What the Eyes Don't See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City (One World Essentials)

by Mona Hanna-Attisha

Frederick Douglass said, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

Weeks, months, and finally years passed. Lead flowed freely and in heavy amounts in all four quadrants of the District, from Georgetown and Spring Valley to the farthest reaches of Georgia Avenue and Anacostia. It affected infants, children, and adults; rich, poor, and gentrified; working, middle, and upper class; white and black. Both WASA and the EPA knew, and did nothing. In January 2004 The Washington Post published its first story, reporting on the elevated water-lead levels uncovered by Edwards. At this point, not even the D.C. mayor and council members had been told. In response, WASA issued a health advisory to pregnant women and young children in homes with lead service lines—but high water-lead levels were later found in homes with copper service lines too.

As Edwards testified to Congress in March 2004, the corrosive water was leaching lead not just from the old lead service lines outside homes but from brass fixtures inside homes as well. It turned out that brass fixtures, even when marketed as “lead-free” by the manufacturer, could still contain an average of 8 percent lead. That wouldn’t change until a new regulation took effect in 2014.

To make matters worse, D.C. didn’t want to pay to replace entire lead pipes, so it recommended the “partial” replacement of lead service lines. But in a partial replacement, the disruption of lead scale in pipes caused even more elevated lead levels in the water.

Marc Edwards, now stripped of funding and discredited by the utility and two government agencies, continued his research independently by working with homeowners directly and mortgaging his house to pay for it. Ultimately, his work and science were irrefutable. In 2008 he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant” for his research. The following year he published a report on the D.C. crisis in Environmental Science and Technology, which tied the elevated water-lead levels to raised blood-lead levels in children. It garnered every piece of scientific acclaim under the sun.

As many as 42,000 children in D.C. had been in the womb or under two years of age when they were exposed to harmful amounts of lead in drinking water from 2000 to 2004. The effects ...

And what about the children? What about the ones who received the full impact of the lead crisis—younger children, whose brains were the most vulnerable? How are they doing? Based on what we know about how lead affects developing brains, we can make some assumptions. Some may have experienced inexplicable developmental delays, behavioral problems, low test scores, and blunted potential. Some today may have neurological effects, cognitive impairments, and maybe even higher aggression and tendencies toward violence. Adults across the District may be experiencing an elevated risk for memory loss, early dementia, hypertension, gout, and retinal hemorrhages.

Even though D.C. is more populous than half the states in the union, it has no representation in Congress. The people of D.C. cannot fight battles the way people elsewhere can.

October 2014, just six months after the switch, General Motors stopped using the water at its engine plant. The company got a waiver to go back to the Lake Huron water as its source. “You don’t want the higher chloride water (to result in) corrosion,” the GM spokesperson said. “We noticed it some time ago.”