Residents of the Michigan city who haven’t been able to drink their lead-contaminated water for more than year are now able to drink up, as long as they use a filter, the Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday.
More than six months after President Obama declared an emergency in Flint,, the EPA says the water in the eastern Michigan city of 100,000 people is OK to drink as long as it’s filtered. The agency had previously warned against the water being given to children, pregnant women and the elderly, even if it was filtered.
The EPA conducted testing at 50 high-risk sites during the last two months, and nearly all filtered water samples showed lead levels of less than 1 part per billion. The EPA says the danger level for lead in water is 15 parts per billion, though there is no safe amount of lead that can be in drinking water.
“These findings reaffirm the effectiveness of filters at removing or reducing lead. This is an important step forward for providing a stable water system for the City of Flint,” said Tom Burke, EPA science adviser and deputy assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “Residents can be confident that EPA’s sampling results correspond with previous tests and are consistent with outside experts’ findings.”
Michigan officials have been distributing filters since January, and the federal government has given more than 50,000 filters to the state for distribution.
The latest test results are a considerable improvement over January’s results. About 7 percent of homes in Flint had dangerous amounts of lead in their drinking water, to the point where the amount of lead would have overwhelmed filters’ ability to remove it.
The tests have been done independent of government agencies by Virginia Tech University researchers led by professor Mark Edwards, a renowned water expert.
Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure at the behest, and approval, of state officials in April 2014. Since then, the more corrosive Flint River water ate away at lead pipes leading from city water mains to people’s homes, causing lead to leach into their drinking water.
A state investigation found the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was ultimately responsible for the crisis. Two agency employees have been criminally charged in the case.
