City council will hold hearings in testing drinking water for lead after a warning that residents’ health could be at risk in wake of contamination in Flint, Michigan

The Philadelphia city council will investigate how it tests its water, after an expert told the Guardian the city’s procedures are “worse than Flint” and risk putting residents’ health in jeopardy.



Philadelphia council members revealed plans to hold hearings “concerning best practices followed by the Philadelphia Water Department” in its testing of drinking water for lead, in the wake of high lead levels in Flint, Michigan, and a Guardian report that found problems with water testing nationwide.

Four Philadelphia council members have put their names to the resolution, led by councilwoman Helen Gym. Hearings are expected to take place next month.

“Certainly Flint, Michigan, and your paper has raised concerns that means we need to review the way we do things,” Gym told the Guardian. “I don’t think Philadelphia is Flint, I don’t think we are doing things at that level. But the water department needs to clarify the practices they employ. It’s important that the city pays attention to this.”

Dr Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical ethnographer, said that water sampling methods used by the Philadelphia water department don’t properly illustrate the level of lead in drinking water and could mask the sort of problems suffered in Flint, Michigan, where a state of emergency has been declared over the toxic, discolored water that made many residents ill.

Water testing instructions given out to Philadelphia residents include the requirement to remove the faucet’s aerator, a small filter, from the nozzle of the tap before sampling. Testers are asked to run cold water through the tap for two minutes, known as “pre-flushing”, at least six hours before the test.

Research suggests both of these practices reduce the amount of lead flowing into the sample. Tests conducted by scientists at Virginia Tech showed that of 21 samples taken from Flint households, 16 were found to have higher lead levels than the official results when tested under conditions that replicate how people use tap water.

While they are not illegal, the US Environmental Protection Agency has advised against these procedures as they hinder the test’s objective: to find the highest possible lead corrosion level in a household’s water supply.

In contrast to Philadelphia, water testing in Flint didn’t involve the removal of the aerator. The city did ask residents to pre-flush their taps prior to tests before scrapping the requirement last month, as the crisis reached a crescendo.

The Michigan state government also ditched the pre-flushing instructions after consultation with the EPA, and the head of the Ohio EPA called modifications to tests, like those used in Philadelphia, “wrong and irresponsible”. As revealed by the Guardian, the practice of pre-flushing taps prior to water tests is prevalent across the US.

Lambrinidou said Philadelphia has spent “20 years minimizing lead levels in tests”.

“Philadelphia is arguably worse than Flint in the testing of drinking water because they use pre-flushing, the removal of the aerator and the slow flow of water into bottles, which can also distort the result,” she told the Guardian. “The excuse that these practices give standardized results is a complete misunderstanding of the rule, which requires that water utilities capture the worst-case lead levels in each and every high-risk home.

“It’s irresponsible, it’s immoral and it’s putting people’s lives at risk. It misleads the public into thinking they will be OK with corrosion control treatment. But the sampling is missing the worst-case lead, so treatment isn’t geared properly towards the correct level of it.”

The Philadelphia water department has staunchly denied there are deficiencies in its water testing and treatment, circulating a note to its customers that states any comparison to Flint is “inaccurate and highly misleading”.

The department administers a 3,200-mile water main system for 1.7 million residents. Around 10-20% of Philadelphia households are thought to have lead pipes leading into their homes, mostly installed at least 100 years ago when the engineering advantages of lead outweighed health concerns.

Homes built before the 1980s, like the more than 540,000 in Philadelphia, are also more likely to use lead in pipes or solders in water systems, and could have faucets containing lead.

Generally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls for pediatricians to intervene when children have blood-lead levels of 10 micrograms per one-tenth of a liter of blood or greater (expressed as 10µ/dL in the medical community).

However, the CDC is careful to note that there is no safe level of lead. The CDC considers 5 µ/dL an elevated blood-lead level and cause for concern.

Even those levels can significantly impair children’s neurological development and can lead to reproductive problems in adults. And since lead is stored in bones, it stays in the body for years, releasing during times of stress and during pregnancy.

Philadelphia children’s blood-lead levels have dropped precipitously in the past two decades, mirroring national trends after lead gasoline additives were outlawed. Nationally from 1997 to 2011, the percentage of children with blood-lead levels 10µ/dL or higher dropped from 7.6% to 0.6%.

But Philadelphia continues to struggle with higher than average lead levels.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Discolored water that came from a faucet in Flint, Michigan. Photograph: Jake May/AP

As of 2014, more than 10% of children in Philadelphia had blood-lead levels of greater than 5 µ/dL. The national average is 2.5%. That’s about 535,000 US children between one and five years old. Pennsylvania state data shows more than 3,800 live in Philadelphia.

The city has taken steps to curb children’s exposure, especially to lead paint, setting up a “lead court” to force landlords to remediate lead hazards. Now, when pediatricians find high levels of lead in children’s blood, city inspectors investigate homes.

But city lead inspectors don’t test water in Philadelphia homes. The city also does not mention lead plumbing, and its potential to leach lead into water, in fact sheets provided to families and clinicians.

And while state health officials collect lead poisoning statistics, they don’t test water for lead. They leave that up to the department of environmental protection, which gets its numbers from the Philadelphia water department.

The Philadelphia water department said it has a “stellar track record of providing reliable, top quality water that meets or does better than all federal standards for public health” as well as compliance with the EPA’s lead and copper rule.

Gary Burlingame, director of the bureau of laboratory services at Philadelphia water, said the city follows “standard guidance” for water testing.

“We put it together, submit it to the state, the state approves it and that’s what we’ve been doing since 1992,” he said. “We advise our customers to clean their aerators. It’s a quandary for scientists – do you remove it or not? It’s not clear if the EPA wants you to remove the aerator or not.

“If we have the aerator off, the lead particle goes into the sample bottle and we have a dialogue where that lead might be coming from. We don’t just take one sample and say that’s their exposure. We are looking at their plumbing and water quality in their area.”

Burlingame said that pre-flushing of the faucets is done because “you want to normalize all the homes to the same conditions.” He added that residents are told to pour water slowly into bottles so that they don’t overfill bottles or forget they are there.

“We’ve spent the last two years asking the EPA to update the regulations, to provide information in a national website, so that people can go to it and see what the requirements are,” he said.

“We are asking different questions about lead than we did in 1992 so we need to do things in a different way. It’s clear that the EPA hasn’t been in final agreement about which sampling method to use in each situation.”

While Philadelphia’s testing practices are technically legal, the EPA does not actually appear to be in disagreement about whether to run the faucet or remove the aerator before testing water.

In 2014, the agency went into Philadelphia homes in one neighborhood to test water. The EPA told field testers to “put the container under the faucet, fill and cap. Do not run the water prior to sampling.” The protocols did not mention removing the aerator, pre-flushing, a waiting period or running the tap slowly.

Lambrinidou said Philadelphia’s approach was “disingenuous and immoral”. The scientist has previously worked on uncovering high lead levels in Washington DC and Durham, North Carolina.

“Just because they’ve come up with a method to cheat these tests, it doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t make it moral,” she said.