This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Emails obtained by the Guardian show how state environmental regulators were sharply critical of the Philadelphia water department’s (PWD) lead-in-water testing, after media reports questioned the water agency’s methods.

The emails reveal intense pressure on the city’s water department, from both state and federal authorities, to change its testing methods. The emails and formal letters show for the first time the regulatory push to change the PWD, a process that has largely been opaque, even as the state water department reformed some practices following media scrutiny.

Philadelphia’s water department delivers drinking water to 1.5 million people daily. This week, the city hosted the Democratic national convention.

Additional documents obtained by the Guardian show for the first time that when the water department began the lead-testing program in the 1990s, it almost exclusively solicited employees. Previous stories by the Guardian had shown that the department used employees until at least 2008.

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The department has been the subject of intense scrutiny since January, when the Guardian revealed it used outdated testing practices that could diminish lead detected in water. The department recently updated those testing methods, following pressure from clean water advocates after the lead contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan.

However, the water department is still the defendant in a lawsuit that alleges it purposely obscured lead levels in the city. Philadelphia has not breached the federal limit for lead-in-water, 15 parts per billion, since 1997.

Every three years, the PWD was required to test 50 homes with lead plumbing for contamination, but repeatedly failed to meet that 50-home threshold, documents show. Instead, the city’s water department tested large numbers of homes at lower risk for contamination, which in regulators’ words may have “diluted” test results.

Letters and emails from state and federal authorities over roughly two months repeatedly probed the city to re-examine its compliance in the months leading up to the announcement of reforms, the Guardian has learned.

“EPA expects the PWD will modify its homeowner sampling instructions for the next scheduled LCR [lead and copper rule] monitoring period,” read one 26 May letter from the director of the EPA’s region III water protection division, Jon Capacasa.

Another letter sent from Lisa Daniels, head of the Pennsylvania department of environmental protection’s safe drinking water bureau, was “intended to remind you of your responsibilities under the Lead and Copper Rule” and laid out requirements that the city include only high-risk homes in testing.

And in emails between state and federal authorities, the state was deeply critical of the city’s testing methods.

“While the regulations do allow the use of non-Tier 1 sites,” in limited circumstances, “we would have expected a large system such as PWD (that self-reported the probable existence of 50,000 LSLs) to do their due diligence by … taking all steps necessary to locate additional Tier 1 sites,” Daniels, in an email in early May.

Yanna Lambrinidou, a fellow Virginia tech academic, was skeptical of the EPA’s motives for intervention.

“As encouraging as it is to learn that EPA is pushing PWD to comply,” she said, “it seems clear that such action would not have taken place without months of volunteer work by ordinary citizens and the media to uncover PWD’s dishonest practices. This state of affairs, where EPA moves to ensure the integrity of its own law only in reaction to intense public pressure, is unconscionable and unsustainable.”

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To justify testing less high-risk homes, environmental regulators said in an email that the PWD relied on a 16-year-old decision by state authorities to justify failing to meet lead-in-water testing requirements for more than a decade.

Referring to state approval the PWD received in 2000, which the city agency believed justified its lack of high-risk homes in tests, Daniels wrote: “We were not aware of and do not agree with the decisions that were made back in 2000 and 2005.”

Daniels wrote the email in response to Karrie Crumlish, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water branch chief, who said her department was “conducting a review” of Philadelphia’s compliance record. It is unclear whether that review is completed.

The PWD’s spokesman, John Digiulio, said in response to a request for comment: “In May the PA DEP, our primary regulator, adopted EPA-recommended guidelines. PWD is implementing these guidelines in the current sampling program (July to December) and will use these guidelines in our LCR sampling in 2017 and into the future.”

High-risk homes include those with lead plumbing or service lines, pipes made of lead that connect a home’s meter to the main. Philadelphia failed to test the required number of high-risk homes in 2005, 2008, 2011, and 2014, despite the department’s own estimate that 50,000 such pipes exist in the city.

When sites with lead service lines were tested they routinely had higher lead levels, PWD’s internal documents show.

The federal limit for lead is 15 parts per billion. In Philadelphia in 2014, for example, homes tested with lead service lines had eight parts per billion of lead, at the 90th percentile (the most common way utilities calculate lead contamination), but homes that were not high risk had three parts per billion of lead.

Additionally, documents obtained by the Guardian show for the first time that the city solicited almost entirely employees to begin its lead testing program, meaning the majority of homes tested belonged to city employees from the beginning of the program in the 1990s. Critics of this practice have decried it as a significant conflict of interest.

In 1991, when the program began, Philadelphia asked more than 3,000 employees, including 2,300 water department employees and 325 former water department employees, to participate in testing. Just 190 customers were asked, documents show.

The PWD continued to use employees’ homes to test for lead until at least 2008, documents show. Of the 97 homes tested that year, 50 belonged to current employees, and four to former employees.

The PWD did not respond to a request for comment by publication, nor did the US Environmental Protection Agency.