IN OCTOBER of last year, city officials discovered drinking fountains in Northgate Park were discharging lead.
According to test results from the Portland Water Bureau (PWB) that were quietly posted to a city website, the Portsmouth neighborhood park’s only two drinking fountains turned up lead levels of 32.3 and 72.6 parts per billion (ppb), in excess of the 20 parts per billion “action level” set by the US Environmental Protection Agency for water in schools.
The samples, collected October 18, were among the first taken in a sweeping survey of outdoor water fixtures at Portland parks last fall. They weren’t the last to turn up elevated lead levels.
In all, the testing turned up excessive lead spouting from 12 water fixtures in nine parks throughout the city. Records of the tests were posted on a little-noticed city website, detailing lead results at dozens of city properties.
While parks officials were quick to shut off offending fountains, and even put signage on a few, some notifications to neighbors came months after tests occurred. It’s unclear how effective those notices were.
Among the findings:
• Two drinking fountains at a playground in East Portland’s Raymond Park showed results of 42.3 ppb and 40.9 ppb.
• A fountain near some tennis courts in Southwest Portland’s Gabriel Park contained 32.3 ppb.
• Water from a fountain near a baseball field at Lents Park contained 24 ppb.
• At Fernhill Park in Northeast Portland, tests on two drinking fountains—which showed lead levels at 74.3 and 36.3 ppb—led to revelations that the fountains didn’t meet plumbing code. The drinking fountain water was tapped into the same line used for watering the grass, which posed a risk of contamination. Portland Parks and Recreation (PP&R) is requesting $300,000 in next year’s budget to remedy the situation.
As you’ve likely heard time and again since elevated lead levels turned up all over Portland schools last year, no amount of lead exposure is considered safe. While the parks bureau points out there have been no documented cases of lead poisoning from drinking water in Multnomah County recently, it also notes “sustained exposure to high levels of lead can lead to serious health concerns, especially for young children.”
Which is why city parks are of potential concern: They’re frequented by kids, and there’s no telling how long problem fountains have been discharging elevated lead. PP&R spokesperson Mark Ross says the fountains had never been tested previously, and officials have yet to figure out precisely where the lead is coming from. Portland’s water is corrosive, and can leach lead from older water fixtures and pipes.
The testing conducted last year suggested the vast majority of drinking fountains and hose spigots in parks don’t merit a closer look. The 12 fixtures identified represent 3.5 percent of those tested. PP&R says an additional 53 fixtures haven’t been tested for a variety of reasons.
By using 20 ppb as a cutoff, the parks bureau is voluntarily adopting EPA guidelines. Other jurisdictions have chosen to be more restrictive.
For instance, last year Chicago shut off water fountains in parks that emitted 15 ppb of lead or more—a benchmark the EPA uses to flag problems in large public water systems rather than spot tests of individual fountains. That standard would have shut down eight additional fixtures in Portland parks.
“There is no federal, state or local regulation requiring water testing for parks facilities,” Ross notes. “PP&R management has undertaken the responsibility to create effective protocols and policies around health, safety and environmental (HSE) matters. We do not want to be a contributor to people’s exposure to lead.”
The parks bureau has clearly learned some lessons since last summer, when the Oregonian reported that officials had allowed high lead results at the Multnomah Arts Center to languish for years without proper attention.
“We haven’t had clear protocols,” Parks Director Mike Abbate told the Oregonian at the time, adding that he’d never seen the tests in question.
Now, officials are reacting more quickly. The PWB is in the midst of testing all city-owned facilities for lead, and prioritized testing parks’ outdoor drinking fountains before they were shut off for winter.
“When they had a high result for a drinking fountain, we would let [PP&R] know so they could turn that drinking fountain off,” says Scott Bradway, who runs the water bureau’s Lead Hazard Reduction Program.
But in most cases, parks officials took their time letting community members know an issue had been discovered. Only the results at Northgate prompted officials to issue a notice within two weeks. For elevated lead levels turned up between October 25 and November 30, parks officials didn’t send out word to community members until January 20 (the bureau says it received those results December 27).
And it’s unclear how effective those notices were. After getting word of the lead tests at several parks in January, the East Portland Neighborhood Office posted notices to its Facebook page, yielding little apparent interest. The office didn’t go further.
“That’s not typically the type of thing our office shares,” says Kari Koch, a community engagement coordinator with the Office of Neighborhood Involvement. “That’s parks’ job to share.”
Some neighbors didn’t even see the lead notice. Mary-Margaret Wheeler-Weber, chair of the Portsmouth Neighborhood Association, tells the Mercury she never opened PP&R’s email about Northgate.
“The subject line didn’t inspire much interest and I get a ton of informational emails,” she says.
City officials defend their efforts.
“It’s just challenging to put out a media release every few weeks,” says Bradway, of the PWB. “In buildings, we post it in the building itself. That doesn’t help with [outdoor] fountains, obviously.”
Ultimately, he argues that the lag in notifying neighbors that their kids might have been exposed to lead isn’t harmful.
“One of the challenges is that after about six weeks it’s out of your system pretty quickly,” Bradway says. “There’s also not a lot you can really do… other than remove the source of lead exposure. That’s being done instantly.”
Here’s a full list of fixtures that showed elevated lead:
The blood lead levels used to indicate harm potential status and trends in public health can be very misleading, since they primarily only indicate current lead exposures or uptake only during the last several months. Blood lead levels quickly reduce by the body sequestering the lead in bones and teeth in accumulative fashion. This sequestration does help the current toxic risk of other physiologic pathway degradation, but tends to only put off the risks until stresses later in life (old age, illness, or pregnancy) develop to cause the body to seek to mobilize the calcium stores in bone to fill the sudden need for added calcium to build defensive molecules needed to counter the stresses. At such times, calcium is low in supply, and since the body does not correctly identify lead as being other than calcium, lead comes out with the Ca and becomes incorporated into the defensive components being made from calcium and zinc. This contamination of stored lead makes many of the molecules such as zinc finger proteins dysfunctional. The body thinks that it has responded well to the stress but has not because the accumulated body lead has poisoned the bodies’ defenses. Blood lead levels can thus drop well, because either the exposures have lessened, or because the body has been effective in storing it in bone, or both mechanisms. Any time the bbl drops, helps the current pathogenicity of the lead to the immediate physiology, but usually only postpones the damage till later in life when stresses remobilize it at precisely the vulnerable times of old age, illness, or pregnancy. Once body burden has increased, we all have increased risks through life from that lead uptake that has occurred earlier. The public health paradigm commonly misrepresents the meaning of the blood lead testing results, erroneously giving the impression that the dangers from the lead exposures have all passed, but science is not served well by this incomplete picture provided by the authorities. Bone lead levels are now 100 to 1000 times those that prehistoric bones had accumulated. Our bodies have not had evolutionary time elapsed to adapt better defense mechanisms to the greatly increased environmental pollution once we dug the lead up out of the ground and dispersed it around the globe as products that easily degrade to be taken up to contribute to our health challenges. As you say, prevention is primary, because once in the body, much of it stays there to eventually do more damage.
Everybody better check their own garages, look on the bench where you set your tackle box after taking the grandkids to teach them how to fish. Go to a hardware store, buy a cheap lead test kit for surfaces, go home and test that tackle box superfund site by just swabbing anywhere in the box. The fine black nearly pure lead powder contaminating the surfaces has likely poisoned the people you love by contaminating your hands, the fishing pole, the sandwiches you handed out to your grandkids, the apples you ate, the cooler ice, and the fish you took home to put into the frying pan. Chronic low dose accumulative effects harm children from all lead sources, the high levels on those apples could have directly poisoned them at levels that reduced IQ. How many tackle boxes sit in contaminated boats? How many sinkers get lost in salmon streams that grind lead sinkers up, exponentially increasing surface area to dissolve faster in the water, chronically low dosing whole aquatic habitats? All of this pollution is ignored by the regulatory agencies because the NRA and industry lobbies reduce election funding to many legislators that would
ask their ‘environmental protection agencies’ to do their jobs assessing these risks as required by the Clean Water Act, Clean Drinking Water Act etc. None of this ever shows up due to lack of due diligence for public health…. and we are poisoning our precious children.
Lead from drinking fountains accumulates in the body in bone and teeth. Athletes, that often drink from contaminated sources while very thirsty from exercise during practice and games to quench their thirst, during many years of school, will have increased body accumulation that is NOT detected by blood lead levels if tested. These students pay the price later in life as stresses such as illness, pregnancy, and old age draw the lead out of the bones just when the body is struggling. Many diseases are made worse by the lead exposure. Many babies have increased lead exposure and harm at birth.