The Poisoned City, page 11
Thanks to the organizing of a broad coalition of community members and reporting by the Washington Post, the lead contamination became public news in 2004. That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report that claimed no one had been harmed by the high lead levels. The study was influential enough to be used by communities around the country to justify why they, too, failed to act urgently when lead showed up in their water. Why would they if no less an authority than the CDC, the nation’s leading institute of public health, said that lead in drinking water didn’t hurt anyone?
The allowance of some lead under the LCR was the EPA’s way of acknowledging that without adequate funding to rebuild America’s massive lead-based infrastructure, not to mention all the plumbing fixtures in individual homes, there was simply no way to eliminate it completely from drinking water. Only a colossal investment, thoughtfully executed, would make zero tolerance possible. The EPA estimated that it would cost up to $80 billion to replace all of the nation’s lead service lines, while the American Water Works Association calculated it at about $30 billion—or $1 trillion, if we repaired and expanded our old water mains, too.68
This never became a priority. Not yet, at least. In the meanwhile, some communities tried to address the lead problem on their own, mostly focusing on paint. But in places such as Flint, where was the money for upgrades supposed to come from? Federal and state funding for such programs declined, and the resources that did make it to local communities were rarely spent on preventive solutions. It was no coincidence that eight of the ten cities with the highest rates of childhood lead poisoning, as determined by the CDC in 2003, were shrinking cities: Cleveland, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Providence, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore. (The others were Chicago and New York City.)69
To make matters worse, poor people—who tended to be concentrated in older cities—also had less access to health care to help manage the harm done by cumulative exposure. The cycle of deprivation affected African American communities most of all. Between 1999 and 2004, black children across the country were 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead than white children, and nearly three times more likely to have very high blood-lead levels.
No one—not taxpayers, not school districts, not the state, and not the federal government—wanted to pay to fix an expensive infrastructure problem. Therefore, many preferred not to know if the children in their communities were drinking lead in their water. There was no onus to act if there was no proof. It was a twenty-first-century adaptation of the strategy of doubt and denial pioneered by Charles Kettering, Robert Kehoe, and their fellow industrialists.
Despite the particular vulnerability of children, there was no federal mandate for schools and child-care centers to test for lead in their water. Forty-four states did not require it either. Part of the problem was that if testing were mandatory, what would happen when lead was found, as it was in about half the public schools in Newark in 2016?70 Do you install all-new pipes, fountains, and faucets, and, if so, who should pay for it? Do you shut off the school’s water and ask the community to donate bottled water? When Camden, New Jersey, found high levels of lead in the water at its schools—New Jersey is one of six states that do require testing—the fountains were turned off. The district went on to spend about $100,000 a year to supply the schools with water coolers.71
The Washington Post investigation that helped uncover the D.C. lead story also revealed how testing was manipulated all over the nation, in both poor and wealthy cities: Boston, Seattle, New York City, Portland, Oregon, and, as it would turn out, in Flint, Michigan.72 The Lead and Copper Rule relies on utilities to self-monitor their water, and it quickly became common for them to exploit the loopholes in the LCR by, for example, pre-flushing the taps before collecting a sample, drawing water at a slow flow rather than a fast one, and disproportionately testing in places where officials believe there are no lead pipes. All these tactics make the amounts of metals in the water appear to be lower than they really are, helping the utility to get a passing grade under the law. Call it modern-day wizardry. However, even with this rule skirting, about 18 million Americans got their water from sources that had lead violations in the previous twelve months, according to a 2016 report from National Resources Defense Council.73
Lead persistently stays lead. Just as it accumulates in the bones of people, it accumulates in the infrastructural bones of cities such as Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Flint. Today, about half a million children have a dangerous amount of lead in their blood.74 But lead poisoning has never catalyzed a movement the way that polio, for example, did. “In the 1950s, fewer than sixty thousand new cases of polio per year created a near panic among American parents and a national mobilization of vaccination campaigns that virtually wiped out the disease within a decade,” write Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner in their book Lead Wars. “At no point in the past hundred years has there been a similar national mobilization over lead despite its ubiquity and the havoc it can wreak.”75 Perhaps it is because both the contaminant and the health effects are invisible.76
Only a few major cities have replaced all their aging lead-laced service lines. Those that have—such as Madison, Wisconsin, and, just fifty miles west of Flint, the state capital of Lansing—have created a promising blueprint for how communities can act before an emergency happens. But, for now, they have few peers.
6
Citizen/Science
The people in the city of Flint are resilient, and we’ve created our own paths to resolve this problem.
—Claire McClinton (2016)
I.
Though he is barely more than fifty years old, somewhere deep in Marc Edwards there burns the fury of an Old Testament prophet. He is a tall, lanky man—he runs most every day—with brown hair, silver wire-rimmed glasses, and an enviable amount of get-it-done energy. But he carries himself heavily. His temper has become infamous in his field, erupting at the perceived moral failings, hypocrisies, and errors of others.
Edwards grew up on the shores of Lake Erie in western New York when it, the shallowest of the Great Lakes, was a symbol for the emerging environmental movement.1 After decades of bearing the detritus of industry, agricultural pollution, and human sewage, huge swaths of the 9,910-square-mile lake were declared “dead.” When Edwards was five years old, the slick of oils and chemicals on the Cuyahoga River, which empties into Lake Erie, caught fire.2 Dr. Seuss, in his 1971 children’s book The Lorax, imagined a toxic place where “fish walk on their fins and get woefully weary in search of some water that isn’t so smeary. I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”
From his tiny town, where children attended a K–12 school housed in a single building, Edwards remembered the foul smell of the lake and the ominous absence of fish. But, as he would tell the story later in life, he also remembered environmental engineers who worked feverishly to clean up the lake, part of a youthful movement that led to reforms that limited water pollution. The Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency were among the biggest triumphs, debuting not long after the nation celebrated the first Earth Day. Lake Erie had a remarkable recovery. Because it is far less deep than the other Great Lakes, it is still a harbinger for environmental woe, but there was enough improvement to inspire two Ohio State University graduate students to write Theodor Geisel, otherwise known as Dr. Seuss, in 1985. They invited him to Cleveland to see the renewal for himself and asked him to remove the dig from his book. The author declined the trip, but said, “I do agree with you that my 1971 statement in the Lorax about the condition of Lake Erie needs a bit of revision. I should no longer be saying bad things about a body of water that is now, due to great civic and scientific effort, the happy home of smiling fish.” He made good on his promise to take the line out of future editions.3
When the time came for Marc Edwards to choose a major at the state university in Buffalo, he opted for biophysics. Always a contrarian, he did so, he claimed, “mainly to spite” his sister after she told him it “was the toughest major in the school” and that he “wouldn’t be able to hack it.” It certainly was difficult, almost blindingly so. But Edwards made it through, while working on weekends with intellectually disabled adults to help pay tuition. As he neared graduation, he began to think about what to do next. Should he become a veterinarian? Maybe a medical doctor? He even considered becoming a dolphin trainer, until a dolphin broke his ribs.
As he mulled it over, one of the most significant environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century was playing out just twenty miles from Buffalo. It steered Edwards toward his life’s work.
In the summer of 1978, in Niagara Falls, New York, residents of a neighborhood called Love Canal were making national news by protesting the toxic dump they lived on. Love Canal was designed as a model community near the shores of the Niagara River, which links Lake Erie with Lake Ontario. Love Canal’s memorable name came about when an entrepreneur named William T. Love designed a clay-lined canal that was supposed to branch off the river, bypassing Niagara Falls. But the project was never completed. Instead, the area became a dump site in the 1940s and 1950s for about twenty-one thousand tons of chemicals contained in fifty-five-gallon drums, some of which were already corroding when workers put them in the ground. After covering the mess with dirt, the Hooker Chemical Company sold the site to the Niagara Falls Board of Education. The price: one dollar and a signed waiver that excused the company from all liability. The board knew that the site contained dangerous chemicals, including aniline derivatives and benzene, but Niagara Falls was growing fast, and it was in desperate need of affordable land for a new elementary school—which was built right on top of the dump. Soon the school was surrounded by hundreds of new family homes. None of the homeowners were told about the toxins seeping through the ground beneath them.4
Twenty-some years later, vigorous reporting by a Niagara Gazette reporter shed light on what was already obvious to Love Canal residents. Miscarriages, birth defects, epilepsy, asthma, migraines, and cancer were alarmingly common in the neighborhood. So were dying backyard plants, bad odors, and even, after steady rain, the sight of old drums of toxic waste poking through the earth. One resident, Lois Gibbs, emerged as a particularly powerful leader after her son, a kindergartner, developed epilepsy and a low white blood cell count. Gibbs mapped the health problems; led demonstrations; and, along with her neighbors, called for an evacuation of the entire development. New York State finally intervened after studies by the Environmental Protection Agency and the state’s Health Department confirmed that there were toxic vapors in the Love Canal houses. The elementary school closed. Families were evacuated from 239 homes, which were demolished over the next several decades. About thirty more families in the area adjacent to Love Canal were also temporarily relocated.5 In time, a second school was closed, and President Jimmy Carter declared a federal disaster in Love Canal. It was the first time that a man-made emergency had been designated as such. In 1980, as a result of the community’s frontline activism, the Love Canal evacuation zone was expanded to include up to nine hundred more homes.6 Nowadays, the area has been “landscaped into banality,” according to historian Richard S. Newman—a green field, studded with shrubs that block the monitoring wells, surrounded by weedy old driveways and a chain-link fence.7
The Love Canal movement pushed the nation to reflect on how it should reconcile its industrial past with public health and environmental wisdom. Even Jane Fonda’s Workout Book, America’s number-one bestseller for more than six months in 1981, discussed the crisis at length in a chapter called “The Body Besieged.” (Fonda toured Love Canal with Lois Gibbs in 1979, and she also funded a speaking tour for Gibbs.8) In Washington, the Carter administration developed what became known as the Superfund program to pay for the careful and comprehensive cleanup of toxic waste. It required the EPA to find the parties responsible for hazardous waste and force them to clean up their mess. Failing that, the agency could use Superfund money to clean up a site and then refer polluters to the U.S. Department of Justice to recover costs (and then some). Significantly, polluters were liable even if their dumping had been legal at the time.9 By 1983, the first National Priorities List named 406 hazardous waste sites around the country—Michigan had 41, the second most listings—and it eventually added about 1,200 more. The dross of industry had so saturated the environment that by 1996 the EPA was pouring more than $1 billion a year into the Superfund—about 20 percent of its budget.10
Marc Edwards had found his field. The engineers working to solve the Love Canal disaster were heroes, and he very much wanted to be seen as a hero, too. He eventually found his academic home at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, commonly known as Virginia Tech. A land-grant college in rural Blacksburg, it was founded on the principle of solving real-world problems. Its motto is Ut Prosim, which translates as “That I may serve.”
The lead crisis in Washington, D.C., broke open in January 2004. One morning, residents woke up to an alarming headline in the Washington Post: “Water in D.C. Exceeds EPA Lead Limit.”11 There had been elevated lead in the water for years—residents had discovered it, pooled their tests results together to create a database, mapped it, and tipped off the Post—but this was the start of the explosive public revelations. Edwards had been part of the group looking into the issue. He worked on the case as a subcontractor for the EPA, and, shortly before the story became front-page news, D.C.’s water utility offered him a consulting contract. But by that point, Edwards had become so disgusted by its handling of the water problems that he refused it—he felt as if he would be working for the wrong side.12 Edwards continued on as a volunteer.13
His expertise on lead infrastructure and drinking water turned out to be an asset to residents who were pushing for answers. Once the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued its now-infamous report—the one that claimed that no one was harmed by the water, even in homes that had more than 300 parts per billion of lead—Edwards became fixated on refuting it, especially as the report began to be used around the country to justify relaxed standards for drinking water.14 Officials at both the EPA and the CDC disputed his allegations by saying that he was only an engineer, not a public health expert.15
For the galvanized community, the resolution to the D.C. water crisis was slow, iterative, and never wholly satisfying. After the Post began reporting on it, the city’s Health Department launched a massive, albeit piecemeal, campaign to protect people from unsafe water. By 2006, the lead levels had lowered significantly, thanks to adjusted treatment. (Pre-flushing was still used, though, which prompted many to question the test results.)16 There was another uptick when the city began doing partial-line pipe replacements.17 Replacing only part of a service line disrupts the section that remains in the ground. That can cause a spike in lead levels that lasts for months.
Edwards doubled down on researching the catastrophe. Along with other community organizers, he filed endless public records requests over many years to see if the rise in lead levels had, in fact, harmed children.18 It cost his family tens of thousands of dollars in fees, he said, and by his own estimation he gave the crisis about thirty volunteer hours a week. He was met with obstinacy at nearly every step—the CDC and other agencies refused to provide him with information about the community’s blood-lead levels during the years when there was especially high lead in the water. When Edwards sent requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the raw data of the CDC report, he got nothing back, for years. Then the agency sent him a single spreadsheet with a list of anonymized subjects who had been tested—but it didn’t make much sense, because it included people who were tested after the study was published, and only thirteen people who were not drinking bottled or filtered water.
In early 2008, Edwards was finally able to evaluate information from the Children’s National Medical Center. In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology in January 2009, he and his coauthors shredded the conclusions of the CDC’s report. The data proved, as he later described it, “what we’d known actually for two thousand years. Which is, if little kids drink high lead in drinking water, they get lead poisoned. They get hurt.” Hundreds of children—maybe even thousands of them—had been lead-poisoned after being exposed to D.C.’s water during the years of contamination. In the most high-risk area, the number of children with elevated blood-lead levels had more than doubled.19
In 2010, a bipartisan congressional investigation into the D.C. lead-in-water crisis confirmed what Edwards and the frontline community organizers had been arguing for years. Its unequivocal report was titled “A Public Health Tragedy: How Flawed CDC Data and Faulty Assumptions Endangered Children’s Health in the Nation’s Capital.” In 2004, it alleged, while worried residents were demanding answers, the CDC had rushed the report to publication, knowingly using incomplete data to tamp down the public outcry.20 As its senior author wrote in an email to her boss at the time, “Today has been the first day in over a month that there wasn’t a story on lead in water in the Washington Post and also the first that I haven’t been interviewed by at least one news outlet. I guess that means it worked!”21
One of the problems with the rushed report is that it did not mention that many of the residents it observed had long since stopped drinking tap water, so it was dubious to claim that they were evidence of the water’s harmlessness. A large group of children who drank water with very high lead levels were left out of the cross-sectional study. Partial-line replacements were recommended as remedy for the crisis, even though the process is likely to increase the lead content of the water. The congressional report skewered the CDC for not notifying the public about how “most of the conclusions” of its study were totally negated, even by much of the agency’s own research.22
