New York City health officials on Thursday announced initiatives to curb the amount of lead that is still making its way into schools’ drinking water, as an environmental advocacy group totted up the number of public schools whose infrastructure still lets the neurotoxin in.
Officials with the New York City Department of Health and the New York Public School system said they would redouble lead-remediation efforts and assured New Yorkers that school drinking water is safe overall. Contamination to the city’s famously pristine supply can creep in from “solder, fixtures, or pipes in a school’s plumbing system,” the NYC health department said. Faucets are regularly tested, and those with lead-laden water — there is no such thing as a tolerable level — are replaced.
NYPIRG, in conjunction with Environment America, continued its years-long quest to eliminate lead’s incursion by pulling state health department data and found that 42% of the public schools “had at least one water outlet used for drinking or cooking that tested above the state’s standard of 5 parts per billion (ppb) of lead,” the groups said in their report, released Thursday. “That’s over 12,000 water outlets across the Empire State that tests indicate could be exposing schoolchildren to lead.”
The “text and fix” approach has got to go, NYPIRG contended, suggesting instead that the state replace all drinking and cooking water outlets with fixtures that capture lead, most of which “comes from everything behind the walls,” said David Masur, Environment America’s senior New York State advocate, in a press conference.
The city acknowledged NYPIRG’s report and said it was reviewing the recommendations while enhancing its ongoing detection and remediation efforts, “which while effective in a vast majority of schools, can reoccur in isolated faucets. These efforts target these limited reoccurrences and further protect the already high-quality drinking water in schools, which has shown to be safe for students.”
The new plan is to test once a year instead of once every three years, “in addition to completely replacing the fixture,” the city health department noted, adding that New York State’s 5 parts per billion remediation trigger is stricter than the federal minimum level of 15 ppb.
The water system will also be flushed out more often to get rid of any standing water that may have had time to collect lead while kids were away, the city said. Further, the city will install a filter on any “repeat offender” faucets where lead shows up even after remediation and will dig deeper to find the source if a problem continues.
“New York City’s public schools already offer students high-quality drinking water and has taken steps to test and fix any source of lead exposure in school water fountains and other faucets,” NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Alister F. Martin said in a statement. “This announcement marks another advancement in New York City’s decades-long history of reducing sources of lead exposure for all New Yorkers, going even further, ensuring that faucets in schools that continue to show high levels of lead are field-tested, flushed, filtered, and fixed.”