Cover Feature Lessons on Lead Reporting on Drinking Water in Your Community By LAURA UNGAR
For environmental and health reporters across the country, the crisis in Flint, Mich., highlighted a long-festering and much larger problem with lead-tainted water, spurring us to ask: What about other places? What about my city? The USA TODAY Network set about trying to answer those questions by examining U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data and then diving deeply into our findings through old-fash- ioned, shoe-leather reporting. I helped lead the national coverage, along with reporters Alison
Young and Mark Nichols, and we all received feeds, data and doc- uments from our Gannett colleagues throughout the country. Many of them, in turn, wrote local stories based on the data, making this a truly network-wide effort. Our investigation resulted in two major national stories (
http://usat.ly/1Lhs90w and
http://usat.ly/21wCJmf). One focused on overall findings identifying almost 2,000 water systems in all 50 states where testing has shown excessive levels of lead contam- ination over the past four years. The other looked specifically at lead-tainted water at schools and day cares. Around 350 of these are served by water systems failing lead tests, but most are not re- quired to test for lead at all because of a gaping federal loophole. We all learned a lot from this experience — lessons that may be useful to other journalists taking on this complicated but crucial topic. Here are a half-a-dozen lessons for your own reporting on lead in drinking water. Lesson No. 1: Check and re-check the data. Data is the back- bone of any project like this, so it’s crucial that it be as reliable as
Sandra Porter, the cook and water operator at Ozark Action Head Start in Ava, Mo., pours a gallon of bottled water into a bowl while she cooks for the school’s children. The Head Start has a well on its property, but the school doesn’t use it because samples from faucets have shown high lead levels. Photo: Guillermo Hernandez Martinez, USA TODAY NETWORK
it can be. Our data came from the EPA’s Safe Drinking Water In- formation System, or SDWIS (
http://j.mp/EPAsdwis). We summa- rized 2012-2015 data that documents instances where lead contamination in water samples reached an “actionable level” under federal regulations. As with any large data set, human error at any point in the data collection process can cause inaccuracies. For instance, one water system serving a day care in Maine appeared to have the highest lead level of any school or day care in the data set. But it turned out that someone had entered the result incorrectly, putting 20 parts per million instead of 20 parts per billion. After the property owner balked at the numbers I shared with him, I checked with state offi- cials, who pointed out the error. Such “outlier” findings may appear stunning, but reporters need to make sure they are true. Lesson No. 2: Go beyond the numbers. Real people give these
stories heart. We had some very strong findings, but we needed to make readers care. And that meant focusing on what high lead lev- els meant to people’s lives.
Melissa Hoffman, 40, expresses her concerns about the high lead levels found at her children’s school, Caroline Elementary School, during a town hall meeting March 3, 2016, in Ithaca, N.Y.
Photo: Romain Blanquart, USA TODAY NETWORK
One of my colleagues talked to a trailer home resident in Maine, mother of an 8-year-old daughter, who got a notice on her door last year alerting her to potential lead contamination in the neighborhood. The property manager blamed tap water from a single old trailer, and
10 SEJournal Summer 2016
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