News Coverage
Lead still lurks in some homes' water
Published July 3, 2004
Fixer-upper houses with antique pipes. New homes with fancy brass faucets. Both could share the same lurking menace: lead in the drinking water.
State and federal regulators report no widespread threat from water contaminated with the toxic metal, whose effects include damaged kidneys, miscarriages and stunted intelligence in children.
But the taps in some South Florida homes contain lead levels many times higher than authorities consider safe -- even when the water utilities meet all government rules.
The problem doesn't discriminate by income: Nearly 9 percent of tested homes showed unsafe lead levels in Wellington, one of Palm Beach County's wealthiest municipalities, according to the county health department.
The worst home contained nearly six times the lead level that triggers increased scrutiny from regulators.
Jupiter showed unsafe lead levels in more than 8 percent of tested homes, by as much as 4.4 times the threshold.
But both water systems fell well within federal lead limits, which allow as many as 10 percent of homes to exceed the threshold before requiring utilities to take action.
Regulators also gave clean bills of health to 15 other water systems in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties whose most recent lead data were examined by The Palm Beach Post. Those systems, plus Jupiter and Wellington, serve more than 1.1 million residents combined.
Each year by July 1, utilities nationwide must report to customers on the health and safety of their drinking water.
A home's lead problem frequently originates in the home itself, not in the water-supply system, regulators say. Utilities often try to reduce that hazard by adding anti-corrosion chemicals to the water.
Even so, environmentalists complain that the EPA's rules are too lax, allowing untold numbers of people to drink lead-tainted water.
"Up to 10 percent of the homes can have extraordinarily high levels, and the system as a whole can be considered to be in compliance," said Richard Wiles, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group in Washington, D.C.
Wiles said lead levels similar to those found in some South Floridians'homes are "not a public health disaster. But we don't think that's water they should drink."
In drinking water, lead may leach from pipes or solder in homes built before 1986, when Congress imposed limits on lead content in plumbing fixtures.
Those limits didn't take lead completely off the market, however.
"People still buy fixtures for their homes that have lead solder in them," said Mike Hambor, operations supervisor at the county health department. "They find some antique that they like and say, 'Hey, this looks neat, let's put it in our house.' "
Even new fixtures can pose a danger, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warns. Laws still allow brass faucets and other fixtures to contain as much as 8 percent lead. For the first few years, those fixtures can slough off unsafe lead levels.
"Some homes can be 75 years old and still be fine," said Ken Rearden, utilities director in West Palm Beach. "Some homes can be 15 years old and have a problem."
In Jupiter, all the problem homes in the most recent tests were built between 1983 and 1987, water plant operator Mark Cantor said. They might be old enough to have been built with lead solder, but they're new enough that it hasn't finished leaching.
The town reported the results to all homeowners whose water was tested, Cantor said.
In Wellington's most recent lead tests, in 2002, only three of 34 samples exceeded the federal lead threshold -- only one was by a wide margin, said Bill Reese of ARCADIS Reese, Macon and Associates, consultant to the village's utility department.
"It sounds like an anomaly," Reese said.
Because it meets all federal guidelines, Wellington must test for lead only every three years.
For homes with unsafe lead levels, regulators say, the simplest fix is to let the faucet run for a minute or two before taking a sip. That will get rid of lead-tainted water that has been sitting in the pipes. Some filters might help, too, as long as they catch the water after it has passed through any lead-tainted fixtures.
The EPA says only 4 percent of medium and large water systems nationwide, and only 2 percent in Florida, exceeded federal thresholds in the past four years.
One of those was Port St. Lucie, which exceeded the limits in the first half of 2000 but has sharply decreased lead levels since then. Port St. Lucie solved its lead problems by increasing the amount of anti-corrosion chemicals it adds to the water, city lab technician Gary Smith said.
Lead contamination normally doesn't originate with the water utilities, except in older cities that still have lead pipes, said Chris Thomas, drinking water chief for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta.
Lead has caused a scandal during the past year in Washington, D.C., where utility managers failed for months to alert residents and elected officials about lead levels more than 20 times the federal threshold.