Lead Persists at Glencairn School Despite Fix

East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS) Superintendent Robyne Thompson notified parents yesterday that in spite of replacement of plumbing suspected of leaching lead at Glencairn Elementary School, water coming to one sink is still testing positive for high levels of lead.

In a letter dated yesterday, Thompson wrote, “To date, a total of 15 locations at Glencairn have been tested. In both rounds of testing, only one water source, the original problem sink, was found to exceed the EPA action level” and did so “in both rounds of testing despite the replacement of the faucet and some piping between testing rounds.”

She says the District will keep working with plumbers to figure out what needs to be done, and in the meantime, “access to this sink is restricted.”

ELi previously reported that this sink had a sign over it warning of high lead and instructing users to run the tap for several minutes before using the water. Thompson has said that the sign apparently dated back “to the late 80s or early 90s.”

Thompson has not replied to ELi’s question to her last week of “why the problem plumbing wasn’t replaced sooner,” given that there was a sign above the faucet, apparently for decades, indicating it was known to have high levels of lead.

The raising of public awareness by the Flint water crisis appears to have been the cause of someone recently sounding an alarm in this case. Why the School District did not act sooner with regard to this sink remains unclear, but it is possible that workers simply did not understand the danger to children of lead in the water.

As I previously reported for ELi, some East Lansing residents seem unaware of the risk to their children of lead paint in their homes.

Similarly, last year, in a series we called The Mercurial Trail, I reported for ELi’s readers the story of how City of East Lansing employees failed to understand the dangers of liquid mercury. In November of 2013, a worker spilled about one to one-and-a-half pounds of mercury at our city’s Wastewater Treatment Plant and then moved to clean it up with ordinary shop vacs and also by washing the mercury down a sink drain and also a floor drain.

The spill went unreported to local health officials for four months. And it was not just the county health department that was supposed to have been notified right away; regulations from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) require that any spill of mercury greater than one pound be reported to the federal EPA. That didn’t happen.

Mercury is not only a dangerous substance; it is a particularly tricky one to clean up. It scatters in balls if dropped, and can become a gas if warmed. That means someone can breathe in the dangerous substance.

As I documented in the series for ELi readers, proper tracking of the spill and proper clean-up did not occur even after the Ingham County Health Department was made aware of the problem. Moreover, by then, the shop vacs contaminated with the original clean-up had been used at the Hannah Community Center to blow out heating vents. It remains unclear whether the vacs were used elsewhere in the City before they were identified and disposed of.

What is clear is that various pieces of contaminated equipment remained in use at the Wastewater Treatment Plant months after the spill, and that some contaminated equipment was left for months in a dumpster that City workers knew contained mercury contamination. Ultimately authorities fined the City of East Lansing tens of thousands of dollars for the mismanagement of a major mercury spill. The City is now battling a lawsuit over mercury and asbestos by wastewater treatment plant workers.

You can read ELi’s whole Mercurial Trail series by starting here. The series includes a detailed account of the parts played by the Ingham County Health Department, which is now assisting ELPS in dealing with the lead problem at Glencairn Elementary School.