A year after detection of water issues, still no relief
Residents in University Park dealing with lead restrictions
When University Park’s water supplier notified residents in June 2019 that elevated lead levels had been detected in samples taken from some of their homes, the company cautioned it might be “a few weeks” before they could safely consume tap water without restrictions.
More than a year later, roughly 1,500 Aqua Illinois customers remain under the lead advisory and the company’s progress eradicating the contamination appears to have stalled.
According to company data released Friday, elevated lead levels persist in 30% of the University Park homes where water was sampled last month — a proportion comparable to what was seen nine months ago.
Aqua must reduce that proportion to 10% or lower in order to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for drinking water.
Company officials did not directly respond to questions about what may account for the discouraging results, but touted overall reductions in lead levels over the past 13 months and said the company was committed to ensuring it was on the “optimal treatment path.”
“While the data illustrate that overall water quality has improved significantly, water chemistry is complicated, and lead concentrations continue to show some variability in impacted homes,” Aqua Illinois spokeswoman Kim
Morreale said in a statement. “This is to be expected as the piping continues to adjust to the treatment.”
The company initially detected elevated lead levels at 14 village properties in mid-June 2019, shortly after making an adjustment to its treatment process, and issued a “do not consume” advisory for about 2,400 customers.
An investigation ruled out the company’s distribution system, service lines and water source as causes of the contamination and identified “water chemistry interacting with lead solder” in the internal plumbing of homes built prior to 1990, as the likely culprit.
After saying initially that the treatment adjustment was likely responsible for changing the water chemistry and causing lead in older homes’ pipes to leach into the water, the company now says it cannot definitively establish that the treatment adjustment contributed to the issue.
Since detecting elevated lead levels last summer, Aqua has used a chemical treatment called orthophosphate to coat customers’ pipes and prevent lead from leaching into their water.
The first few months of treatment delivered promising results and the company appeared to be on its way to meeting the EPA’s lead standards for drinking water before hitting a plateau last November.
Since then, progress has
halted and the proportion of customers with elevated levels of lead in their water has actually increased.
When asked whether Aqua had modified or planned to modify its treatment methods in light of its stalled progress, officials said the company continues to use the same orthophosphate treatment.
Aqua has, however, stepped up its calls for affected customers to run their taps more frequently in an effort to enhance the treatment’s impact.
“The data show that water use is critical for the treatment to work,” Morreale said. “So at this time we are asking impacted customers to run cold tap water from their kitchen faucets for an extra 30 minutes every day.”
Aqua officials said 84% of University Park homes that used more than 3,600 gallons of water a month over a four-month period last year had “low” lead levels compared to only 63% of homes that used less than that amount.
The company has waived water bills for affected customers since the lead crisis began, but has angered University Park’s mayor by not doing the same for sewage bills, which also are impacted by water usage.
“You encourage residents to run water, then you come back and charge them for water going out for sewage,” said Mayor Joseph Roudez, who harshly criticized the practice.
He said Aqua had asked him numerous times to encourage residents to run their taps more frequently, but that he had refused because the company would not agree to zero residents’ sewage bills.
“Their main concern is regarding their economics,” Roudez said.
Aqua said in response to the mayor’s critique that sewer bills had been capped based on past usage and that no customers were being charged more for sewage than they had been prior to the lead advisory.
Roudez countered that capping sewage charges based on prior use failed to account for situations in which households had lost members in the past year and would otherwise have experienced a reduction in water usage were it not for needing to repeatedly flush the water.
“I got a household down the street from me,” said the mayor, whose own home remains under the lead advisory. “Two kids left and usage is down so why should they have to be paying something from last year when there were more people in the house? It’s just an unfair tactic.”
Roudez said he also remains skeptical of the safety of consuming tap water, even though Aqua has repeatedly advised affected customers that they may safely drink and cook with the water as long as they’ve flushed it for two to three minutes and filtered it first.
The mayor challenged Aqua’s president to drink his tap water and said that “99.9%” of residents still don’t feel comfortable consuming what comes out of their faucets.
Roudez said having to rely on bottled water — 12 gallons of which Aqua provides weekly to affected customers — has been extremely challenging for his family and others over the past 13 months, but that he’d been impressed by the community’s resolve amid a water crisis that has coincided with a global pandemic and a national reckoning over racial injustice.
“I want to compliment the residents and say what a resilient, determined group of people we have in our community,” he said.
Aqua, which has said its customers’ health and safety are its top priorities, also expressed gratitude for residents’ patience as they continue to work through the lead contamination problem.
As of June 30, the company said it had distributed 808,611 gallons on bottled water, 5,380 pitcher and faucet filters and 6,205 filter replacements.