New Blog Posts on Lead and New GAO Report on Lead Testing in Schools
Lead has been back in the news again with three new items of interest on lead. On Monday (7/16), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) published a couple of blogs on lead in drinking water:
- The “Developing accurate lead service line inventories and making them public: Essential tasks” blog is the first in a series from Tom Neltner of EDF. It provides a table with the 13 states that have some form of inventory of LSLs at the community water system level. EDF anticipates publishing the blog describing Indiana’s voluntary survey on Friday (7/20) followed next week by our review of the four states with mandatory reporting approaches.
- Lindsay McCormick’s blog post “Illinois moves forward with critical rules to address lead in water at child care facilities” provides a summary of EDF’s comments to the state about its rules. EDF specifically calls for Illinois to look for and replace LSLs in child care facilities when found, regardless of testing results. As one may recall in EDF’s child care report released a few years ago, EDF called for specific changes to EPA’s 3Ts for child care facilities. Illinois is using 2 ppb as an action level.
Additionally, EDF is working on another blog dealing with the 5 ppb Q-statistic limit for lead leaching in NSF/ANSI 61. EDF plans to point to three studies, an NSF review of its testing results, our child care test results, and an analysis by Marc Edwards team, to show the relative high lead levels found after replacing brass faucets and with meeting the AAP 1 ppb recommendation.
The third item is a recent GAO report on lead testing in schools. Be forewarned the entire report is about 100 pages, but the first page has the important statistics – 43% of school districts tested for lead, 41% didn’t test for lead, and 16% didn’t know (assuming the real answer would be “no testing”). Of the 43% that tested for lead, 37% had elevated levels (not sure if GAO used 20 ppb or 15 ppb as its selected threshold). This report might generate some questions from the press and/or elected officials.
