A meeting between government officials and reporters Thursday afternoon to discuss the St. Croix water crisis provided few new answers but clarified that a perfect storm of events has apparently contributed to the elevated levels of lead and copper found in some areas during testing in September.
In short, a prolonged drought, an influx of sargassum this summer that impaired water production at the reverse osmosis plant, and some 67 percent of customers who rarely if ever use their V.I. Water and Power Authority water, combined to create low water levels and stagnant water in ductile iron pipes that are more than 70 years old in some cases, officials with WAPA and the Department of Planning and Natural Resources said.
The pipes also have old plumbing fittings that contain higher levels of lead than current Environmental Protection Agency standards permit, allowing heavy metals to leach into the water when it sits long enough, they said.
Recent heavy rains have helped alleviate the strain — when cisterns are full, people don’t need to buy trucks of water from the reverse osmosis plant, and they don’t turn to WAPA water if they have both WAPA connections and a cistern — affording the utility plenty of water to aggressively flush the system, said WAPA CEO Andy Smith.
St. Croix residents have long been dealing with discolored brownish-red WAPA water coming from their taps, and tests conducted on Sept. 30 and returned to the territory on Oct. 13 revealed levels of lead and copper in 35 of 66 sites that in some cases were hundreds of times above what the EPA deems safe.
Lead levels in one pipe tested at more than 1,340 times the threshold set by the EPA. Another site had 601 times the lead considered an EPA “action level.” Another test site had water with more than 105 times the allowable copper levels. Exposure to either metal at those levels can cause severe, long-lasting health problems, federal officials warn, especially in children.
A Government House advisory against drinking WAPA water remains in place across all of St. Croix, and residents are advised to flush their taps for 10 to 13 minutes before using the water.
However, officials stressed during the meeting that they’re certain the problem affects only pockets of St. Croix where water levels were low and WAPA water infrequently used.
An island-wide ban on drinking the water “was an EPA call based on the need for an abundance of caution. We’ve already demonstrated that the water produced on the production side is not an issue. It meets all the EPA standards, including turbidity and color,” said Austin Callwood, director of DPNR’s Division of Environmental Protection, referring to the reverse osmosis plant.
“We took samples at 66 sites initially, and again this was because of reports of red and brown water. Of that 66, 29 came back unimpacted. So, it was not the entire system that was compromised or is compromised, it is selected areas. As indicated before, when we drill down more into where those areas were, for the most part they were in areas that showed lack of use, whether it was an individual meter or a fire hydrant or other components like that where there was no activity, no flow at all in the system,” said Callwood.
“It’s not in the entire system, it’s in pockets. As we start to unearth some of those areas we’re actually finding that a number of those components were not lead-free components, or they weren’t newly changed out components,” he added.
Officials also took pains to point out that the elevated results were separate from metals testing that WAPA performs every three years as mandated by the EPA, where samples are taken from the taps of 30 customers in each district. Those tests were conducted on Sept. 19 and St. Thomas and St. John were found in compliance. On St. Croix, one sample came back at the EPA “action level” threshold for lead, and one other was slightly above, said Harold Mark, DPNR environmental program manager. When those two sites were retested on Sept. 21, the results were “much lower,” he said.
“When the water sits still at the meters for an extended period of time you start to see elevated levels of lead,” said Mark.
The good news is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has approved about $1.2 billion in funding to replace St. Croix’s water infrastructure. However, that requires a 10 percent match by the V.I. government, and WAPA spokesperson Shanell Petersen confirmed after the meeting that the money is not in hand. “There are a variety of funding sources we are actively seeking to cover the match,” she said.
Replacing the entire water infrastructure also is not a quick fix.
“That’s a 20- to 30-year project, and obviously given the situation we have, compounded by a 10-year drought, the sargassum affecting our ability to produce water at the volume that we need to, to keep our system operating, it brought us to this crisis level of having both stagnant water, and not being able to flush because we don’t have the flow or capacity that we normally have,” said Callwood.
In the meantime, WAPA is using a variety of other funding sources to begin replacing the old pipes and has already done so in the towns of Frederiksted and Christiansted and in Clifton Hill, with work about 70 percent complete in Camporico, said WAPA Chief Operating Officer Noel Hodge. Old copper service lines have been replaced with PVC in other communities, including Strawberry Hill, Hasselberg, Sion Farm, Whim, Princess, and St. Croix by the Sea, he said.
“It is a work in progress, it’s just not happening as fast as we would like,” said Callwood.
The crisis prompted Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. to declare a territorial State of Emergency on Monday as a precursor to seeking a national emergency designation from President Joe Biden. The state of those negotiations is unclear, as the Government House communications staff limited the Source to just one question during Thursday’s meeting while allowing other news organizations to make multiple inquiries.
The meeting was called following complaints that on the weekly Government House press briefings, some news organizations waiting on the line to ask questions are overlooked, while others are not. Communications staff have attributed the problem to technical “glitches.”
