There have been various efforts to raise awareness about the dangers of lead poisoning in children. One bright spot is the effort to keep our drinking water lead-free.
Hawaiʻi was one of seven recipients of an Environmental Protection Agency grant to retrofit water fixtures in elementary schools and preschool centers. Millions of dollars have gone into replacing problematic fixtures across the state.
HPR talked to Dr. Diana Felton, the toxicologist for the state Department of Health, about a project to ensure drinking water in Hawaiʻi public schools is lead-free. The initial surveying of school sites was funded by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act.
"We glommed on to that grant early on in 2021 and started testing our elementary schools and our child care facilities, and we had to prioritize because the money was limited, so we used EPA priority rankings and decided to prioritize the schools where we thought there was the highest risk to have lead in the drinking water," she said.
Felton said they started testing with 106 elementary schools, including those in old buildings built before 1988.
"What was interesting is we found a fair amount of lead in the drinking water," she said. "We were not expecting to find very much, but we did."
Felton said testing overwhelmingly found that the detected lead could be traced to the drinking water fixtures: faucets and fountains. In most cases, the source was not deeper in the pipes.
"As we know from long times of testing, we know our source water doesn't contain lead," she said.
Using the $1.4 million EPA grant, the project has replaced 1,459 water fixtures, she said. About 78% of the schools tested had at least one fixture that needed to be replaced.
"Confirmatory testing after the fixture replacement showed around an 80% to 85% success rate," Felton said. Two schools, Kula Elementary on Maui and Lehua Elementary on Oʻahu, continue to have problems, and deeper investigations are in progress.
"We focused on elementary schools because lead is more toxic to younger children, to the developing brain. But of course, we would like to see evaluation of the middle schools and high schools as well, and we are exploring potential funding sources to further this project into middle and high schools, but that funding has not been secured yet," Felton said.
However, the majority of lead exposure cases in local children come from homes, she said.
"Most of our lead exposure to kids is coming from deteriorated lead-based paint, from lead in soil, from fishing weights melting. These are the key places we're seeing as the source of lead for kids with lead poisoning in Hawaiʻi. Because we don't have lead service lines, because we don't have lead in our source water, water tends to be a very small contributor to the overall lead exposure for an individual child with lead poisoning," Felton told HPR.
The department recommends all children get tested for lead at some point between ages 9 and 12 months, and then again at age 2.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Oct. 25, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
