This summer the city of Montreal has continued to test for lead in people’s drinking water. Some NDG area homes are showing alarming results.
Recent tests on Prud’homme Avenue showed lead levels far higher than those Health Canada considers safe. At least one home tested at 65 parts per billion (ppb). That’s 13 times higher than recommended levels of 5 ppb.
Sasha Angelic is the owner of a duplex on Prudhomme Avenue. His water tested at 49 ppb. “I am extremely upset about it,” says the 42-year-old bank worker.
“This should have been dealt with a long time ago. Carole, the next-door neighbour, passed away from leukemia. She lived there for twenty years. It makes you wonder if that’s why,” he says.
Lead gets into our water from lead pipes as well as from lead service lines that connect homes to the city’s distribution system. The health effects from exposure to the neurotoxin are more pronounced in pregnant women and children under the age of six. They can include cancer, liver disease and neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD.
Angelic and his wife have been living on Prud’homme for six years. The city has recommended they get blood tests to check their lead levels. While he is worried about their health, Angelic is also annoyed he can’t find out when his pipes will be replaced. He says he tried calling 311 but couldn’t obtain any information from the number given to him by the city employee who tested his water.
“What’s the point of giving you a phone number if when you call it they can’t answer your inquiry?” says Angelic.
Cote-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de Grace borough mayor Sue Montgomery says lead testing will remain ongoing every summer until it is complete. The borough is prioritizing areas with the oldest infrastructure, which tend to be in its Western regions. Montgomery calls the lead test results on Prud’homme “alarming.”
“This is why removing lead pipes from our streets is a top priority for me. I urge property owners who have not yet replaced their side of the connection to do so as soon as possible,” says Montgomery.
The borough has yet to set start-end dates for all of its pipe replacement work. However, contracts have been awarded for certain streets.
In July 2018, Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante vowed to replace all of the city’s lead pipes by 2026. The completion date was recently pushed back to 2030.
Notre-Dame-de-Grace city councillor Peter McQueen says the current administration is having to make up for a lack of action when it comes to cleaning up lead in NDG resident’s drinking water.
“The whole project to replace lead water entries on residential streets started badly under the Codere administration,” says McQueen. He also points out that the previous government failed to create a mechanism to ensure homeowners replaced their part of the infrastructure.
“Projet Montreal pushed through a complicated bylaw that takes in effect next year that means all replacement work starting next year will automatically change both lines at the same time,” says McQueen.
Government officials have known that there are toxic levels of lead in our drinking water for years, according to a recent Canada-wide investigation conducted by journalism students and media organizations. It found that Montreal used a testing method that gave misleading results.
“The situation in Quebec is particularly troubling because authorities were using a testing method that was widely discredited internationally,“ says Patti Sonntag, the director of Concordia’s Institute for Investigative Journalism and one of the lead investigators on the study of lead in our tap water.
The study uncovered that 1 in 3 Canadian homes in older areas, have higher than acceptable levels of lead in their drinking water. In many cases, tap water in Canadian homes was of worse quality than tap water in Flint Michigan at the peak of their water crisis in 2015.
The journalists also discovered that in Montreal the problem was more widespread than it was in Flint. 58 percent of water samples taken from Montreal homes exceeded acceptable lead limits. In Flint, only 25 percent of homes had water that surpassed recommended lead levels.
Sonntag says our governments aren’t doing a good job of keeping people informed about dangerous lead levels in their water.
“To have a healthy community we all need to talk to each other. We depend on transparent information,” says Sonntag, who agrees with Angelic that extracting information from the government about lead levels can be needlessly complex.
Sonntag says her team consulted with experts at Harvard University who explained best practises. Lead test results need to be posted publicly, so that people who rent, especially, are able to access them. In contrast, Sonntag’s team of journalists spent thousands of dollars to get the data they needed and had to obtain much of it through time-consuming access to information requests.
Sonntag believes one of the key findings of the investigation was that it exposed how Canadian governments operate.
“This cycle of discovery and scandal and then forgetting and sweeping things under the rug has reoccurred over and over again,” says Sonntag. She notes that Canada had its own Flint Michigan style crisis. In the 1980s lead poisoning affected 465 people, 213 of whom were children living in the small Laurentian town of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts.
Sonntag says governments at every level are very aware of the health effects of exposure to lead.
“The effects are so profound they are estimated to cost the health care system close to 2 billion dollars a year,” she says.
The Quebec government recommends running your taps for a few minutes before using your water. If you suspect you have lead in your water they recommend preparing food with cold water. Hot water contains more lead and boiling water can increase the concentration of lead. The government also recommends using a certified NSF/ANSI no 53 water filter.
Sonntag wants people to make sure they follow the directives provided to them and to remember that when the work is being done and pipes are disturbed, the highest concentrations of lead can occur. She warns that while Health Canada may consider 5 ppb safe, The World Health Organization maintains that no level of lead in the water is safe.
