Lead found in water at school
PHOENIXVILLE >> The Phoenixville Area School District’s buildings have a total of 291 faucets.
When the water that comes out of them was tested for lead, 13 of them had a level over the federal minimum safety standard and 12 of those were at the district’s oldest building — Barkley Elementary School.
One was at Phoenixville Middle School.
All have been shut off while the district decides what to do about it.
Superintendent Alan Fegley said “we’re actually very pleased with the results.”
That’s because most districts find that 10 to 30 percent of their faucets dispense water that has a lead level higher than 15 parts per billion, he said. Phoenixville’s
percentage is about 4.5 percent.
Also less worrisome is the fact that the lead only shows up when the water has been left to sit for more than 12 hours. But when the water has been run as little as 15 seconds, whatever contamination remains drops below the safety level.
All of the contamination came from sinks, none from drinking fountains, Fegley confirmed.
And the sinks where the contamination was found “are really not used very much,” said J. Kenneth Butera, who heads the school board’s building and grounds committee.
He reported on the findings at the March 14 school board work session.
Fegley said the district’s consultants said it is useless to try to find the pipe which is the source of the contamination and it is much more cost-effective to replace faucets, place filters there or, may well be the case, simply turn off faucets hardly anyone ever uses.
He said the testing was done at the suggestion of the state, which suggests annual testing or at least discussion of undertaking a regular testing regimen.
The last time the district tested its water for lead was in 2007 when the minimum safety standard was 20 parts per billion, Fegley said.
This article was first published as a post in The Digital Notebook blog.