CUTLER, Calif. – Over the last decade, the drinking water at thousands of schools across the country has been found to contain unsafe levels of lead, pesticides and dozens of other toxins.
An Associated Press investigation found that contaminants have surfaced at public and private schools in all 50 states — in small towns and inner cities alike.
But the problem has gone largely unmonitored by the federal government, even as the number of water safety violations has multiplied.
"It's an outrage," said Marc Edwards, an engineer at Virginia Tech who has been honored for his work on water quality. "If a landlord doesn't tell a tenant about lead paint in an apartment, he can go to jail. But we have no system to make people follow the rules to keep school children safe?"
The contamination is most apparent at schools with wells, which represent 8 to 11 percent of the nation's schools. Roughly one of every five schools with its own water supply violated the Safe Drinking Water Act in the past decade, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by the AP.
In California's farm belt, wells at some schools are so tainted with pesticides that students have taken to stuffing their backpacks with bottled water for fear of getting sick from the drinking fountain.
Experts and children's advocates complain that responsibility for drinking water is spread among too many local, state and federal agencies, and that risks are going unreported. Finding a solution, they say, would require a costly new national strategy for monitoring water in schools.
Schools with unsafe water represent only a small percentage of the nation's 132,500 schools. And the EPA says the number of violations spiked over the last decade largely because the government has gradually adopted stricter standards for contaminants such as arsenic and some disinfectants.
Many of the same toxins could also be found in water at homes, offices and businesses. But the contaminants are especially dangerous to children, who drink more water per pound than adults and are more vulnerable to the effects of many hazardous substances.
"There's a different risk for kids," said Cynthia Dougherty, head of the EPA's Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water.
Still, the EPA does not have the authority to require testing for all schools and can only provide guidance on environmental practices.
In recent years, students at a Minnesota elementary school fell ill after drinking tainted water. A young girl in Seattle got sick, too.
The AP analyzed a database showing federal drinking water violations from 1998 to 2008 in schools with their own water supplies. The findings:
• Water in about 100 school districts and 2,250 schools breached federal safety standards.
• Those schools and districts racked up more than 5,550 separate violations. In 2008, the EPA recorded 577 violations, up from 59 in 1998 — an increase that officials attribute mainly to tougher rules.
• California, which has the most schools of any state, also recorded the most violations with 612, followed byOhio (451), Maine (417), Connecticut (318) and Indiana (289).
• Nearly half the violators in California were repeat offenders. One elementary school in Tulare County, in the farm country of the Central Valley, broke safe-water laws 20 times.
• The most frequently cited contaminant was coliform bacteria, followed by lead and copper, arsenic and nitrates.
WE HAVE ALL BEEN AWARE OF THIS TYPE OF PROBLEM SINCE THE ERIN BROCKOVICH MOVIE WITH JULIE ROBERTS
and like MOST toxic waste problems WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO ABOUT FIXING THE PROBLEM
THE STATISTICS ARE STAGGERING AND NOBODY IN THE GOVERNMENT SEEMS TO BE ADDRESSING THE ISSUE
IT MIGHT BE THE MOST COMPLEX ISSUE FACING MANKIND.
NOT ONLY TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHO PAYS FOR THE ATTEMPTED CLEANUP BUT JUST WHAT TO DO WITH THE "TOXIC ELEMENTS" INVOLVED IF AND WHEN AN AREA GETS CLEANED UP
WE'VE PUT OURSELVES IN A VERY DANGEROUS AND DEADLY PICKLE AND WE SEEM TO BE IGNORING THE REALITY.
UNFORTUNATELY THIS TOXIC PROBLEM, IF NUCLEAR , DOES NOT GO AWAY FOR ABOUT 250,000 YEARS
IF THE PROBLEM IS LOCATED IN THE WATER TABLE THEN WE WILL NEED WATER FILTERS THAT ARE THE SIZE OF MONTANA
iF DIPSHITS HANNITY, BECK AND LIMBAUGH STARTED ADDRESSING THIS PROBLEM INSTEAD OF ATTACKING HEALTH CARE REFORM, MAYBE SOMETHING WOULD START TO GET DONE
THE COMPANIES THAT GENERALLY CREATED THE PROBLEMS ARE PILLARS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY and are not being held responsible in the repair process because they are fighting, in the courts, for how much they should be paid to clean up the messes they've created.
THE FACTS AND FIGURES ARE AVAILABLE FROM THE EPA
CHECK OUT TOXIC WASTE SITES IN THE UNITED STATES and pay close attention to how many of those sites have been addressed with actual cleaning gestures.
I'M NOT SURE THERE IS A SOLUTION and maybe that's why no elected official seems to be bringing it up.
BUT ON THE OTHER HAND
ALL PROBLEMS CREATED BY HUMAN BEINGS PROBABLY HAVE SOLUTIONS if time and money are no object.
TIME and MONEY SHOULD NOT BE AN OBJECT WHEN IT COMES TO CLEANING UP
TOXIC PROBLEMS
YOUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN WILL HAVE MANY MORE DANGEROUS HEALTH ISSUES IF THIS ISSUE IS NOT ADDRESSED
THE ABOVE STORY ABOUT TOXIC CALIFORNIA DRINKING WATER WILL SEEM SMALL AND TRIVIAL IF THIS PROBLEM IS IGNORED
Michael Timothy McAlevey
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