President Joe Biden announced a state of emergency in the US Virgin Islands over lead-in-water poisoning earlier this week after testing on St. Croix indicated levels more than 100 times the EPA’s guideline – among the worst readings a US municipality has seen in decades.
“On a personal level, it’s been frightening and frustrating,” said resident Frandelle Gerard, executive director of Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism, Inc.
Residents were advised to turn off their taps and vouchers for bottled water were distributed. Lead can have a negative impact on children’s development, conduct, and IQ scores.
However, according to experts consulted by The Associated Press, the terrifying results could be erroneous because they originated from testing that did not follow EPA criteria.
“The data should be thrown into the garbage,” said Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech lead and water expert who helped identify the lead problems in Flint, Michigan.
If the information provided to St. Croix citizens is incorrect, it will not be the first time. Poor information frequently afflicts communities, and they are frequently majority-Black neighborhoods confronting lead concerns, leaving people unclear what to believe. Officials in Flint first disguised dangerous lead levels. When levels rose in Newark, officials stressed the safety of the city’s reservoirs, despite the fact that lead pipes are frequently the source of the problem.Residents in Benton Harbor, Michigan, relied on bottled water for months while officials confirmed that filters worked.
Officials on the Caribbean island of St. Croix avoided some of these traps and swiftly informed citizens of the outcomes. The governor declared a state of emergency.
“This is not something that we shy away from talking about,” said Andrew Smith, head of the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority.
The problem, according to Edwards, is how the samples were acquired, not the sky-high results. Workers typically use water from a domestic faucet for lead testing. However, the samples that tested so high on St. Croix were taken directly from the meter.
“When you (unscrew) it, you are literally ripping the leaded-brass apart and a chunk of leaded-brass gets in your sample,” he said. It produces artificially high results.
Tom Neltner, a chemical and lead expert at the Environmental Defense Fund, agreed that water meter testing is ineffective. “There’s a lot of oddities” about how St. Croix’s sampling was done, he said.
Parents in St. Croix therefore still have no idea how much lead their kids were consuming.