President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency earlier this week over lead contamination in water in the U.S. Virgin Islands after tests on St. Croix revealed levels more than 100 times higher than limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency – one of the worst outcomes an American community has seen in decades.
“On a personal level, it was scary and frustrating,” said resident Frandelle Gerard, executive director of Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism, Inc.
Officials told residents to stop using their taps and began handing out vouchers for bottled water. Lead can have devastating effects on children’s development, behavior and IQ scores.
But experts consulted by The Associated Press said the frightening results may be incorrect because they come from tests that don’t meet EPA standards.
“The data needs to be thrown in the trash,” said Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech leader and water expert who helped identify lead problems in Flint, Michigan.
If the information given to St. Croix residents turns out to be bad, it won’t be the first time this has happened. Communities are often plagued by bad information, and it is often Black majority communities that face leading crises that leave people unsure of what to believe. In Flint, officials initially hid high lead levels. When levels spiked in Newark, officials emphasized the safety of the city’s reservoirs, even though it’s usually the lead pipes — not the source — that are the problem. In Benton Harbor, Michigan, residents waited months for officials to confirm the filters actually work, relying on bottled water.
On the Caribbean island of St. Croix, officials avoided some of these pitfalls and quickly notified residents of the results. The governor declared a state of emergency.
“This is not something we shy away from talking about,” said Andrew Smith, head of the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority.
Edwards doesn’t believe the sky-high results reflect reality and said the problem is how the samples were collected. For lead testing, workers usually draw water from a household tap. But the samples that tested this high on St. Croix were collected from the meter.
“When you unscrew it, you literally tear the lead copper apart and a piece of lead copper ends up in your sample,” he said. It produces artificially high results.
Tom Neltner, a chemical expert and lead expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, agreed that water meter testing is not accurate. “There are a lot of oddities” about how the sampling of St. Croix was done, he said.
As a result, parents in St. Croix still have no idea how much lead their children consumed.
This is what is known:
In September, officials tested in the normal manner, at taps, according to EPA rules for testing for lead. Those results showed that the water was safe.
But islanders, who have long had to deal with discolored water, said the color has gotten worse in recent months. So officials took more samples, this time at the meter, to see if the utility’s pipes were the problem. It is some of these tests that recorded astronomically high lead levels for the first time.
“We were all shocked and surprised by the results,” Smith said.
When retested, the results found were still too high. However, other locations, including two schools, were low.
A more definitive answer should come soon. Local and federal officials conducted detailed tests in early November to determine the cause. A final report is expected in mid-December.
Smith said about 3,400 homes were affected and the utility worked with EPA on sampling.
Although the testing did not follow normal procedure, EPA water expert Christine Ash said: “Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend that people who use (utility) water piped to their homes do not consume the water until we are able to conduct further research to determine if there is a potential source of lead and what it could be.
Fortunately, that doesn’t apply to everyone on St. Croix.
Many people depend on rainwater that they collect in reservoirs.
On the continent, lead pipes pose the greatest threat to drinking water in many cities. However, that is not the problem on the island. Instead, they are copper fittings that contain lead and can corrode in water, Smith said.
And regardless of the test results, the water system needs attention and repair. Smith and his colleagues flush water through it. When people don’t use the water, it sits and can absorb pollutants. They are also improving the way they treat their water so it is less corrosive, and are working to replace components that contain lead. That replacement work could take 12 to 18 months, Smith said. In addition, the island’s water system is old and major improvements are planned in the coming years.
Gerard said people on the island are overwhelmed.
“There’s a good feeling, what’s next for St. Croix?” she said, adding that in recent years residents have weathered a devastating hurricane, the pandemic and water pollution from a refinery. Many people gave up tap water long ago, she said, and it’s hard to know what to make of these latest developments.
“As a reasonably literate person, reading the reports has almost left us with more questions than answers.” Many people probably don’t understand how high these lead test results are, she said.
As for the temporary measure of flushing a lot of water through the pipes to reduce lead, it is not appropriate for the island, she said.
“We are a water-saving society,” said Gerard. “Water is a precious commodity.”
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