The US Virgin Islands have been contaminated with lead-based water for more than a century, according to studies conducted on St. Croix. These findings represent the worst outcomes any US municipality has seen in decades, prompting President Joe Biden to declare an emergency earlier this week.
Resident Frandelle Gerard, Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism, Incorporation’s executive director noted, “On a personal level, it’s been frightening and frustrating.”
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Officials distributed bottled water coupons and instructed residents to stop using their taps due to lead exposure, which can have a harmful impact on a child’s IQ, behavior, and development.
However, specialists that The Associated Press spoke with claimed that the alarming findings might not be accurate because they were derived from tests that did not adhere to EPA regulations.
“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.
Residents of St. Croix will not be the first to get misleading information. Disregarding information often makes it difficult for residents of communities where Black people predominate to know whom to trust. Higher than normal lead levels were initially concealed by Flint officials. Newark officials stressed the safety of the city’s reservoirs when levels rose, even though the problem is usually with lead pipes rather than the source. In Benton Harbor, Michigan, residents were forced to rely on bottled water while they waited months for inspectors to validate the filter’s effectiveness.
Some of those problems were avoided by officials on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, who promptly informed the locals of the outcome. An emergency was proclaimed by the governor.
The leader of the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority, Andrew Smith, stated, “This is not something that we shy away from talking about.”
According to Edwards, there is an issue with the way the samples were obtained and the extremely high results do not accurately reflect reality. Workers typically use water from a domestic faucet to test for lead. However, the samples taken from the meter were the ones that tested so high on St. Croix.
“When you (unscrew) it, you are literally ripping the leaded brass apart and a chunk of leaded brass gets in your sample”, he remarked. It generates findings that are inflated.
Tom Neltner, an expert in chemicals and lead at the Environmental Defense Fund, concurred that the water meter’s testing isn’t reliable. He added that there were “a lot of abnormalities” in the way that St. Croix was sampled.
Thus, parents in St. Croix are still unaware of the amount of lead their children were exposed to.
