LEAD THREAT

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2006 by Stith, Pat

Water regulations not enforced; contaminated water found system-wide

In the spring of 2005, chloramine, the same disinfectant associated with lead-tainted drinking water in Washington, D.C., was in the news again, this time in Greenville, N.C. Could other North Carolina public water systems that use chloramine have lead problems? If so, what was being done?

We took our questions to the state's Public Water Supply Section. Officials there were unable to give us an accurate list of systems that use chloramine-treated water, but they said there were at least 20.

The agency's electronic records were all but indecipherable. Because there was almost no documentation to go with the 81 tables nor written descriptions for more than a thousand fields, David Raynor, our database editor, was forced to chase down the field descriptions one by one.

The federal safe drinking water rules, enforced by the state's Public Water Supply Section, were another problem. They are so complex that the state employs "rule managers" to master their nuances. I had to learn as much as I could, at least for the most important contaminants.

In other words, a straightforward water story was turning into a swamp.

Questionable quality

Eventually Raynor was able to identify more than 100 chloramine systems in North Carolina. Eventually we would learn that none were reporting the kinds of problems that caused Greenville to warn residents to stop drinking the water.

Along the way, my colleagues and I realized that we were chasing the wrong story. That became clear when I had a "get acquainted" interview - one with easy, open-ended questions - with the chief of the Public Water Supply section, an obscure 98-person agency headquartered in Raleigh. She expressed confidence in the large water systems, like Raleigh, but said she might not drink from a water fountain at a gas station in a rural area.

"I don't know if they're doing their testing or not," she said. "I might get the bottled water."

Think about that: the official in charge regulating the water is afraid to drink it?

There are an inordinate number of public water systems in North Carolina (almost 7,000), and more than half of them are small systems like those in a service station or a convenience store, that serve people who are just passing through.

She told me she had asked for more help - several times - to regulate those small systems. I knew that budget requests had to be in writing, so I requested the records and found that she had told superiors that bacterial contamination was found in hundreds of systems in the past year and that most were not investigated. The state denied her request for a 25-percent increase in her staff.

Any final doubts about changing our project's direction disappeared when I saw the spare office where water records were stored. Stacks of correspondence were jammed on shelves, stuffed in torn cardboard boxes or piled in heaps on the floor. Could an agency keep records like that and still do a good job? We tried to answer that question.

Systems violate laws

The agency's reports to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the governor showed that thousands of systems weren't obeying laws that require them to test the water and clean up contamination. State regulators rarely levied fines and, when they did, they usually didn't collect. Our database editor Raynor found that hundreds of systems did not have a certified operator.

Science reporter Catherine Clabby put a human face on the problem when she visited a mobile home park that had water contaminated with arsenic. One woman told Clabby that she wouldn't even let her dog drink the water. State correspondence showed that regulators repeatedly had ordered the owner to develop a clean-up plan. The state threatened him with fines but never followed through.

We talked to more than 100 people, and some told us about problems with private wells that put more than two million North Carolinians at risk. Our report found that the state enacted construction standards for wells in the 1970s but did not enforce them and neither did two-thirds of the state's 100 counties.

Further, there was no state law in North Carolina requiring tests of private well water, and few counties required such tests.

State records showed that there are about 25,000 known sources of man-made pollutants that can contaminate ground water. State geologists told us where naturally occurring arsenic is most likely to poison wells, and we mapped those locations online. We told readers that our home county. Wake, is North Carolina's ground zero for radiological contaminants that pollute well water.

Since we knew that the state wasn't checking up on lead tests submitted by public water systems, we did a little checking of our own. EPA rules say systems should test houses where they are most likely to find lead-tainted water: houses built after 1982 and before states banned the use of solder with high lead content to join copper water pipes. North Carolina's Public Water Supply section said that meant houses built from 1983 to 1986.