It didn’t take Marguerite Woods long to find a hole in Baltimore’s plan to enlist city and county residents to test the pipes that bring water into their homes for lead.
The city’s directive followed a call to action by the federal Environmental Protection Agency for localities to replace all service lines made from the hazardous material within 10 years.
But Woods, who lives in a house a few blocks north of Leakin Park, is blind. She wasn’t able to scramble around her basement to find the underground pipe that connects her home to the water main, then scratch the pipe with a key to see the color of its material, as the test requires.
At a forum that the Johns Hopkins Health Education and Training Corps hosted in late February, Woods urged city and county officials in charge of the self-testing effort to include those with physical disabilities and older adults who live alone in their strategic planning for the testing.
“We want to be a part of the process,” she said. “We just need the tools and the skills to be able to do it.”
Like many cities around the country, Baltimore launched its self-testing initiative late last year. The city and county are tracking the progress of the effort on a joint website, which includes a map of the area’s service lines. It’s off to a slow start. As of late February, most service lines — about 314,000 in the city and county — remained untested, according to figures shared by Jennifer Combs, a spokesperson for the Baltimore Department of Public Works. About 6,200 self-surveys, or less than 2%, had been submitted.
The inventory map on the Baltimore Service Line Partnership’s website so far reveals a smattering of green squares — the symbol marking service lines that aren’t lead. Very few of the lines that have been tested appear to be made of lead, a neurotoxin that can harm a child’s intelligence, ability to pay attention and academic achievement, even at very low levels of exposure.
Lead can enter drinking water when plumbing materials containing lead corrode, according to informational materials on the service line partnership’s website. However, according to the partnership, the city “carefully manages the water chemistry to prevent this from happening.”
Baltimore and other utilities across the U.S. are required to present their service line inventories to the EPA by October, but it will be OK if there are still some unknowns in the data at that time, Eric Burneson, director of the Standards and Risk Management Division at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, told The Baltimore Sun in December.
Reaching out
To alert city and county residents of the self-testing initiative, the city public works department and the Baltimore County Department of Public Works and Transportation mailed postcards to residents identified as having an unknown service line material, Combs said. Also, a flyer explaining the inventory process was included in water bills mailed in February to city and county water customers, she said. The municipal system delivers water to customers in Baltimore City and large portions of Baltimore County; the city public works department owns and maintains the pipes.
The two departments also hosted a pair of outreach meetings in January, giving residents the chance to ask questions, Combs said. At the HEAT Corps forum, Paul Sayan, DPW’s acting head of the water and wastewater bureau, said the city is considering rolling out additional communication strategies to get residents to complete the survey.
“Like the county, we’ve started in the city to develop a program where we go door-to-door, knocking,” he said. “We’re hoping to roll that out at the end of March — not to everyone, but to certain populations or certain areas of the city.”
County and city residents, including those with disabilities and older adults, who have questions about the effort can call the city at 311 or the county at 443-263-2220, Combs said.
Knocking on residents’ doors to spread the word about the effort might be overly ambitious, Woods said. She suggested that city and county officials instead get a better understanding of what residents know about the initiative by meeting with community organizations. She also encouraged them to find a way for young people to get involved by testing the service lines for their neighbors who have disabilities or are older.
“I know that this all is unfolding as we go,” Woods said, “and we want everybody to weigh in on it, because the whole community needs to be represented and their pipes need to be replaced, if needed.”
Earlier this year, Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos — co-founder of Medicine for the Greater Good, which promotes community health and wellness — and Natalie Exum, a researcher at Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, visited Woods to test her home’s service line.
Armed with a key, coin and magnet — the materials needed to conduct the test — Exum donned a headlamp and climbed behind the water heater. If the line scratches a silver color, it indicates it’s likely made of lead. After a moment of concern when Woods’s pipe appeared to be that color, Exum and Galiatsatos confirmed it was made of copper. Then, they sat with Woods in her living room and helped her complete the survey.
Health hazards
Scientists have known about the health hazards of lead exposure for several decades. The U.S. banned the use of lead paint in 1978 and a few years after that, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act to ban the use of lead in pipes and as a soldering material.
But the original lead pipe rule, enacted in 1991, only required full inventories if water samples indicated lead levels were high and efforts to limit pipe corrosion by modifying the water chemistry didn’t resolve them.
With the proposed changes to the regulation, the EPA is signaling that current anti-corrosion efforts and lead testing activities aren’t enough to keep the population safe from the long-term and potentially disabling health effects of lead exposure, Exum said.
“The whole community needs to be represented and their pipes need to be replaced, if needed.” — Marguerite Woods, water customer
Since the late 1990s, childhood lead poisoning has dropped substantially in the city — something the Baltimore City Health Department attributes to local and state prevention efforts, among other measures.
However, lead exposure in children is often difficult to detect. Most children have no obvious immediate symptoms. Children younger than 6 are especially at risk because their bodies are developing and growing rapidly. And while bodies can release some lead through urine, sweat and feces, the toxin can be stored in bones and teeth for decades.
Lead exposure, Exum said, is a “silent tragedy.”
“It is a loss of your IQ. Your loss of cognitive functioning, executive functioning. Kids having challenges in school. And if you’re not able to sit in your chair or you’re not able to read right,” Exum said, those are challenges that may make it harder, down the line, for you to have a productive life.