Tainted Drinking Water Found at Thousands of U.S. Schools, AP Report Says

Students at thousands of schools across the U.S. have for years been drinking water that contains potentially dangerous amounts of pesticides, lead, and other toxic chemicals, a new Associated Press investigative report has found.

According to the AP, water fountains at schools in all 50 states, from rural schoolhouses to big-city urban campuses, have tested positive for dangerous toxins, but the government has failed to adequately protect students from risks of cancers and other health problems.

Exposure to lead can cause reduced intelligence, learning disabilities, and major organ damage in children, while pesticides have been associated with various cancers. Children are particularly vulnerable to the hazardous toxins, which are also found in various levels in water in homes.

Marc Edwards, an engineer at Virginia Tech and a leading advocate for water quality, called the AP findings an “outrage.”

“If a landlord doesn’t tell a tenant about lead paint in an apartment, he can go to jail,” Edwards told the AP. “But we have no system to make people follow the rules to keep school children safe?”

Well-Served Campuses Fared Worst

The AP found the water-quality problems are the worst at the approximately 10 percent of schools that are served by water wells. About one in five of well-serviced schools violated the Safe Water Drinking Water Act in the last 10 years, the AP found.

Still, schools with unsafe water represent only a small percentage of the nation’s 132,500 schools, the AP said. The spike in the number of water-related violations reported to the Environmental Protection Agency in the last 10 years mostly because the government has cracked down with tougher restrictions on contaminants such as arsenic and some disinfectants.

Tests of drinking water at schools in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Seattle and Los Angeles have found dangerous levels of lead in recent years, officials said.

Are Report Findings ‘Tip of the Iceberg?’

Some of the notable findings from the AP’s analysis of a database showing federal drinking water violations from 1998 to 2008 in schools with their own water supplies include:

• Water in about 100 school districts and 2,250 schools breached federal safety standards.

• Those schools and districts racked up more than 5,550 separate violations. In 2008, the EPA recorded 577 violations, up from 59 in 1998 — an increase that officials attribute mainly to tougher rules.

• California, which has the most schools of any state, also recorded the most violations with 612, followed by Ohio (451), Maine (417), Connecticut (318) and Indiana (289).

• Nearly half the violators in California were repeat offenders. One elementary school in Tulare County, in the farm country of the Central Valley, broke safe-water laws 20 times.

• The most frequently cited contaminant was coliform bacteria, followed by lead and copper, arsenic and nitrates.

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