them with involuntary manslaughter. He alleges that negligence led to the death of Robert Skidmore in December, 2015. “Involuntary manslaughter is a very serious crime and a very serious charge,” Schruette said during a news conference. “It holds significant gravity and weight for all involved, and I don’t take this lightly, not one bit.”
In most cases, that negligence usually comes down to a lack of resources and concerns over the cost of addressing the problems, problems that could be exacerbated by President Trump desire to cut the EPA's funding by 30 percent because federal funding helps defray the cost of testing. “If state agencies are struggling right now, what are they going to do when their budgets continue to go down?” says Lynn Thorp, national campaign director for the non-profit Clean Water Action. “That’s the gap I’m most freaked out about.”
Testing water and mitigating contamination is expensive, Griffiths says, but states must consider the repercussions of poisoning an entire generation of people. Lead poisoning can cause developmental delay in children, reduced IQ levels, anemia, and hypertension in adults. “These are kids who are not going to be as smart as they would have been,” Griffiths says.
Given that, you can consider spending the money for more and better testing an investment in the future.
