In the spring of 2003, home inspectors from the District of Columbia's Department of Health came to Andy and Shelli Bressler's century-old house in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood, looking for lead. Like 300,000 young children in the U.S. each year, the Bresslers' 2-year-old twins had elevated lead in their blood, which their doctor picked up during a routine checkup. Lead affects neurological development in children, and twins Adam and Casey had taken a long time to reach milestones such as walking and talking... Then, in January 2003, Bressler read in the Washington Post that thousands of homes in D.C. had high lead in their drinking water. The problem constituted one of the worst episodes of water contamination in U.S. history and signaled a potential crisis in metropolitan areas across the country. In Washington, tens of thousands of people unwittingly drank tap water contaminated with lead for several years; in a few cases, the tap water contained enough lead to be classified as a hazardous waste. When tests confirmed that their tap water contained high lead levels, Bressler says, "we immediately stopped drinking and cooking with tap water. Finally, the boys' lead levels came down." To this day, officials involved in the D.C. crisis contend that no one was significantly harmed by D.C.'s lead problem. But Salon has recently learned that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the "no harm" conclusion has been falsely represented. During the crisis, the city's Water and Sewer Authority and Health Department sent inspectors to the homes of children with elevated blood lead to look for the source. At a 2004 congressional hearing investigating the causes of the exposure, D.C. water authority general manager Jerry Johnson testified that in every case the assessments showed that water was not the source of the child's lead exposure. But a recent examination of the assessment reports reveals that water is the sole source of the blood poisoning in some homes and that assessors found high levels of lead in tap water in many other homes. The reports were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by Virginia Tech environmental engineer Marc Edwards, a leading authority on water corrosion, who first called attention to D.C.'s lead problem. Since then, Edwards has been conducting his own investigation of the crisis and has established a clear connection between lead-contaminated water and elevated blood lead levels in some D.C. children. "The assertion that no one was harmed in D.C. contradicts decades of scientific research on dangers of lead in drinking water," he says... [In] Greenville, N.C...John Morrow, director of public health in Pitt County, which encompasses Greenville, wanted to find the source of lead in a blood-poisoned infant, 1-year-old Conner Jackson. Inspectors had looked all over Jackson's house but failed to find a source. As the child's blood lead climbed higher, Morrow, who had heard about the D.C. lead crisis, started to wonder if water could be the source of Conner's blood poisoning... Morrow turned for advice to experts in Washington. He found materials on the Web from Tee Guidotti, director of occupational medicine and toxicology at George Washington University and the Washington water utility's paid advisor on lead. Information from Guidotti downplayed the role of water. "These all indicated to me that drinking water lead and blood lead are not related," says Morrow. It wasn't until 11 months later, in February 2005, when Conner's mom, Laura Jackson, showed Morrow a letter from the Greenville water company saying that her lead levels were high, that water was even considered as a possible source. When inspectors did sample the water, they found it contained an unsafe amount of lead. Ironically, Conner's blood lead stayed high after he stopped drinking the water. It now appears that food cooked in the water had become laced with minute particles of lead solder. Tests conducted on pasta cooked in the water revealed that a single serving had more lead than a dime-size chip of lead paint. Over a year after Connor's problem was identified, the Jacksons finally stopped using the contaminated tap water for cooking and Connor's blood lead finally started to come down. Just as it did in D.C., the lead from solder got into the Jacksons' tap water because the local water utility switched water treatment to comply with the EPA's Disinfection Byproducts Rule. This caused the water to attack solder in the Jacksons' home. Greenville water treatment plant manager Barrett Lasater says that although the EPA's new rule had indirectly caused the lead problem, he had to solve it on his own. "We made these changes to reduce disinfection byproducts. We had no idea they would affect lead," he says... Following the Greenville experience, North Carolina now requires health inspectors to sample tap water when they look for lead. Thanks to this common-sense change, public health officials in Durham linked a child's lead poisoning to drinking water just a month after his problem was identified. An inspection of the child's house found unsafe levels in tap water and no other source in his mother's apartment, according to Durham County health officer Marc Meyer. Further testing found elevated lead in dozens of Durham homes. Drinking fountains at eight schools were disconnected when sampling found high lead there... Edwards says that public health officials will continue to ignore the risk of lead in water, and that the CDC and the EPA will downplay the risk. But as the case in Washington, D.C., proved, the misinformation can no longer be ignored. "Now that we know the agencies were wrong and the science was right, we can stop debating whether lead in water is a real public health concern, and start determining how to better detect and mitigate the hazard," he says.
