12.11.2020 'Damage has been done': Newark water crisis echoes Flint | US news | The Guardian

This article is more than 1 year old 'Damage has been done': Newark water crisis echoes Flint The city’s lead contamination crisis has been more than three years in the making and residents feel officials have been slow to act

People wait in line for at a recreation center in Newark, New Jersey. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images Lauren Aratani in Newark Sun 25 Aug 2019 06.00 BST

n a steaming August afternoon in Newark, New Jersey, a stream of cars parked in front of the Boylan Street recreation center. Typically, they would be driven by parents, dropping off kids hoping to take advantage of the last days of summer at the giant pool, or to play basketball or tennis. But these people were coming for a different reason. The center had become a hub for the distribution of drinkable water. O Those who come with proof of Newark residency can get two cases of 24 half-liter bottles. Each address is given two cases, regardless of how many people live there. Sweating workers, hired by the city, help residents get water to their cars.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered Newark to give its residents bottled water after the city discovered that water filters it distributed last year may not be working. Such filters helped Flint, Michigan, temporarily handle its lead contamination crisis, which attracted widespread attention. If they had not been working properly in Newark, thousands, including young children, could have been drinking and cooking with lead-contaminated water for months.

“I don’t know how long we’ve been dealing with this lead,” said Kelvin Watts, 53, a lifelong Newark resident picking up bottled water. He had been using the filters, he said. “It’s crazy. It’s terrible, because that means you’ve got lead in your system and you thought you were being safe, but it wasn’t. It was unhealthy.”

The emergency water distribution has helped shine a national spotlight on Newark’s problem. , the New Jersey senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination who was mayor of the city between 2006 and 2013, tweeted that the “water emergency” represented a broader “national crisis of lead-contaminated water disproportionately hit[ting] poor black and brown communities like my own”.

It is a crisis more than three years in the making. In March 2016, Newark shut down drinking water in 30 public schools after annual testing found elevated levels of lead. Samples sent to New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2017 and 2018 continued to test above the federal maximum. From July to December last year, more than 100 of 240 sampled homes surpassed the federal standard.

Pressure on the city intensified when a lawsuit was filed against it and the state of New Jersey by a coalition of local teachers and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), one of the not-for- profits that sued Flint and Michigan, for allegedly violating federal law that requires local governments to replace lead pipes, inform the public and treat water for corrosion if elevated lead levels are found.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/25/newark-lead-water-crisis-flint 1/3 12.11.2020 'Damage has been done': Newark water crisis echoes Flint | US news | The Guardian

Children play next to packages of bottled water at a city-run water distribution site in Newark, New Jersey, on 16 August. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

The EPA says any exposure to lead is dangerous: the federal maximum is a level at which officials are required to take action. Lead is particularly dangerous for children as exposure can lead to serious damage to the brain and central nervous system, slowing growth and causing behavioral and learning problems. In adults, lead exposure can