Construction projects could be exposing New Orleans residents to lead in their water, the city inspector general has found. It’s only the latest of several reports documenting failings of the city’s water monitor.

City of New Orleans / Via roadwork.nola.gov

New Orleans residents may have consumed lead in their drinking water as construction around their neighborhoods shook toxic metal loose from aging pipes under the ground. The city’s water monitor, the Sewerage and Water Board, failed to alert citizens that such work could cause lead spikes in the tap water and tell them how to protect themselves, the New Orleans Office of Inspector General said in a report published on Wednesday. The oversight is “an imminent risk to public health,” New Orleans Inspector General Ed Quatrevaux told BuzzFeed News. “This is a very, very serious problem and we need leadership.” This year, the city and the water board began the first phase of a historic $2 billion overhaul of New Orleans’ infrastructure, with plans to rip up and rebuild roadways and cut out aging lead pipes to fit in newer plastic conduits. That effort is expected to span at least the next least eight years, building on steady renovation since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The city is also undertaking a 135-mile FEMA-funded lead-pipe replacement effort, which is about 20% complete. The new report is the first part of a survey of the SWB’s water-monitoring activities. The inspector general focused on the issue after the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan, made news in 2015. Like Flint and most American cities, a majority of New Orleans water pipes are made of lead. Chemicals added to treated water have coated those pipes with a protective layer that usually keeps lead from dissolving into the water. But researchers have found that running heavy road rollers near pipes, or doing replacement work close by, shakes loose the protective coating — and some lead with it. Many studies, including a 2013 Environmental Protection Agency survey of sites in Chicago, have found high water-lead levels in pipes disturbed by construction or repair. “We should not allow city governments to cut lead service pipes in front of people’s houses exposing them to a horrific levels of exposure,” Marc Edwards, a professor of civil engineering at Virginia Tech who has worked in water-lead monitoring for decades, told BuzzFeed News. “If it’s not criminal it should be.”



“If it’s not criminal it should be.”

The New Orleans water board did inform residents of water outages during construction or replacement work, but rarely warned about the risk for elevated lead exposure, OIG investigators found after reviewing public notices posted by the water board and interviews with its staff. In an interview with BuzzFeed News in June, SWB Executive Director Cedric Grant confirmed that there was a policy to inform residents about construction taking place near their homes. “We have a very extensive outreach program, on this Capital Program, that includes public meetings, social media, direct mailers — the entire gamut — door knockers, the works,” Grant said. He did not specify whether this included information about possible lead exposure. When city workers replace old lead pipes because lead levels higher than EPA standards have been detected, they are required by law to tell residents to expect a rise in lead levels in their water, suggest ways they can protect themselves from exposure, and test the water after work is complete. But the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule, the regulation dictating the responsibilities of city water utilities, does not extend this requirement to cases in which the work is routine, or “voluntary.”

“They can come, create a massive spike of lead that goes into your house that poisons your family, and legally they don’t even have to tell you they did it,” Edwards said.

City of New Orleans / Via roadworks.nola.gov Planned road or pavement work in New Orleans.