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More than half of B.C.'s school districts had unsafe lead levels in drinking water sources in 2016

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More than half of the 60 school districts in British Columbia had unsafe levels of lead in drinking water sources in 2016 and early 2017, according to new water testing ordered by the provincial government.

An analysis of the test results shows that 26.5 per cent of the 15,000 tests on about 10,000 drinking sources revealed lead levels that exceeded the mandated limit for drinking water, some of them by wide margins. 

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According to the data — and confirmed in interviews with district officials — the 34 school districts have responded with measures such as installing filters and, in some cases, by replacing pipes and fixtures.

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But some schools continue to use flushing, running the water through pipes and fixtures for a period of time, as a mitigation measure. That passes muster for now with the province, but is viewed by some experts as an inadequate long-term solution.

“Flushing is a short-term, incremental half-ass solution. It’s better than nothing, but it’s not a long-term solution,” says Dr. Bruce Lanphear, a Simon Fraser University health sciences professor and expert in the effects of toxins such as lead on children.

Lead in drinking water is a concern because, over time, elevated levels can cause damage to developing brains, say medical experts.

The testing for lead in drinking water was ordered last year after a Vancouver Sun survey  revealed that more than a quarter of B.C.’s school districts found lead in drinking water that exceeded the allowable limit in Canadian drinking water guidelines of 10 parts per billion.

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Lead can leach into water in schools from old pipes, lead solder and certain types of fittings and fixtures.

The plumbing code was revised to limit the use of lead in potable water lines after 1990, so all 1,578 schools built in the province before then are potentially at risk for elevated lead levels.

The 2016 and early 2017 test results are in a database obtained through a freedom of information request by an interest group and analyzed by Postmedia News.

They are the latest comprehensive test results available, according to the B.C. Education Ministry, but do not capture water safety at all drinking sources in every B.C. school because the province gave the districts three years to complete the tests.

More results — some of them from followup tests after fixes to drinking sources — will roll out this year.

Some of the recent test results significantly exceed the Canadian guidelines for lead.

At a drinking fountain in a girl’s change room at Walter Lee elementary school in Richmond, a test in March 2017 showed the lead in the water exceeded the Canadian and B.C. safety guidelines by 307 times.

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According to the information supplied to the province, the Richmond district decommissioned the fountain temporarily to allow an investigation of piping sources and fixtures to determine the problem and develop corrective measures.

At Henry Bose Elementary School in Surrey, the water tested at a drinking fountain in August of 2016 was 229 times above the drinking water guidelines for lead.

In one of the worst results, in October 2016 at Berkshire Park elementary school in Surrey, a sink in a girl’s washroom adjacent to the gym tested at more than 1,700 times the allowable limit.

The Surrey district — which conducted the most extensive tests at drinking sources at all of its schools and found higher than acceptable lead levels in nearly 30 per cent of tests — has said it has taken action at its schools to ensure drinking water is safe.

B.C. Education Minister Rob Fleming said the overall results were a concern, which is why testing and mitigation requirements will continue under the new NDP government.

Fleming said schools would not be forced to expedite testing under a policy set last year that requires schools only to test one third of schools each year, but he expects that some schools will accelerate their testing.

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Fleming said about $6.5 million had been provided to school districts since last year to help reduce lead levels in water.

“We want to build a relationship with (school) districts where testing and poor results are nothing to be afraid of receiving because when it comes to education and the new government, our message is that help is on the way,” Fleming said in an interview.

Surrey

In the Surrey school district, where 8,711 tests were conducted on drinking sources including fountains and sinks, 29.5 per cent exceeded safe limits for lead in water, the results supplied to the province show.

The Surrey district would not make officials responsible for its testing and mitigation projects available for an interview, saying they were too busy with beginning-of-school-year duties.

But Doug Strachan, the district’s communications manager, said that all available drinking water sources have been tested and are safe to drink from, including those that require regular flushing.

For example, more recent testing data at two drinking sources each at Henry Bose (February 2017) and Ray Shepherd (April 2017) elementary schools showed lead levels well below the limit.

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Strachan said the district has installed 271 new drinking fountains, 2,462 new sink faucets, 236 new bubblers and 239 filters in an effort to reduce lead in drinking water.

There are at least two filtered drinking fountains and two sinks at schools where filtering is required, he said.

As a medium-term solution, the district is planning to install an automated flushing system for water lines at 63 schools built before 1990.

Strachan said a permanent solution is to replace pipes. “But it will take years to do it because of the magnitude of the project,” he said.

Victoria

At the Greater Victoria school district, more than half of tests on drinking sources exceeded safe limits for lead, 313 of the 612 tests.

The district responded by installing in-line filters, about 500 so far, and making plumbing changes that allow filters to be easily changed, at a cost of about $200,000.

The district decided flushing was not a viable long-term option.

A report prepared by a consulting firm — Goode Environmental Services — noted that water showed a significant jump in lead levels after water was left standing in the pipes for two hours. “These results indicate that flushing alone is not always an effective procedure to keep the amount of lead in the system below the maximum acceptable limit required,” said the consultant.

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Said Mark Walsh, the Greater Victoria district’s secretary-treasurer: “We were worried that sometimes, if people get busy, not everything would get flushed appropriately.”

Installing filters was a cheaper mitigation measure than replacing pipes and fixtures, said Walsh.

Abbotsford

At the Abbotsford school district, the district decided to replace fixtures and piping in a permanent measure after testing showed elevated lead levels in 36 schools, a decision lauded by the Fraser Health Authority.

Echoing the concern of Greater Victoria, Abbotsford secretary-treasurer Ray Velestuk said the district didn’t believe that flushing water lines was an acceptable long-term solution, and would eat up staff time.

The work on upgrading pipes and fixtures — with help from $840,000 in funding from the province — was carried out through a four- to five-month period where walls had to be opened, which included some remediation work for asbestos that was done on weekends, noted Velestuk.

“We looked for a permanent solution at a reasonable cost,” he said. “We remedied it in pretty short order.”

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Kootenay Lake

At the Kootenay Lake school district in the Interior, 70 of 157 tests of drinking sources such as fountains and sinks exceeded the lead limits for water.

The district is using flushing to reduce lead levels, which superintendent Christine Perkins said is considered an “acceptable procedure” by the Interior Health Authority.

Perkins says the district expects to have results of another round of water testing within two weeks, which will be made public, and which will help the board decide what to do next.

According to the provincial database of test results, districts such as Burnaby, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows and Vernon are also using flushing to reduce lead in drinking water.

Vancouver

In the spring of 2016, the Vancouver school board tested more than 250 water samples at its 87 oldest schools. The district would not provide someone for an interview, but on its website says fountains that tested high for lead at 12 schools have been turned off, and that problem sinks at two additional schools have signs warning the water is not drinkable.

One of those decommissioned fountains is at Graham D. Bruce elementary, which had more than seven times the acceptable level of lead when tested twice in May 2016. 

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Earlier this year, Vancouver Coastal Health issued new rules requiring water to be run for five minutes or until cold at all schools with fountains that had tested high for lead.

The VSB says on its website that when flushing is done, all retests showed acceptable levels of lead. But it is also too time-consuming for staff to do flushing daily for every water source, so the district plans to close many drinking fountains at the 85 schools built before 1990.

In June, the district’s director of facilities told the board that this action would leave about three working fountains in each elementary school and about six in each high school. The district promised to retest the remaining fountains before the start of this school year, but aa official said the results are not yet available to the public.

If those tests still show high levels of lead, the board could install a trickling device to keep the water running or could replace the fountain or could replace the piping.

The district does not plan to re-test sinks in the older schools, but to put up signs warning water should be flushed before use.

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 Vancouver tested a small number of samples compared to the large amount of testing done in districts such as Surrey and Richmond, but the VSB says on its website it tested fountains or sinks farthest from the water supply, where water was most likely to sit in the pipes longer.

The Langley school district has also tested relatively few water samples, collecting 23 samples in total from 10 of its 45 schools. Langley has opted to take the full three years allowed by Victoria to do the testing.

On its website, the Langley district, which uses water from wells, says it tested all its schools for lead in 2015 and the tests came back clear. When the Education Ministry ordered this round of tests in 2016, Langley worked with Fraser Health to “develop a new comprehensive testing procedure.”

So far, all 23 Langley results revealed low lead levels. Tests at the remaining 22 Langley schools that were built before 1990 will be done over the next two years.

The district did not answer a question about how it can be sure the water is safe at those yet-to-be-tested schools, saying only that it is following ministry policies.

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The website indicates that if any future tests show high lead volumes, the district’s immediate solutions include flushing the fountains or deactivating them.

Flushing a short-term option

Lanphear, the SFU professor, said it is good that many districts are taking such steps as installing filters and replacing pipes and fixtures, rather than flushing.

He said flushing water through pipes is a temporary solution, noting it may only be good for an hour or two, as often time lead concentrations can build up again quite quickly.

Fleming, the education minister, agreed that flushing is not a long-term solution to reduce lead in drinking water in schools.

But he said in an interview that the provincial health office has found no evidence of any children being harmed by the elevated lead levels.

Marc Zubel, drinking water program manager at the Fraser Health Authority, said in some cases flushing may not be effective, but one can’t draw a conclusion that it’s not going to be good enough in every case.

But he also said he doesn’t believe all the facts are in on how schools are trying to reduce lead levels in water and whether they are effective. “It would be good to see what all those results are and a sort of a summary of what the schools have been doing about it,” said Zubel.

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The World Health Organization has declared there is no known level of lead exposure that is considered safe. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also say that there is no known safe level of lead in a child’s blood.

Experts and regulators, including in Canada and the U.S., have said that young children are particularly vulnerable to lead because the physical and behavioural effects of lead occur at lower exposure levels in children than in adults.

In children, low levels of exposure have been linked to damage to the central and peripheral nervous systems, learning disabilities, shorter stature, impaired hearing and impaired formation and function of blood cells, according the U.S. Environmental and Protection Agency.

Health Canada says the strongest association observed to date is increased lead levels in blood in children and reductions in intelligence quotient, or IQ, scores.

Lanphear said the Canadian standard for lead in drinking water of 10 parts per billion  was never intended as a health standard, and that like other toxic standards, was a balance between scientific evidence and what was feasible to achieve.

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He said over time — whether that’s two years or five years — steps should be taken to reduce the lead in water to below one part per billion, a standard recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

An analysis by Postmedia of the water testing data supplied to the province showed that if the safe limit was set at even five parts per billion, half the current standard, the number of B.C. tests that failed would increase to 42 per cent from 26.5 per cent.

District parent advisory councils do not seem overly concerned about testing results and the approach being taken by school districts.

Karen Tan, president of the Surrey District Parents Advisory Council, said for a short period of time last  year, students were told not to drink from fountains, including at her children’s school, Williams Watson elementary. 

The Surrey parent advisory council was made aware of lead testing being done last year, and told if water is not safe, fountains and sinks would be shut off until fixed, she said.

“Of course, there maybe inconveniences to students. We, parents trust the district to ensure that our schools are safe and water fountains are safe to drink from,” said Tan.

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Audrey Smith, the president of the Victoria Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils, noted the Greater Victoria school district is addressing the problem.

Many parents send water bottles to school with their children, said Smith.

“Old buildings have old pipes. In Victoria, that means lead pipes unless the building has had an extensive renovation. That isn’t in the budget, so filters are the answer for now,” said Smith.

She added the confederation was not aware of any parents unhappy with the response from its district, since the lead levels were measured.

ghoekstra@postmedia.com

twitter.com/gordon_hoekstra

lcublert@postmedia.com

twitter.com/loriculbert

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