Lead levels safe here, city official says

Water manager says Lawrence won't have problems like Washington

For six years, Terry Lewis has poked his head into the plumbing of roughly 10 Lawrence households a day.

He’s seen galvanized steel, copper and plastic pipes help deliver water to faucets. But there’s one type of pipe he hasn’t seen.

“I haven’t seen any lead lines to service a house,” said Lewis, a service plumber for Kastl Plumbing. “I would even go so far as to say zero, in this neck of the woods anyway.”

That’s part of the reason local officials say Lawrence residents don’t have to fear lead contamination in their drinking water — unlike the recent outbreak in Washington, D.C., where thousands of homes were found to have lead levels at dozens of times the maximum federal standards.

Shari Stamer, the city’s water quality manager, on Monday said Lawrence had passed all tests for lead in drinking water with flying colors.

“With regard to lead, there’s not really a problem here,” Stamer said.

In January, officials in Washington, D.C., disclosed that more than 4,000 homes had water that exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard of 15 parts per billion.

Under EPA requirements, water systems must notify the public and take upgraded regulatory steps if more than 10 percent of the tested homes have that level of contamination.

Last week, several members of the federal House Committee on Government Reform called on the EPA to toughen its standards in the wake of the Washington, D.C., outbreak. Previous rounds of testing, they said, showed extremely high levels of lead contamination — just under 10 percent of the tested households, falling short of the threshold to take action.

The Lawrence Utilities Department tests water in individual households if residents have reason to be concerned about lead.”If a resident calls us and thinks there is a lead problem there, we’ll come out and take a sample,” said Shari Stamer, the city’s water quality manager.The department can be contacted at 832-7800.

Stamer said Lawrence went beyond EPA requirements, testing for lead in treated water four times a year.

The city also, under EPA direction, periodically does tests at 30 selected houses, each with lead soldering on copper pipes. The last round of tests was in 2002; the highest lead levels found then was 5.2 parts per billion, Stamer said, well short of the standard.

photo EPA: List of Drinking Water Contaminants & MCLs

Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said Monday that six of 461 water systems in the state exceeded lead requirements during testing in 2002. She did not have the names of those systems immediately available.