How One Company Contaminated Pittsburgh’s Drinking Water

This summer 81,000 homes in Pittsburgh received a worrisome letter about their water. The local utility “has found elevated levels of lead in tap water samples in some homes,” it said.

Seventeen percent of samples had high levels of the metal, which can cause “serious health problems.”

The situation was bad enough to attract the attention of Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped expose the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. “The levels in Pittsburgh are comparable to those reported in Flint,” he said in an interview with local TV station WPXI.

This was surprising because until this year, Pittsburgh’s lead levels had always been normal. So what happened?

First, a bit of background: In 2012, the city faced a dilemma. Though it had clean water, its century-old water system desperately needed repair. And its utility, Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, was plagued by administrative problems. Residents complained of bad customer service and unfair fees. And after a series of poor financial decisions in the 2000s, PWSA was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.

Pittsburgh isn’t alone: Public utilities around the country are trying to make ends meet with dwindling public funding and increasingly outdated infrastructure. Many, like Pittsburgh, turn to private management companies to help out.

Pittsburgh’s utility called in Veolia, a Paris-based company that consults with utilities, promising “customized, cost-effective solutions that reflect best practices, environmental protection and a better quality of life.”

Veolia consults or manages water, waste, and energy systems in 530 cities in North America, with recent contracts in New York City, New Orleans, and Washington, DC. Last year, the company, which operates in 68 countries, brought in about $27 billion in revenue.

Pittsburgh hired Veolia to manage day-to-day operations and provide an interim executive team, helping the utility run more efficiently and save precious public dollars. Under the terms of the contract, Veolia would keep roughly half of every dollar the utility saved under its guidance.

Under the leadership of Jim Good, a Veolia executive serving as interim director, PWSA began making sweeping changes—and they seemed to be working: Within a year, call waiting times for concerned customers dropped by 50 percent. Thanks to new fees for commercial buildings, new customers, and other assorted changes, the utility saved $2 million.

According to a 2013 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Veolia changed PWSA’s culture, too: Instead of traditional top-heavy management, Good checked in with employees over pizza and burgers every week. At a staff barbecue in 2012, “I told them that we were there to work with the employees as their partners,” he later told the Post-Gazette. “I provided assurances that there wouldn’t be any layoffs and that together we could achieve anything.”

But by the end of 2015, the utility had laid off or fired 23 people—including the safety and water quality managers, and the heads of finance and engineering, according to documents obtained through a Right-to-Know request.

The PWSA laboratory staff, which was responsible for testing water quality throughout the 100,000-customer system, was cut in half. Stanley States, a water quality director with 36 years of experience at the utility (employees referred to him as “Dr. Water”) was transferred to an office-based job in the research department. Frustrated with the move, he retired.

Good maintains that not all staffing decisions were made by Veolia, which was in a consulting rather than management role when the layoffs occurred. Any suggested staffing changes had to be approved by the board, he said.

As the lab staff shrank, PWSA made major changes to its water treatment system. For decades, the city had been adding soda ash—a chemical similar to baking soda—to its water to prevent the pipes, many of which are lead, from corroding and leaching into the water. (Lack of corrosion controls caused lead to leach into the water in Flint.)

In 2014, PWSA hastily replaced soda ash with another cheaper corrosion control treatment, caustic soda. Such a change typically requires a lengthy testing and authorization process with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, but the DEP was never informed of the change. Nearly two years later, as news spread about the disaster in Flint, the utility switched back to soda ash.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto puts the blame for the treatment change squarely on Veolia, saying the company never informed the utility’s board or the city. Veolia denies responsibility for the change, saying it “did not and would not prioritize cost savings ahead of effective corrosion control methods or water quality.”

In the case of Pittsburgh, Veolia maintains that PWSA’s board of directors retained control over the authority over the course of the three-year contract. “Veolia met its obligations and fulfilled the requirements of our contract in a fully transparent manner,” wrote a Veolia North America spokeswoman in an email. “We stand behind the work performed on behalf of PWSA.”

Read full article at: Wired

Media

Taxonomy

• Pollutants
• Heavy Metal Removal
• Taps Design
• Water Supply
• Drinking Water
• Pollution

1 Comment

1. The similarities with Flint are stunning: lack of local voice in the decision, saving a dollar at expense of public health, lack of or deliberate avoidance of long held studies and research that even subtle changes in water chemistry can result in lead extraction.