Some states, utilities balk at disclosing locations of lead water pipes

Some states and water utilities are balking at the Environmental Protection Agency’s call to post inventory information online about the number and locations of risky lead pipes in their systems, according to a review of documents obtained from 49 states by the USA TODAY NETWORK.

Drinking water regulators in about a dozen states expressed varying degrees of resistance or concerns about the EPA’s directive encouraging water systems to voluntarily give consumers easy access to what utilities know about homes receiving drinking water through lead service lines, a key indicator of whether a home's tap water could be contaminated and whether utilities are complying with testing regulations.

“We do not have the initial materials inventory from systems readily available and do not intend to spend valuable staff resources sifting through microfilm to find this information,” South Dakota’s water regulatory agency told the EPA, saying in its March 7 letter that it would instead post details about the subset of homes where each utility takes its water samples.

USA TODAY NETWORK reporters collected letters from 49 state agencies responding to the EPA’s call for action. Requests are still pending for letters from New Jersey and the District of Columbia.

Some major water utilities told USA TODAY they also have concerns, including customers' privacy. The bottom line: It’s unlikely water system inventory information will be widely available online anytime soon.

“What the EPA is asking for is critically important,” said Yanna Lambrinidou, a drinking water safety watchdog and affiliate faculty member at Virginia Tech. She called resistance expressed by some states “highly troubling” and an impediment to the public knowing whether utilities are testing water from the right customers’ taps, meaning those with the lead service lines that are most likely to have lead-contaminated water.

States' lead enforcement letters to EPA

Even after Flint, Mich., switched to corrosive river water that drew lead out of pipes at an alarming rate, the city's water system passed its EPA-mandated water tests in part because the city wasn't testing at homes with risky lead service lines, as required. On Wednesday, criminal charges were announced against two Michigan state water regulators and Flint's supervisor of its lab and water quality.

Most contaminants can be filtered out at a water treatment plant. But lead usually gets into drinking water at the end of the system, as it passes through lead pipes coming onto individual properties and into homes.

That's what makes thorough tracking and transparency about the location of lead service lines important. If utilities test water at homes that have little or no lead in their plumbing, the results are unlikely to find contamination and can give a false sense of safety across the system, as they did in Flint, Lambrinidou said.

“Accountability, up until today, has almost been completely absent because the public has been left out of the equation of protecting ourselves from lead in water,” Lambrinidou said.

Beyond Flint: Excessive lead levels found in almost 2,000 water systems across all 50 states

A USA TODAY NETWORK investigation last month revealed that almost 2,000 water systems serving 6 million people nationwide have failed to meet the EPA's standards for lead in drinking water. But people in thousands more communities deemed in compliance with EPA's lead rules have no assurance their drinking water is safe because of the limited and inconsistent ways water is being tested, the investigation found.

It's an issue with significant consequences because there is no safe level of lead exposure. Even at low levels, lead can cause reduced IQs, attention disorders and other problem behaviors in children. In adults, lead exposure is associated with kidney problems, high blood pressure and increased risks of cardiovascular deaths.

Federal regulations required water systems in the early 1990s to determine what kinds of materials their pipes were made of in at least some portions of their distribution areas.

The EPA, as part of its effort to restore public confidence in the safety of U.S. drinking water, sent letters Feb. 29 to every state, calling on their drinking water regulator to “work with” utilities to post on the web those documents – as well as any updates or maps of lead service line locations.

Many states told the EPA that water systems were never required to file their inventories with state regulatory agencies, which enforce federal drinking water regulations. The utilities merely had to certify that they had done the survey work in order to identify a limited pool of high-risk homes with lead service lines and lead plumbing to serve as tap water testing locations.

The very largest water systems only needed to identify 100 sampling locations, and federal regulations allow smaller systems to test at even fewer sites.

Got lead in your water? It's not easy to find out

Water regulators at the Virginia Department of Health told EPA that representatives from its state’s water utilities have “expressed a number of concerns … primarily about the expenditure of a substantial amount of staff and financial resources to complete this request,” according to the state’s March 25 letter. North Carolina and North Dakota also expressed concerns that gathering and posting inventory records would require significant effort.

“The placement of voluminous information gathered from these materials evaluations, most of which were conducted more than 20 years ago, on either the water system’s website or on our agency’s website would be overwhelming,” North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality said in its letter.

Some states, like Kansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania, have raised privacy concerns about publicly posting the locations of lead pipes or addresses where utilities test water for lead. Other states, like Florida, sent letters to the EPA that didn’t specify whether they had encouraged water systems to post inventories online.

The EPA said it is reviewing states’ response letters. “EPA believes these actions are essential to restoring public confidence in the safety of our drinking water,” the agency said in a statement. The information the EPA wants posted will help “demonstrate that (water utilities) have conducted a thorough materials evaluation and understand the locations of lead service lines in their system.”

Rather than call for water utilities to post inventories and any updated maps online, some state regulators have told the EPA they are asking for different types of information to shed light on lead pipes in the systems.

South Dakota regulators already have created and posted online reports for each water system listing the locations of water sample sites and whether they are served with a lead service line or other lead materials. “We included the address so that people could look at the table and see if their home was near one of these sites,” giving clues about their own home’s pipes, said Mark Mayer, the state’s drinking water program administrator. “We felt that that was as good or better than what the EPA was asking for.”

EPA delay in releasing danger level for lead in water raises questions

Indiana regulators are surveying their state’s water systems, asking for each to provide a tally of their lead lines. But the survey forms don’t give any location information. The Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s April 6 letter doesn’t say whether it plans to ask utilities to post inventory details, locations or any maps of lead line locations. The department didn’t respond to USA TODAY’s questions about this.

North Carolina, which balked at posting 20-year-old inventories online, said it instead will ask water systems to update certain forms, including those covering construction materials, plans for selecting water sample test sites and spreadsheets of test locations. But rather than post the information online, the forms will be “placed in our files, and will be available for public review, upon request,” the state’s letter said.

Jessica Godreau, chief of North Carolina’s Public Water Supply Section, told USA TODAY her department lacks the resources to scan massive amounts of information and post it on the Internet. But she said the updated forms, which the state expects to receive by sometime this summer, would be easily available to anybody who asks.

While many states told the EPA they’ll encourage water systems to post their original inventories and some said they are asking for updates, only a few states set deadlines or indicated efforts mandating sharing the inventories with the public, the USA TODAY NETWORK review found.

• Mississippi: Starting June 1, the state will require water systems annually submit an inventory or map of lead service lines and lead plumbing in their systems. The information will be posted on the state’s website.
• Illinois: The state told federal officials it will require water systems to update and refine their inventories of lead service lines. Although not specified the state's letter, Illinois Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson Kim Biggs told USA TODAY the information will be required to be posted on the Web.
• Ohio: Governor John Kasich and state water regulators recently proposed state legislation to require all water systems to identify and map areas of their distribution systems that “are known or are likely to contain lead services lines.” Systems “will be required to submit a copy of the map to the Ohio EPA and we will work with water systems to ensure this information is posted on state and local websites,” Ohio’s letter said.
• Delaware, Idaho, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada and Utah: These states said they are asking their water systems to update their inventories. Kansas, noting possible “homeowner privacy concerns,” said: “Posting of that updated information will also be left to the discretion of the water systems.” 

Despite such concerns, some municipal water systems already are posting detailed maps online showing the locations of lead service lines. Massachusetts regulators, in their March 29 letter, noted that the Boston Water and Sewer Commission’s online inventory information could serve as a model for others. The City of Cincinnati has posted similar information online that allows customers to look up information about whether they have a lead line, the Ohio EPA said in its April 1 letter.

Boston's water system has been posting maps of lead service lines since 2006. The system used a water meter replacement program during 2002-2004 as an opportunity to also catalog what individual water service lines were made of, said James Steinkrauss, the commission’s deputy general counsel. While the system sent letters to customers in 2005 notifying them if they had a lead service line, Steinkrauss said the public maps allow renters and others to know if a property is known to be served by a lead pipe.

Lead taints drinking water in hundreds of schools, day cares across USA

The maps list addresses but not any customer names or other account-specific information, he said. “We haven’t had a lot of negative feedback.”  As a government agency, the commission’s documents are subject to public disclosure. “We have a certain level of comfort we can make public records available to the public,” he said.

How far the EPA’s suggested and voluntary encouragement will go remains unclear. Officials at some major water companies told USA TODAY that while they are in favor of transparency, they worry about balancing customer privacy with public disclosures.

“While we respect and understand the intended benefit of making materials inventories and locations of lead service lines public via our website, we are equally and concerned about the negative impacts this could have,” Aqua America, which provides water and wastewater services to about 3 million people in eight states, said in a statement to USA TODAY.

Those issues include “inappropriate use of this information by third parties” and making customers hesitant to participate in sampling programs because of privacy concerns. “We believe we can achieve the same results by directly and privately noticing customers who have lead service lines,” Aqua America said.

Officials at American Water, which provides water and wastewater services to about 15 million people in 47 states and Ontario, Canada, said many water systems don’t have detailed, accessible inventories of customer connection pipes. Much of that information is on about 3 million, decades-old, 3-by-5 paper index cards – one for each drinking water connection, said Mark LeChevallier, the company’s director of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship.

American Water has been in the process of digitizing and geocoding the information. LeChevallier expects the work to be done at all of its systems in about six months. But each card has varying amounts of information about whether a line is made of lead, he said, and some have no information about the line’s materials.

While the digitizing project will make it easier for American Water customers to get information about their own service lines, the company is concerned about customer privacy implications of publicly releasing maps or locations of lead lines.

“We would like to have a discussion with the state agencies and EPA around the issues of how do we actually present this information to the public,” LeChevallier said.

Read full coverage of the USA TODAY NETWORK's ongoing investigation of drinking water safety: lead.usatoday.com

Contributing: About two dozen journalists from newsrooms across the USA TODAY NETWORK gathered records from each state. Follow this link for a complete list of the contributors and to see the states' letters.