page_title: Lead contamination in Washington, D.C., drinking water
section_title: 2004: Washington Post
hierarchical_section_title: Lead contamination in Washington, D.C., drinking water / 2004: Washington Post
caption_attribution_description: English: An excavation revealing a lead water main running to a house serviced by the DC Water And Sewer Authority
context_page_description: Lead contamination in Washington, D.C., drinking water, first discovered in 2001, left thousands of children with lifelong health risks, and led to a re-evaluation of the use of monochloramine in public drinking-water systems. Professor Marc Edwards, an expert in plumbing corrosion, discovered lead levels at least 83 times higher than the accepted safe limit while performing research into premature pipe corrosion for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority. He found that the decision to change from chlorine to chloramine as a treatment chemical had caused the spike in lead levels.
  After the Washington Post ran a series of front-page articles about Edwards's findings, resulting in widespread public concern, the United States House of Representatives conducted an investigation. The House found that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had made "scientifically indefensible" claims in a report that had indicated there was no risk from the high lead levels.
context_section_description: The issue became front-page news when the Washington Post ran an article titled "Water in D.C. Exceeds EPA Lead Limit" on January 31, 2004 across six columns of page A1.  Reporter David Nakamura was contacted by one of the homeowners whose water was tested by WASA during its survey after he received the test results.  Nakamura—who had no prior experience with clean water issues—initially thought it was a minor issue, but agreed to help the homeowner get a response from WASA.  When WASA would not give him a straight answer, Nakamura pressed them for full data on the tests.  Nakamura says that, even though he was "stunned" at the facts reported in that first story, the Post "had no idea about the size and scope of what was to follow."
  The article quoted Erik Olson, an analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, as saying "This is a really big deal... If schools go over 20 parts per billion, they immediately take the water out of production."  WASA recommended that residents let the tap run for 30 seconds to one minute before using it to reduce the risk.
  This first Post article was the first public mention of the theory that the lead levels were tied to monochloramine.  The traditional use of chlorine had been stopped four years earlier, out of concerns that it could produce harmful chemicals in the pipes.  Long-term exposure to the byproducts from chlorine treatment has been linked with cancer. The paper quoted officials as saying that it was possible chloramine was more corrosive to lead pipes. (In fact, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the Washington Aqueduct that supplies water to WASA, rejected a recommendation to add phosphates to the water to prevent lead leaching in the mid-1990s.)  The change to chloramine was made after the EPA issued regulations concerning disinfection byproducts formed when chlorine reacts with organic matter in drinking water; the EPA considered these byproducts to be a potential health threat.
  After the first article, the Post formed a core team of reporters to investigate the issue. Nakamura was joined by reporters Carol Leonnig, Jo Becker, Avram Goldstein, and D'Vera Cohn; editor Marcia Slacum Greene provided daily oversight. Nakamura was the lead reporter for the breaking news coming from WASA and City Hall, and wrote profiles of key players. Leonnig reported on the federal and EPA response to the contamination. Cohn investigated the Washington Aqueduct angle and worked with water quality and environmental experts. Goldstein covered the DC Department of Health. Becker looked at water quality nationwide.
  After the first article appeared, residents inundated WASA's water hotline with calls and overwhelmed water testing laboratories with requests to have their tap water tested for lead contamination. District elected officials immediately called for an emergency public meeting, and established an inter-agency task force with the EPA to investigate and manage the problem.  However, messages to the public at the time were often confusing and contradictory: while WASA was suggesting running taps for 90 seconds to flush out any lead, the EPA was demanding that recommendation be changed to ten minutes.
  The Post article lead WASA to hand out over 30,000 free water filters, hire health experts, and offer free blood tests to residents. Some water fountains were turned off due to lead levels. In 2004, the D.C. Council held 11 oversight hearings on the issue; the US Congress held four.  American University claimed that its water was safe to drink, because the larger water mains feeding commercial sites like the college were not made of lead.
  After Nakamura's first few stories for the Post on the issue, he was contacted by Seema Bhat's attorney.  Bhat, who was then fighting her dismissal from WASA, shared thousands of internal documents with Nakamura. The documents, Nakamura said, "provided a fairly clear picture" that WASA had been trying to find a way to avoid the cost of replacing pipes and adding additional chemicals to the water. He said Bhat's documents were critical to 
caption: A DC WASA lead service line being replaced in 2008.
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