Cid Standifer, The Plain Dealer

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Tests of Cleveland’s tap water indicate that it contains little or no lead, a toxin that is particularly dangerous to a child’s developing brain.

Yet few of the locations sampled by the city-run water utility are in Cleveland’s poorest neighborhoods, where city and state data show children are at the highest risk for lead poisoning.

Cleveland Water also relies on samples in many cases that city and water department employees have collected from kitchen faucets in their own homes, a practice not prohibited by regulators.

Cleveland Water says it has followed all state and federal rules and is confident its water is safe system wide. That might not be how Clevelanders who live in neighborhoods with no testing feel in a post-Flint, Michigan, water crisis-era, where trust that tap water is safe has eroded, especially in poor and predominantly black communities.

“I think there’s a distinction between being compliant and being equitable,” said Bianca Butts, manager of climate resiliency and sustainability at Cleveland Neighborhood Progress. Butts also serves on the US Water Alliance’s Cleveland Water Equity Taskforce.

That larger water testing conversation, she said, can create opportunity for education and awareness in neighborhoods and also for larger institutions to show they can be more transparent and more proactive in establishing trust as a two way path.

“If water testing isn’t free already, how can we work together to remedy that,” she asked.

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Rachel Dissell, The Plain Dealer

Rigourous testing

Cleveland’s public water system, which serves more than 1.5 million customers in 80 Northeast Ohio communities, is required by federal and state law to routinely test drinking water from home faucets for lead and copper, two metals that pose danger when ingested, especially for young children and pregnant women.

The tests are designed to capture water in conditions most likely to identify a problem: during warm weather, from homes with lead service lines and drawing water that remained in the pipes for at least six hours.

Cleveland Water’s results, based on its compliance tests, in recent years are so good that it now must test only 50 taps every three years, down from 100 annually.

“I’d stack our lead numbers up to anybody’s,” Scott Moegling, water quality manager for the utility said.

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Taking a closer look

The Plain Dealer mapped and reviewed 78 addresses Cleveland Water provided as locations for its required lead and copper testing. Collection kits were distributed this summer and 56 samples have been returned as of last week.

The Plain Dealer’s analysis found that:

A third of the addresses are in Cleveland but only two on the list were in high-risk areas where 20 percent or more of children were found to have elevated levels of lead in their blood in recent years.

Half of the Cleveland addresses listed are associated with a recent city employee or contractor, or a Cleveland Water employee, including several water plant managers.

Cleveland Water officials say a lack of testing in high lead-poisoning neighborhoods isn’t intentional.

It’s more likely a result of not having volunteers from those areas helping with the sampling, which has to be done in accordance with increasingly strict standards, Moegling said.

Cleveland Water Commissioner Alex Margevicius said when routine testing for lead and copper started more than two decades ago, detailed data and maps that show lead exposure weren’t available, as they are today.

Many of the same homes have been part of the testing pool for a decade or longer, he said.

That’s good, Moegling said, because it allows for consistency in measuring the effectiveness of water treatment methods.

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Plain Dealer file

Water treatment methods

Since Cleveland started regularly adding a chemical called orthophosphate to the water, levels of lead in tap water tests have dropped nearly 90 percent and haven’t exceeded the EPA “action level” of 15 parts per billion. (One part per billion would be like a pinch of salt added to a 10-ton bag of potato chips.)

Orthophosphate binds to lead to form a protective film on the inside of pipes and plumbing fixtures. It helps prevent the metal from leaching into water and minimize exposure throughout the whole system.

Those results have held even with increasingly stringent state conditions for the sample collection, which include bottles that allow for natural flow, water that has been in pipes for at least six hours and locations with known lead pipes or lead solder.

“We’re looking for lead at the worst sites, in the worst conditions at the worst time of year,” Moegling said. “If there’s lead, we want to find it.”

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Plain Dealer file

Whose line is it anyway?

Cleveland Water is responsible for the service lines which mostly connect at the curb. Property owners are responsible for the line that runs to the home and the plumbing fixtures inside. Water treatment is supposed to protect the entire system.

You can look up your address if you are a Cleveland Water customer to see if your lines are known to be lead, likely to be lead or not likely to be lead.

Also, here are some simple ways to check and see if the pipes in your home contain lead.

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Cleveland Water

Neighborhoods not tested

It’s the neighborhoods not tested that drew the interest of Chantez Williams, a former city environment commissioner turned activist.

After about two decades in the health department, Williams left the city in 2015, after reporting revealed that his understaffed unit hadn't kept up with investigating the sources of lead in homes where children were poisoned.

After working briefly in St. Louis, where a state public health program allowed anyone to send in water samples to be tested for lead for free, he returned to Cleveland.

Williams said he knew from his public health work that certain areas of Cleveland routinely were among the those with the highest percentage of poisoned children in Ohio, including blocks in the Hough and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods.

Health officials believe most of that poisoning is due to lead dust and chipping and peeling paint in homes.

“I wondered,” Williams said. “Are they testing the water there?’”

A map on Cleveland Water’s website showed Williams that 50 to 80 percent of the city service lines that delivered water to homes in the hardest hit neighborhoods were made of lead. That’s wasn’t even considering the age and condition of the pipes and fixtures in the homes.

Was there a reason for concern? Williams said he didn’t know. But if there was a disparity, there needed to be proof.

Williams created an ioby campaign, like a social justice Go Fund me, in hopes of collecting about $10,000 to work with community members to collect water samples to test.

“I figured we could follow the data,” he said.

So far, the campaign has gotten little traction, with just $20 donated.

Williams said he also approached hospitals and foundations with his idea, and while there was interest, nobody has committed support.

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Carlos Osorio/AP file photo

Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor from Virginia Tech, has helped residents in many cities, including Flint, pictured above, to test their own water.

Asked if it was usual that tap water in the most vulnerable communities wasn’t routinely tested, Edwards answered: “Unfortunately it is.”

Poor communities have lower breastfeeding rates and more infants on reconstituted formula mixed with tap water, which can be a great risk, he said.

But the only way to know for sure if there’s a problem is to test.

Pregnant women and infants under a year old aren’t routinely tested for lead, though some obstetricians recommend screening for mothers who live in older housing.

“Concerns about the ingestion of lead are the same no matter what the source, and while the primary route to exposure to kids in our community is [deteriorated] paint and soil, we should aim to address all routes of exposure,” Dr. Aparna Bole, chief of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine for University Hospital’s Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital said.

Dr. Ellie Ragsdale, director of Fetal Intervention at UH, said lead exposure during pregnancy is a concern because the toxin does cross the placenta and is associated with miscarriage, early birth and neurological and brain development issues in babies.

“We do talk with patients about clean and safe water,” Ragsdale said.

Ragsdale said screening of patients who live in at-risk communities hasn’t turned up really high lead levels often.

A small, yet-to-be published study, she said, didn’t find elevated levels of lead in the blood of mothers or the blood collected from umbilical cords at birth.

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Marvin Fong, The Plain Dealer

Old pipes, new demand for information

Cleveland isn’t the only city with antiquated water infrastructure that will inevitably deal with increasing questions about water quality from consumers.

“Flint has changed the consumer perspective forever,” Megan Glover, CEO of 120WaterAudit LLC, a tech company that works with public water systems and school districts to use data to comply with drinking water standards and bolster consumer water testing.

In Flint, public officials told residents their water was safe after the source was switched to the Flint River. It was not, and it took residents testing their own water to prove it.

Water systems will need to fundamentally change how they manage lead, and that usually starts with a data-driven approach that protects consumers in all demographics, Glover said.

Among cities that have adopted that approach is Pittsburgh, which contracts with 120WaterAudit to handle its free consumer and compliance lead testing and two programs that provide water filters when lead service lines are replaced or when lead levels in water exceed standards.

Pittsburgh has offered free lead tests to water customers for about a decade and, before the Flint water crisis, received about 100 requests a year, Will Pickering, communications manager for the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority said.

After Flint, requests surged. Then, compliance testing of Pittsburgh’s water exceeded federal guidelines, likely due to water treatment issues – it wasn’t using orthophosphate like Cleveland. That created more of a demand for testing.

Now, lead test results are sent directly to water consumers and also shared online, where block-level information for more than 7,000 of them can be downloaded from the water and sewer authority web site. At first, most of the requests were from customers in wealthier neighborhoods, but with more outreach that has changed.

Like Cleveland, Pittsburgh had relied on its own employees to do the federally required water testing in their own homes. At the time, it made sense, because it was easier to confirm the home had a lead service line and the employees were more likely to return the samples.

Pickering said that practice was discontinued last year and now all samples are collected from community volunteers, not employees.

There was no indication the sampling wasn't accurate or done properly, Pickering said.

“One of the concerns for us was optics,” he said. “Would you want people testing water when the results could impact their job?”

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Rachel Dissell, The Plain Dealer

Cleveland will work to expand testing pool

For its latest round of compliance testing, Cleveland Water sent out 200 test kits to customers and, after many calls and reminders, had 105 returned.

It’s still a struggle to get the water samples returned, said Pickering, even when the tests kits are requested. The utility is considering incentives to improve this.

Cleveland Water doesn’t currently offer free lead testing.

Instead, it refers customers with concerns to a three-page list of labs certified by the Ohio EPA to test water for a range of contaminants. Testing costs are not included on the list.

Cleveland Water, though, says it can do better and will make efforts to expand its testing pool into the areas not sampled.

“We understand the concern there and that we might need to think about things a little differently,” said Jason Wood, chief of public affairs for the utility.

“We know the water we produce is of the highest quality,” he said. “We want our customers to know that too, no matter where they live.”