Amy Roe (continued)
EPA has failed to provide an appropriate structure in the LCRI for effective and honest public education because it has failed to provide the basic definitions of what terms mean; terms that have been used time and again in communities like mine to mislead people about the safety of their drinking water.
EPA has failed to define:
What a health-based standard means
What safety and safe drinking water means
What “non-detect means” or how to interpret results for water testing.
Utilities must be explicitly prohibited from declaring their water “safe,” simply because they meet LCR requirements.
The State of Delaware’s Annual Report for Childhood Blood Surveillance, published in December 2022, specifically stated that “No elevated blood lead levels were found to be caused by drinking water” in our state. However, when we pressed this issue we also learned that no water sampling for any lead-poisoned child has ever been performed. This type of deception has undermined safe drinking water, and is perpetuated by the EPA’s failure to provide responsible guidance on what basic terms mean.
Doublespeak about what lead results mean has also been a tremendous problem, as the EPA has apparently encouraged our Department of Education to describe water samples that contain lead as “non-detect.” This was used to invalidate concern about approximately 70% of school water samples tested in 2023 that did, in fact, contain lead.
EPA’s cowboy attitude about what level of lead in water in schools is appropriate is encompassed by the fact that without any scientific justification for health, EPA instructed Delaware schools to lower the target level for lead 7.5 ppb, yet is instructing the rest of the country that 10 ppb in a P90 scheme is appropriate.
There is no accountability, and no opportunity for accountability, in large part because EPA chooses to be purposefully vague.
The EPA has allowed, and now will continue to allow, the public to be intentionally misled by water providers about what terms mean. This is not only not good public education, it is extremely dangerous.
The EPA must stop providing space where communities are intentionally misled by water providers or school districts.
This is especially problematic because the testing in schools and 3Ts provides false assurances of safety and false confidence that variable water sampling is appropriate to determine safety at the tap. We know how to fix this problem, through Filter First.
The LCRI needs to be used to button down the rhetoric, close these loopholes, and stop misleading on health.