One morning a few weeks ago, it was 73 degrees Fahrenheit outside and the air-conditioning unit in the classroom I was in was broken. I was sweating through my purple cotton shirt and had drunk all the water left in my bottle (which I’d filled up in my kitchen sink at home). Knowing I wouldn’t be able to focus on the lecture without cooling down a little bit, and knowing also that I couldn’t borrow water bottles from friends due to a recent influx of Omicron variant cases, I decided to take a risk and fill up the bottle from a water fountain on the bottom floor of the Humanities building. I’d heard lots of rumors since I was a freshman, from sources both legitimate and not so legitimate, that I’d get lead poisoning if I consumed the school water. For a week-long stretch last semester, crime scene tape was strung around the fountain spigots on both levels of the Humanities building, for reasons that custodians did not disclose to us. Once I’d filled up the bottle, I lifted it gradually to my mouth, quivering with dread that a metallic taste would follow and I would vomit. Instead, the water was clean, if a little lukewarm. I drank three long sips and continued on with my morning.
In our Humanities Magnet, there exists a popular phobia about drinking water from the school fountains that is impossible to ignore. In a magnet-wide survey completed in mid-January, 49.3% of Humanities students reported that a teacher has, at some point, discouraged them from drinking the water at Hamilton. Meanwhile, 76% of students have received that message from a fellow peer. And students are listening to that advice: 57.3% said they haven’t once drank water from Hamilton’s fountains, period, and 24% said they do so on a once-a-semester basis. Only 6% of surveyed Humanities students drink water once or multiple times per day from Hamilton outlets.
No one I interviewed knew where this phobia about the water in the Humanities Magnet originated. Indeed, L.A.U.S.D. has a murky history when it comes to detecting high lead levels in its schools. The pipes are the main culprit, though lead can also leach into water from soldering and brass fittings. Old infrastructure, mixed with a lack of funding for repairs or substitute pipes, means that lead can become caked onto the inside of water fountain pipes for decades without a single human ever noticing. In April 2019, the school district announced that it was spending $15 million to research and repair the district’s water fountains (the district “does not currently have sufficient funding to allow the replacement of water pipes in all schools,” per an FAQ page). In that 2019 water sampling data, about 13.9% of fountains or fixtures in the district clocked in above the national Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) guideline for lead levels, 15 parts per billion, before flushing occurred. Of the 991 schools and facilities where tests were conducted, 772 had at least one fixture with lead levels in the range of 5 parts per billion to 15 parts per billion pre-flushing. Once flushed, though, only 3.2% of fountains district-wide were above that concentration. Flushing is a process wherein custodians are supposed to let the fountains spit out water for 30 seconds before school in the mornings, to get rid of the motionless water that had been sitting in lead flakes the night before. This data might seem like grounds for optimism. Yet the specific results for which schools tested at which levels were never published, leaving students at Hamilton and elsewhere oblivious to the health of their school’s water. The district also conducted periodic testing on the water fountains in 2009, and, in lieu of an official report, released a list of all the district schools that would be exempt from a flushing certification requirement (that is, schools whose fountains all tested below 15 ppb). Alexander Hamilton Senior High School was not listed on this document, which implies that one or multiple of its outlets contained lead concentration that violated the E.P.A. guidelines. When one fountain is poisoned, that means all the other fountains attached to its pipes are likewise poisoned.
In other words, until now there has been district-sanctioned evidence to support our phobia in the Humanities Magnet. Yet there has been significant progress since 2019 at Hamilton, as water sample records that the Vitruvian obtained from the Office of Environmental Health and Safety (O.E.H.S.) in January show. The testing, conducted on March 4, 2020 by the Maintenance and Operations wing of the district, confirms that every single functional drinking fountain at Hamilton contains lead concentrations lower than 15 parts per billion lead. With the exception of one spigot on the first-floor Humanities fountain (which contains 11 ppb), all the water outlets inside the magnet building are well below 10 ppb. The data vindicates the sentiment that can be heard amongst most of the Hamilton student population, outside our Humanities Magnet bubble—that the school water might not be as pure as a $5.99 bottle of Fiji, but nevertheless, our school leaders wouldn’t let us drink something that could damage our brains. The fact that Humanities Magnet students are exposed to identical lead levels as the other SLCs but are much more resistant to drinking them, some students believe, exemplifies deep-rooted conflicts over Humanities Magnet elitism at Hamilton.
So, does this mean that, since the fountains are below 15 ppb, we should begin gulping down as much water from them as we can? It’s a question that has scientists all over the world biting their nails. All lead in drinking water, no matter its ratio, is scientifically proven to cause slower brain development, shorter attention spans, and lower IQ scores in children. The Center for Disease Control has insisted in various studies that “no safe blood lead level in children has been identified.” Organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics believe that the E.P.A.’s 15 ppb “action level” is too lenient, suggesting that levels as low as 1 part per billion contribute to an increased lead concentration in children's blood. Although the district’s goal is 0 ppb, at some point lead contamination in school fountains is inevitable. And it is quite possible that the lead levels found in Hamilton’s drinking fountains are lower than those coming out of students’ sinks at home.
In 1986, the federal Safe Drinking Water Act was ratified, forbidding the use of lead pipes in all new buildings constructed post-1986 that provide drinking water to humans. Until then, lead used to be the main material used for pipes in homes: our modern English word for plumbing, in fact, is derived from the Latin word plumbum, meaning lead. The law was implemented in response to scientific studies that unveiled what we all now know: old lead pipes contaminate the drinking water that flows through them, and most homeowners do not have the economic means to hire a plumber to investigate the pipe qualities in their sinks, let alone replace toxic ones. In a 2020 report available to the public, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power confessed that the 90th percentile of lead concentrations in the homes of Los Angeles residents was 5 ppb (that is, 90% of residents are consuming water that is 5 ppb lead or below). High levels of Chromium 6, a chemical that the EPA defines as a carcinogen, were also detected. Students in low-income neighborhoods are at a higher risk of consuming water from cheaper and older pipes, due to a national trend of environmental racism that events like the Flint water crisis have brought to the media’s attention. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health on February 28, 2020, found that 24.4% of Black children 1-5 years old, living in houses built before 1950, had high blood levels, compared to 11.9% of Hispanic or non-Hispanic white children. In houses built between 1950 and 1977, that rate was 11.9% for Black children and 1.7% for Hispanic or non-Hispanic white children. It would be logical to conclude that in cities as segregated as Los Angeles, students from poor backgrounds are much likelier to depend on school water fountains as their main source of drinking water than their middle-class peers.
The survey completed by Humanities Magnet students in January indeed supports this hypothesis. The 58.7% of students who guessed that the school drinking water was dirtier than their water at home, and the 61.3% of students who predicted from their own biases that the lead concentration at Hamilton was above 15 ppb, identified disproportionately white and middle-class.
One potential issue about the 15 ppb E.P.A. guideline that the district follows is that because the water fountains at Hamilton all tested below 15 ppb, our custodians are not required to conduct flushing before school. When I conducted my own water sampling in the Humanities building on Wednesday, January 26, at 7:30 a.m. with an at-home kit I’d bought online (the results of which verified the district’s 2020 samples), there was no evidence that flushing had occurred. I was the first one to press on the spigot that morning. My data showed that lead levels dropped significantly once 30 seconds worth of water had been flushed out of the pipes.
The widespread directions within the Humanities Magnet not to drink from school water fountains, while well-intentioned, could ironically have detrimental health effects of their own. The consensus among modern scientists is that humans should be consuming a range of 2.7 to 3.7 liters of water per day. Most water bottles contain less than 1 liter, meaning that if the 97% of Humanities students who come to school with either tap water or bottled water from home do not refill those bottles at school out of fear of lead poisoning, they could experience dehydration, which can lead to severe fatigue and migraines. Mask-wearing (in addition to the new Humanities Magnet measure this spring semester that students must walk outside to drink water or blow their nose), has intensified this issue. Furthermore, multiple students have confided in me, both on and off the record, that they hesitate to wash their hands in the bathroom sinks when they urinate, putting them at a higher risk of Covid-19 infection and bacterial diseases.
We should keep in mind that being worried about lead poisoning as opposed to other water cleanliness issues, regardless of if that concern is evidence-based or merely a result of our Humanities superiority complex, is a privilege. In less industrialized countries, drinking water runs red-hued from meatpacking waste, brown from sewage, black from oil, and worse. According to United Nations data, 85,700 children every year die from water-borne illnesses.
Whether or not we drink water from Hamilton’s fountains is our personal right, one that our parents, doctors, and personal scientific research can inform. Whether or not we ostracize others for that choice, however, should not be.
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