After drinking water crisis, Newark is winning war on lead
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Workmen prepare to replace older water pipes with a new copper one in Newark, N.J., Thursday, Oct. 21, 2021. An ambitious program to replace thousands of residential lead water lines in New Jersey's largest city is about to be completed years ahead of schedule. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — On a recent sun-drenched morning, the staccato rhythms of a jackhammer ricocheted off buildings as a work crew dug into a Newark street to remove an aging pipe that carried water — and potentially a poison — to a small apartment building.
The new pipe is copper. The old one was lined with lead, which can be harmful to human health even at minute levels.
The water service line was one of more than 20,000 made with the toxic metal the city began replacing in 2019 amid public outrage over revelations about high lead levels in the tap water in schools and homes across the city.
Less than three years after the work began, the replacement project, initially projected to take up to 10 years, is nearly complete.
City residents who switched to bottled water during the crisis are breathing — and drinking — easier. Newark, once castigated and sued over its sluggish response to the problem, is being held up as a potential national model.
“I’m just happy that it’s happening and that it’s finally getting taken care of so we finally get to drink tap water again,” Newark resident Cesar Velarde said as he watched the crew work. “I have three cases of bottled water right now. I don’t drink faucet water no more because of this.”
The pipe replacement project has been a vindication of sorts for Mayor Ras Baraka, who faced mounting public pressure in 2018 after the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, sued, claiming New Jersey’s largest city had failed to adequately monitor lead levels and had downplayed the problem to residents.
Deteriorating lead-lined pipes, some a century old, are a problem in many older U.S. cities, a recent example being Benton Harbor, Michigan. But Newark’s replacement project proceeded faster than expected, thanks to an infusion of state and local funds and an amendment to state law to protect homeowners from having to bear the cost.
“I’ll feel better when we’re completely finished, but I’m excited that we’re at the end of this thing. It’ll be a huge milestone for us,” Baraka said last week.
Newark’s efforts led to the lawsuit being settled last January, and drew praise from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It’s a pretty significant turnaround from the early days when the city was denying they had a lead problem,” Erik Olson, NRDC senior strategic director for health, said. “We are pointing to it as a model for other cities to follow. They’re doing it much faster than other cities have even tried to do.”
The NRDC estimated recently that there are as many as 12 million lead service lines in the U.S. Nearly half of all states don’t even track the number of lead lines within their borders, they found.
Lead in drinking water has been linked to developmental delays in children and can damage the brain, red blood cells and kidneys.
The challenge of removing lead from drinking water in the U.S. came into sharp focus after the Flint, Michigan, scandal in which city leaders switched water sources in 2014 to save money. That led to criminal charges, though many later were dropped, and a $641 million settlement for the residents of the poor, majority Black city.
The $1 trillion infrastructure plan passed by the House on Friday night and now awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature includes $15 billion to replace lead pipes.
Several hundred lead lines remain to be replaced in Newark, many connected to buildings that were not accessible earlier in the project.
The process can take up to five hours, though many replacements take less time because they involve smaller pipes that can be pulled out and replaced by making a smaller cut in the curbside, said Mark Wleklik, foreperson for Underground Utilities, a company that has done thousands of pipe replacements in Newark.
More than 70% of Newark residents are renters, and many of the buildings are owned by limited-liability corporations based elsewhere that can be hard to track down, said Kareem Adeem, director of the city’s water and sewer department.
“It’s hard to chase an LLC down to Texas or Missouri or Louisiana or California,” Adeem said. “The renters always want the line to be replaced, but they don’t own the property.”
That led the Newark City Council to pass an ordinance allowing tenants to provide access to buildings. An amendment to a state law paved the way for public money to be used for the replacements — which can cost thousands of dollars per home — and Newark was able to borrow $120 million. All those efforts allowed the city of more than 310,000 people to accelerate its line replacements to as many as 120 per day.
The city also created a program that trained about 75 unemployed and underemployed residents to work on the line replacement crews, Adeem said.
Looking back, Baraka described the confrontation with the Natural Resources Defense Council as “tough, tense, with no love lost,” but he admitted learning some lessons.
“We were so busy trying to fight the NRDC, we were having conversations with them and not with the residents,” he said. “We thought they were wrong and wanted to oversee the city, and we already had oversight. So we were trying to fight that as opposed to being on the offensive and saying, ‘We have this problem, let’s go out and fix this.’”
For some, praise for the Newark’s accomplishment needs to be taken in context. Yvette Jordan, a teacher and chairperson of the Newark Education Workers Caucus, which joined the lawsuit brought by the resources council, said it was no coincidence that many of the city’s actions came at a time when Baraka was seeking reelection and Newark was in the running to become home to Amazon’s second headquarters.
“This showed us that the community must rise up and say something,” said Jordan, whose own home showed high levels of lead in its drinking water at one point.
“Without the community screaming and yelling and saying, ‘We need this,’ nothing is going to happen. The state and federal government also have to say, ‘We’re going to do this’ and have the political will to do it. Without that political will, without the stars aligning, I don’t think you would see Newark as this national model.”
___ This story has been corrected to show that the name of the organization that sued Newark is the Natural Resources Defense Council, not the National Resources Defense Council.
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — On a recent sun-drenched morning, the staccato rhythms of a jackhammer ricocheted off buildings as a work crew dug into a Newark street to remove an aging pipe that carried water — and potentially a poison — to a small apartment building.
The new pipe is copper. The old one was lined with lead, which can be harmful to human health even at minute levels.
The water service line was one of more than 20,000 made with the toxic metal the city began replacing in 2019 amid public outrage over revelations about high lead levels in the tap water in schools and homes across the city.
Less than three years after the work began, the replacement project, initially projected to take up to 10 years, is nearly complete.
City residents who switched to bottled water during the crisis are breathing — and drinking — easier. Newark, once castigated and sued over its sluggish response to the problem, is being held up as a potential national model.
“I’m just happy that it’s happening and that it’s finally getting taken care of so we finally get to drink tap water again,” Newark resident Cesar Velarde said as he watched the crew work. “I have three cases of bottled water right now. I don’t drink faucet water no more because of this.”
The pipe replacement project has been a vindication of sorts for Mayor Ras Baraka, who faced mounting public pressure in 2018 after the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, sued, claiming New Jersey’s largest city had failed to adequately monitor lead levels and had downplayed the problem to residents.
Deteriorating lead-lined pipes, some a century old, are a problem in many older U.S. cities, a recent example being Benton Harbor, Michigan. But Newark’s replacement project proceeded faster than expected, thanks to an infusion of state and local funds and an amendment to state law to protect homeowners from having to bear the cost.
“I’ll feel better when we’re completely finished, but I’m excited that we’re at the end of this thing. It’ll be a huge milestone for us,” Baraka said last week.
Newark’s efforts led to the lawsuit being settled last January, and drew praise from the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“It’s a pretty significant turnaround from the early days when the city was denying they had a lead problem,” Erik Olson, NRDC senior strategic director for health, said. “We are pointing to it as a model for other cities to follow. They’re doing it much faster than other cities have even tried to do.”
The NRDC estimated recently that there are as many as 12 million lead service lines in the U.S. Nearly half of all states don’t even track the number of lead lines within their borders, they found.
Lead in drinking water has been linked to developmental delays in children and can damage the brain, red blood cells and kidneys.
The challenge of removing lead from drinking water in the U.S. came into sharp focus after the Flint, Michigan, scandal in which city leaders switched water sources in 2014 to save money. That led to criminal charges, though many later were dropped, and a $641 million settlement for the residents of the poor, majority Black city.
The $1 trillion infrastructure plan passed by the House on Friday night and now awaiting President Joe Biden’s signature includes $15 billion to replace lead pipes.
Several hundred lead lines remain to be replaced in Newark, many connected to buildings that were not accessible earlier in the project.
The process can take up to five hours, though many replacements take less time because they involve smaller pipes that can be pulled out and replaced by making a smaller cut in the curbside, said Mark Wleklik, foreperson for Underground Utilities, a company that has done thousands of pipe replacements in Newark.
More than 70% of Newark residents are renters, and many of the buildings are owned by limited-liability corporations based elsewhere that can be hard to track down, said Kareem Adeem, director of the city’s water and sewer department.
“It’s hard to chase an LLC down to Texas or Missouri or Louisiana or California,” Adeem said. “The renters always want the line to be replaced, but they don’t own the property.”
That led the Newark City Council to pass an ordinance allowing tenants to provide access to buildings. An amendment to a state law paved the way for public money to be used for the replacements — which can cost thousands of dollars per home — and Newark was able to borrow $120 million. All those efforts allowed the city of more than 310,000 people to accelerate its line replacements to as many as 120 per day.
The city also created a program that trained about 75 unemployed and underemployed residents to work on the line replacement crews, Adeem said.
Looking back, Baraka described the confrontation with the Natural Resources Defense Council as “tough, tense, with no love lost,” but he admitted learning some lessons.
“We were so busy trying to fight the NRDC, we were having conversations with them and not with the residents,” he said. “We thought they were wrong and wanted to oversee the city, and we already had oversight. So we were trying to fight that as opposed to being on the offensive and saying, ‘We have this problem, let’s go out and fix this.’”
For some, praise for the Newark’s accomplishment needs to be taken in context. Yvette Jordan, a teacher and chairperson of the Newark Education Workers Caucus, which joined the lawsuit brought by the resources council, said it was no coincidence that many of the city’s actions came at a time when Baraka was seeking reelection and Newark was in the running to become home to Amazon’s second headquarters.
“This showed us that the community must rise up and say something,” said Jordan, whose own home showed high levels of lead in its drinking water at one point.
“Without the community screaming and yelling and saying, ‘We need this,’ nothing is going to happen. The state and federal government also have to say, ‘We’re going to do this’ and have the political will to do it. Without that political will, without the stars aligning, I don’t think you would see Newark as this national model.”
___ This story has been corrected to show that the name of the organization that sued Newark is the Natural Resources Defense Council, not the National Resources Defense Council.
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Crews continue work on lead pipe replacement at a home along Ogden Avenue in Benton Harbor, Mich., on Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. City residents continue to use bottled water for drinking and cooking as a number of homes have been found to have elevated lead levels in the water lines. (Don Campbell/The Herald-Palladium via AP)
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — After a Michigan official emailed the head of Benton Harbor’s drinking water system in June 2019 about the impoverished city’s failure to hit targets for treating corroded lead pipes, the local leader snapped back: “I have no time for this.”
Municipal superintendent Mike O’Malley’s email response went to lay out grievances about state demands on his office since the discovery months earlier of elevated lead levels in Benton Harbor’s water. The testy exchange was among many between the water chief and state regulators trying to contain what has become Michigan’s second high-profile lead contamination crisis in less than a decade.
The strained ties were evident in emails released last week by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. They were among an 11,000-page trove of communications and documents sought by legislators investigating the state’s handling of the predicament in Benton Harbor, a majority-Black city of about 9,100 in Michigan’s far southwestern corner.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also ordered measures last week to strengthen water quality statewide, including stepped-up efforts to reduce lead content and remove service lines made with the toxic metal that can damage children’s brains and nervous systems.
But her administration faces complaints of inadequate response from Republican foes and even some allies, including Black activists and environmental groups, as she prepares to seek reelection next year. When campaigning in 2018, Whitmer criticized the performance of GOP predecessor Rick Snyder in the Flint lead emergency.
LANSING, Mich. (AP) — After a Michigan official emailed the head of Benton Harbor’s drinking water system in June 2019 about the impoverished city’s failure to hit targets for treating corroded lead pipes, the local leader snapped back: “I have no time for this.”
Municipal superintendent Mike O’Malley’s email response went to lay out grievances about state demands on his office since the discovery months earlier of elevated lead levels in Benton Harbor’s water. The testy exchange was among many between the water chief and state regulators trying to contain what has become Michigan’s second high-profile lead contamination crisis in less than a decade.
The strained ties were evident in emails released last week by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. They were among an 11,000-page trove of communications and documents sought by legislators investigating the state’s handling of the predicament in Benton Harbor, a majority-Black city of about 9,100 in Michigan’s far southwestern corner.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also ordered measures last week to strengthen water quality statewide, including stepped-up efforts to reduce lead content and remove service lines made with the toxic metal that can damage children’s brains and nervous systems.
But her administration faces complaints of inadequate response from Republican foes and even some allies, including Black activists and environmental groups, as she prepares to seek reelection next year. When campaigning in 2018, Whitmer criticized the performance of GOP predecessor Rick Snyder in the Flint lead emergency.
LEAD PIPING BEING REMOVED
City and state officials “have failed to address this public health crisis with the urgency it requires,” progressive groups said in a Sept. 9 petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last week, the EPA instructed Benton Harbor to improve corrosion control, repair filters at its treatment plant and better notify residents.
Liesl Clark, director of the state environmental agency, described the Benton Harbor situation as “unique and particularly urgent” in a letter to state Sen. Ed McBroom, the Republican chairman of the Senate Oversight Committee, which is investigating the state’s response. But lead-tainted water is a statewide issue, Clark added.
While acknowledging her department could do better in Benton Harbor, Clark said the thousands of newly released documents show it had gone “above and beyond legal requirements.”
“It’s frustrating to hear this mantra that the state did nothing there for three years,” Eric Oswald, director of the department’s Drinking Water and Environmental Health Division, said in an interview Monday. “We had a pretty significant response effort.”
The documents and emails provide a behind-the scenes look at conversations between state and Benton Harbor officials after samples indicated high lead readings three years ago.
On Jan. 14, 2019, shortly after Whitmer look office, a memo from an Oswald aide said the city wasn’t providing promised bottled water or filters to residents with high lead readings. Local officials were sending mixed messages about the situation and rejecting offers of help with additional sampling, the memo said.
The next month, the state issued a permit for the city to pump orthophosphate and polyphosphate into the water to coat the pipes and prevent erosion. Then came a consent order requiring the city to fix problems with the water system and boost rates to fund upgrades.
Further emails and letters showed state officials prodding O’Malley to increase the number of locations for water sampling, while he argued that fewer should be permissible because the city’s population had fallen below 10,000.
“I put off the lead sampling requirement until recently, now I have to go full speed ahead on finding 60 homes. I have 4 right now,” O’Malley wrote in June 2019. “100 letters 4 responses. We are going to go door to door next and hope for the best!”
When state water treatment specialist Ernie Sarkipato offered help, O’Malley replied: “I have already asked you for help and been denied.”
State engineering supervisor Michael Bolf wrote Oswald in December 2019 about Benton Harbor repeatedly missing consent order deadlines.
“We feel caught between a rock in a hard place,” Bolf wrote. Fining the cash-strapped city might worsen relations and achieve little, but with leniency, “the water system remains vulnerable and we are potentially culpable if a problem occurs.”
The state agency notified Benton Harbor in February 2020 its corrosion control treatments weren’t succeeding and ordered adjustments. O’Malley replied the conclusion was premature.
“To Benton Harbor, your order left us quite anxious about what was required and it felt like, you want us to begin running scared,” he said.
Oswald said Monday he was “cautiously optimistic” the corrosion control system was getting better results and was awaiting results of the latest testing.
The state revoked O’Malley’s certification to operate the city water plant in November 2020 for numerous reasons, including refusing to disclose where samples were taken, said Hugh McDiarmid Jr., spokesman for the environment department. Benton Harbor suspended and later fired him, McDiarmid said.
The Associated Press was unable to reach O’Malley for comment. Messages were left Monday with Benton Harbor Mayor Marcus Muhammad and city manager Ellis Mitchell.
Muhammad told a legislative committee in October the city’s water problems were years in the making. Benton Harbor was under state emergency management from 2010 to 2014.
One manager laid off half the water plant’s staff and its plant’s director, yet in 2018 the state environmental agency told him more water staff was needed, he said.
“I was cross-eyed because on one hand you had a state official to deplete the water labor and then another official coming back saying you need to increase it,” Muhammad said.
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Flesher reported from Traverse City, Michigan.
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