The state will direct most of its efforts — and most of $30 million in federal money — toward its cities, whose children have borne the brunt of this epidemic. In announcing the allocation recently, Gov. Ned Lamont pointed to lead’s “catastrophic” effects on children’s health and development, noting that lead poisoning is “a problem that impacts most deeply minority and disadvantaged communities of our state.”
Nearly half of the 1,024 children reported as lead poisoned in 2020 lived in New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Hartford, or other cities, according to state Department of Public Health numbers.
DPH Photo.
“The money is necessary to address a problem that is a wrong of the past,” said Manisha Juthani, MD, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health. “We need to do better in the state of Connecticut.”
The more enduring thrust of the state’s new actions, however, is the strengthening of its outdated lead laws, starting in 2023. The changes will increase early interventions by:
• Gradually lowering the blood lead levels that trigger parental notifications.
• Lowering the blood lead counts requiring home inspections.
• Requiring more frequent testing of children who live in areas where lead exposure is more common.
Under current law, parental notifications aren’t required unless a child’s blood lead level is 5 micrograms per deciliter or higher. Starting Jan. 1, 2023, the trigger for parental notifications will be 3.5 micrograms, the standard adopted by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If the state had used the CDC’s new measurement of 3.5 micrograms in 2020, the number of Connecticut children considered lead poisoned would triple to 3,000.
More significantly, perhaps, is that by Jan. 1, 2025, investigations into where and how a child has been poisoned will drop from the current trigger of 20 micrograms per deciliter to 5 micrograms per deciliter.
‘It’s A Start’
The $30 million for lead poisoning relief is from the state’s share of the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Biden administration’s COVID-19-relief legislation.
Department of Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani, MD, said the funds will be spent largely on remediating housing found to be the source of a child’s poisoning.
Abating a single home or apartment can cost between $12,000 and $15,000, Juthani said, adding that the ARPA money will remediate more than 1,500 housing units.
“It’s a start,” she said. “This may not remove the problem altogether, but the hope is that we can make a … dent.”
“We’re going to continue to explore funding opportunities that may be federal, that may be with other partners,” Juthani said. “This is always going to be an ongoing priority.”
DPH Photo
Lori Mathieu, DPH public health section chief, discusses the state’s lead abatement plans with Commissioner Juthani.
The federal government approved a bipartisan infrastructure measure in 2021, allocating $3 billion over the next five years to cover the costs of replacing lead-lined water pipes throughout the country.
Connecticut and the other states are conducting inventories to identify pipes that need to be replaced. “Right now, we have about 18,000 on a list of possible lead service lines,” said Lori Mathieu, DPH public health section chief.
Leaded water pipes cause about 20% of all lead poisoning cases in the state; nearly every other case is linked to leaded paint.
Lead Paint In Housing
Until it was banned in 1978, for more than a half-century, lead was added to house paint to boost its durability. Even painted over, it remains on the walls of older apartment buildings and homes. As the paint inevitably deteriorates, leaded chips and paint dust can be ingested by crawling babies and toddlers who, during this peak period of brain development, typically explore their new worlds using hand-to-mouth activities.
Once in the bloodstream, the heavy metal can cause permanent cognitive problems, including a measurable loss in IQ points, hearing loss, developmental delays, learning disabilities and hyperactivity.
For years, Connecticut law lagged behind the scientific findings that ever-smaller amounts of lead can cause irreversible harm to young children.
In testimony before the Public Health Committee in March, doctor after doctor described the dire and discriminatory landscape of lead poisoning.
“As a pediatrician who cares for children with lead toxicity, I have seen firsthand the devastating and long-term health effects that lead poisoning has on the physical and mental health of young children, in particular those under the age of 6.”
— Erin Nozetz, MD, chair of the New Haven Lead Task Force
“Right now, in Connecticut,” Nozetz said, “the risk of a child being poisoned and the response to that poisoning depends on the town that the child lives in. We also know that children from underrepresented minority populations are disproportionately affected by lead toxicity. I don’t know about you, but this infuriates me.”
Waterbury’s Efforts
Connecticut cities have some of the oldest housing in the country. Larger cities may each have well over 10,000 housing units built before lead paint was outlawed.
Waterbury has more than 14,500 such units, and the city consistently has some of the highest numbers of lead-poisoned children in the state, state DPH reports show.
The Brass City reported 81 lead-poisoned children under 6 in 2020, which is certainly an undercount because of the pandemic, said Public Health Director Aisling McGuckin. In 2018, the year before COVID-19 hit, Waterbury reported twice as many lead-poisoned children.
“Waterbury is predominantly a renter city,” McGuckin said. Healthy Homes, the federal program created to eliminate housing-related environmental hazards, has done a lot of work in the city, she said. But much work remains, as well as challenges, she said.
“Landlords can be hard to contact” if an apartment unit or home needs lead remediation, McGuckin said, so “families don’t have a lot of control.”
And there are the logistics involved in the numbers of children and families needing help.
In testimony urging passage of the lead legislation, McGuckin wrote, “Currently in Waterbury, we have two staff managing the lead case management work. In FY 2021, we had over 1,000 cases that under the proposed blood lead level limits would have provoked an investigation and follow-up.”
A Modernized System
New Haven was embroiled in a class-action lawsuit for over two years after the city quietly changed its criteria for investigating lead-poisoned children. Two top health officials, including the department’s director, left. Last summer, a state judge agreed with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, which had brought the lawsuit, that New Haven was in the wrong.
When the new mayor, Justin Elicker, hired Bridgeport’s public health director to fix the embattled health department, Maritza Bond said she would involve a broad spectrum of the community in her efforts, including lawyers from New Haven Legal Assistance.
“We’re in an excellent position,” Bond said. “We’ve modernized systems. We have a lead dashboard. We’re tracking cases, updating them daily.” The department’s website contains maps highlighting areas with high numbers of lead cases.
The lead program is almost fully staffed. “In two years, we’ve gone from two inspectors to five, and we’re hiring for a sixth,” said Bond, who is running for secretary of the state.
And New Haven is inspecting the homes of lead-poisoned children whose blood lead levels are 5 micrograms per deciliter or higher. The state won’t require that until 2024.
To view the 2018 and 2019 childhood lead reports go here.
Scroll below to read the 2020 childhood lead poisoning report.
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Open in new tab Of the children tested that year, 649 were new cases.
As has been the case for many years, nearly half of the 1,024 lead-poisoned children lived in the state’s cities. New Haven had the highest number of lead-poisoned children, with 171, followed by Bridgeport, 148; Waterbury, 81; Hartford, 71; and Meriden, 35. These five cities had 49% of all lead-poisoned children in Connecticut in 2020.
Following suit, health disparities also continued. Black and Hispanic children continued to have higher rates of lead poisoning than non-Hispanic white children. Non-Hispanic Black children were 2.6 times more likely to be poisoned than white children, according to a report on the 2020 lead poisoning numbers on the state’s Open Data website.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
In October 2020, Charles Tate, a Bridgeport lead inspector, scanned the peeling side of a second-floor porch and found high levels of lead in the paint.
DPH Commissioner Manisha Juthani, M.D., said Tuesday, “Protecting the youngest residents of our state from lead poisoning is a priority for DPH. And even though the numbers show that we are heading in the right direction, our work — including linking families to vital resources and building awareness in our inner cities — is far from done.”
But these latest numbers are based on a calculation that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the state have used since 2012. That calculation defines lead poisoning as 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood in a child’s body.
In October, the CDC lowered its definition of lead poisoning to 3.5 micrograms per deciliter.
If the state had used the CDC’s new measurement, or “reference value,” the number of Connecticut children considered lead poisoned would triple, to 3,000.
Even without the CDC’s adjustment, the pandemic complicates how to compare the numbers released to those from earlier years.
The DPH says in its report that “there was a sharp decline in screening” in April 2020, a month after the country started shutting down. A total of 61,700 children in Connecticut received lead blood tests in 2020, compared with 72,000 in 2019 and 73,000 in 2018. In addition, less than 60% of the state’s children under 3 years old were tested twice, as required by state law.
Although lead poisoning is notoriously linked to the water crisis in Flint, Mich., in 2014, lead poisoning in the Northeast and in other older parts of the country is usually the result of deteriorating interior and exterior house paint.
For close to a century, before the federal government finally banned its use in 1978, lead was added to paint to increase its durability. Although walls may be painted over, chips from the degrading paint can be leaded. Of particular concern is leaded paint dust, created as paint breaks down and is left behind when doors and windows of older homes are opened and shut.
Babies and toddlers are particularly vulnerable to deteriorating paint because they are close to the ground and their breathing rates are higher than that of adults. And, as any parent knows, young children typically explore their new worlds, quite literally, through hand-to-mouth activities, turning a floor with leaded paint chips and leaded dust into dangerous terrain.
Exposure to the heavy metal, particularly during these early years when children’s brains are developing, can cause permanent cognitive damage, including an irreversible loss in IQ points. The toxin is also linked to speech and developmental delays, hearing loss and hyperactivity.
In addition to the 2020 numbers, DPH this week issued the numbers of lead-poisoned children in 2019 – 1,188; and 2018 — 1,333.
To view the 2018 and 2019 childhood lead reports go here.
Scroll below to read the 2020 childhood lead poisoning report.
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For social worker Jara Rijs, who works at Windham Center School, where more than half of its pre-K through fifth-grade students qualify for subsidized lunch, the job responsibilities bleed well beyond the job description, particularly since the pandemic hit.
As many in her school community face trauma either induced or exacerbated by the pandemic, Rijs says she considers every one of the estimated 250 students at her elementary school part of her caseload.
Beyond providing clinical support to students with individual education plans, in a given day, Rijs might also meet with a student struggling with a family loss or divorce, connect to a community health agency to check availability, lead a staff discussion on self-care, or even don the school’s “froggy” mascot costume—a symbol of the school’s “Froggy Four” character development program.
Fun and games aside, Rijs takes a serious tone when discussing the state of her student’s mental health.
“I’ve never seen so many young children talking about suicidality, feeling so drained and not having coping skills.”
— Jara Rijs
In Connecticut, as elsewhere across the country, the pandemic has exacerbated just how thin school-based social workers are stretched, with the demand for services swelling. The number of children needing behavioral health treatment at children’s hospitals has surged, resulting in long waits for inpatient and community-based care.
In January, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy declared a “national youth mental health crisis,” acknowledging the pandemic’s toll on children.
Connecticut’s ratio of social worker to student is 580 students to one social worker; the national professional standard recommends one social worker for every 250 students. The standard was developed before school-aged children endured months of isolation from the regular daily routine of school and the broad, adverse ramifications of the pandemic.
Earlier this month, a state task force led by the Department of Public Health identified 157 schools most in need of health care and mental health care services, with Waterbury, Bridgeport and New Haven at the top of the list. The task force report is designed to provide lawmakers with data to be used during the 2022 legislative session.
This week, Democratic lawmakers held a press conference highlighting their top priorities for the current legislative session and acknowledging the “mental health fallout” from the pandemic. Lawmakers plan to introduce several measures supporting children’s mental health, including increasing funding for school social workers.
Stephen A. Wanczyk-Karp, executive director of Connecticut’s chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, said: “I’ve been in this field since 1977. And I’ve never seen this level of interest for social work.”
Unable To Keep Up With Demand
Even in districts with seemingly adequate mental health resources, some schools are in crisis mode.
Carrie Rivera, assistant director of mental health services for New London Public Schools, describes the district’s efforts to ensure adequate student support: increasing the number of social workers at the secondary level, adding social-emotional programming to include a mindfulness program for pre-K through 8th grade, and maintaining a relationship with a community agency for psychiatric evaluations.
But the community’s needs are significant. Rivera says several families have lost family members—many of them parents or guardians—during the pandemic. The homeless student population has increased. Job loss, food security and financial insecurity are running high. Consequently, Rivera says, the district has seen a huge uptick in student depression, anxiety and related behavioral concerns.
“We have support staff within every single building. I don’t think it can ever be enough right now. Every day there’s a crisis.”
— Carrie Rivera
Windham’s Rijs knows the feeling. In a school year during which she’s never before seen students so mentally fragile, she says, the district eventually secured a one-year contract with a second social worker at her school.
“I hope they keep the second social work position. But I worry that it’s a position that could be eliminated,” Rijs said.
Obstacles To Hiring More School-Based Social Workers
Amid the enormous need for school-based social workers, whose many roles include “first responders” to student crises, leaders in the field say the job is often misunderstood. Wanczyk-Karp says that frequently they are perceived as interchangeable with other mental health professionals such as school psychologists, whose primary responsibilities include conducting student psychological and academic assessments and guiding students’ academic success.
A lack of recognition of social workers’ value to schools may be the cause of district-wide decisions like the one in 2015 by the Avon School District to eliminate its social workers and replace them with additional school psychologists, which met with public outcry from parents and former students. Catherine Lewis, an Avon parent and professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut, was among those who denounced the district’s decision to eliminate social workers. “They do a lot of intangibles,” Lewis said. “They know the pulse of the school.”
Some social workers hope that the pandemic’s silver lining will mean greater recognition of their profession, and, subsequently, additional resources. “Legislation is talking about students’ health more than ever,” Rijs said. “We are finally in the limelight.”
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“She came and hugged me,” Carolina said. Students had been peering out windows all morning at the black smoke rising a few blocks from the school, in Bridgeport. But that still couldn’t prepare Carolina for her sister’s news that it was their family’s house that was burning.
The blaze destroyed everything, including the stuffed rabbit that was Carolina’s favorite toy. It also started an odyssey for the Martinez-Nava family that, at almost every step of the way, was stymied by COVID-19, whose shape and intensity was, especially in the beginning, poorly understood.
“We couldn’t believe there was so much stress,” Angelina Martinez-Nava, mother of the sisters and 4-year-old Alesander, said this summer through an interpreter.
Although what they experienced may have been extreme, today, every family has its pandemic story, one that—as data and anecdotes from health care professionals show—can be largely summarized by two words: anxiety and loss.
Melissa Mendez, a licensed clinical social worker and director of early childhood programs at Wheeler Clinic, said she thinks that for the rest of her professional career, she and others working in children’s mental health “will be dealing with the aftermath—if we ever get there—of this pandemic.”
Anxiety Persists Nationwide
Shortly after COVID-19 began its sweep across the country, health experts began warning about high rates of anxiety and depression among children and adolescents.
Kim Holyst, director of behavioral health at the Wheeler Family Health & Wellness Center in Waterbury, said counselors started to see “some pretty significant anxiety” among children and adolescents as soon as schools went to remote learning.
The children had “behavioral issues, increased irritability,” Holyst said, noting, “Their whole world had been turned upside down.”
By February 2021, an NBC/Stanford University survey showed that only a third of high school students “felt they were able to cope with their sources of stress, which include strained mental health and peer relationships.”
In June, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that visits to hospital emergency departments for suspected suicide attempts were more than 50% higher among girls 12-17 in February and March 2021 than in the same period in 2019.
Today, the Wheeler Clinic’s Mendez said the anxiety continues, linked to the “ongoing uncertainty” about COVID-19.
“Nobody ever knows for sure what’s happening day to day,” Mendez said. “There’s new research coming in, new recommendations being made, new drugs being approved.
“We’ve never really had anything like this,” Mendez said. “That, I think, has created a lot of anxiety and uncertainty with grownups in general, and that certainly filters down to children.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
The Martinez-Nava family (clockwise from right) Angelina Martinez-Nava and her children Alesander, 4, Carolina, 12 and Arlene, 14. “We couldn’t believe there was so much stress,” said Angelina.
Family Searches For Ways To Cope
The Martinez-Nava family soon found a new apartment, but their challenges continued to mount. Schools closed. The children’s father was diagnosed with COVID-19 and lost his landscaping job when he had to quarantine. Angelina, a cook at a restaurant, lost her position when the restaurant closed. For six weeks, no income came in.
Arlene and Carolina tried to keep up with their schoolwork by passing Arlene’s cellphone back and forth. Although they eventually got computers, their grades dropped as they struggled with the challenges of remote learning and those of their new home environment.
Angelina tried to keep things going, but her usually outgoing daughters pulled inward.
“I would lock myself in my room, and I would sleep through the day and be up at night,” Arlene said. “At random times,” she said, she and Carolina, “would just crack, and get angry with the world, with anyone around us.”
Carolina’s best friend had left Connecticut before the pandemic, and with schools closed, the younger girl had no one to talk to.
“I didn’t want to leave my room,” she said. “I would just stay there, in the corner. I was very worried, like scared, all the time. I’d most likely cry myself to sleep.”
Their mother arranged physicals for the girls at Southwest Community Health Center in Bridgeport. When she told the pediatrician how worried she was about them, he suggested reaching out to the center’s behavioral health staff.
‘We Really Did Need Therapy’
Nancy Wiltse, chief behavioral health officer at Southwest, said the number of families seeking mental health treatment for children and adolescents has soared, helped by the advent of telehealth.
Both girls saw counselors at Southwest, meeting with them on cellphones and then on computers through the year. With counseling, the sisters were able to process what was happening to them and, most importantly, find words for their feelings.
When the fire and the pandemic blew up their lives, Arlene said, “We didn’t know we had a problem.
“By the time we got to the end of professional therapy,” Arlene said, “that was when we thought, ‘We really did need therapy!’”
‘Pins And Needles’
With schools reopened, many families have been able to resume more familiar routines, even though the threat of COVID-19 continues to impede the country’s full resumption of “normal.”
Contributed Photo.
Melissa Mendez, director of Wheeler’s Early Childhood Programs.
Many people “had high hopes about what fall would be like,” Mendez said, “and now we’re here, and everybody just—I don’t know, it’s pins and needles, it’s bated breath.”
Some families that Wheeler counselors have been treating were not ready to send their children back to school, Mendez said.
They’re “upset that remote was not an option this fall,” she said.
“I think the children who are struggling more with the anxiety around the pandemic and what it means for them and being away from their parents again are probably having a harder time at school,” Mendez said.
She notes, however, that, “Children are actually pretty resilient and pretty adaptive, and many are happy to be in school again and see their friends, for the most part.”
But, Mendez warned, in the past 18 months, “a lot of families and children have gone through some pretty serious losses”—family members, people in their communities.
“We don’t really see a lot of discussion about that,” she said.
]]>Between March 19 and June 30, a group of scientists tested waste that had previously been used to detect COVID-19, looking for drugs and chemicals. The researchers found significant increases in three opioids, four antidepressants, and other chemicals in sludge from New Haven.
The analysis, by scientists from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (CAES) and Yale University, offered the first glimpses of how the pandemic’s stay-at-home orders affected people’s behavior. It also underscored how important human waste can be as a resource for understanding public health and society’s habits. Diseases, drugs and chemicals all show up in feces, providing a major tool for public health studies.
Sara L. Nason, a CAES scientist, is leading the waste analysis, which found increases in fentanyl, hydromorphone and methadone in sludge taken from primary settling tanks in New Haven.
Nason said the goal is to understand how the pandemic changed people’s habits and health.
“We hypothesize that the changes in chemical concentrations will reveal interesting trends that correlate with public health outcomes.”
— Sara L. Nason
Fentanyl’s increase in the New Haven population reflected “both increased use in hospitals for patients on ventilators, and the nationwide trend of increases in accidental overdose deaths from illegal use,” Nason said.
Five years ago, the testing of human feces for substances “was something that I would talk to other people about, funding agencies, and they would kind of roll their eyes and say, ‘Yeah…’ It was not too much on the radar back then,” said Jordan Peccia, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale University. Peccia is working with Nason on the analysis using frozen samples from another project on which Peccia is working, a COVID-19 testing effort that analyzes sludge from six Connecticut treatment plants. Peccia’s Yale laboratory collects data and publishes the information on a public website. The lab tests the concentrated substance found at the bottom of the tanks where waste entering sewage plants in New Haven, Bridgeport, Hartford, New London, Norwich and Stamford goes to settle.
Peccia and at least eight other scientists hope to expand the sludge testing “to other diseases, to other viruses, to other locations around the world where they don’t have testing,” he said. They have applied for National Institutes of Health funding.
Rising Drug Levels
Besides the opioids, the scientists found six antidepressants in the sludge, and six disinfectants. Sertraline (Zoloft) increased in March, before there were reported shortages of that drug. Three other drugs showed a clear rising trend over the spring: doxepin (Silenor), citalopram (Celeva), and amitriptyline (Elavil). Tracking these drugs during the pandemic was important, Nason said, because studies have linked psychiatric illnesses and COVID-19.
Nason explained it this way: studies have shown “people with psychiatric illnesses are at risk for being diagnosed with COVID-19, and that COVID-19 infection is associated with new diagnoses of psychiatric illnesses.”
Steven Geringer/Yale University Photo
Sludge samples are placed into test tubes at Yale University.
Three of the six cleaners they found in the sludge are common wipes and sprays with quaternary ammonium disinfectants, known as quats, which scientists in the last decade have linked to reproductive and developmental problems in animals.
Nason said the CAES/Yale team’s research focused on “substances whose use we expect to be affected by the pandemic, such as antidepressants, opioids, and antiviral drugs.” They compiled their key findings in a poster presented last fall to the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. They plan to submit research papers for publication this winter.
The findings were mostly detected using a technique called suspect screening, in which a mass spectrometer collects molecular information and matches it through large databases. “Suspect screening is a very powerful technique because you don’t necessarily need to know what chemicals you are looking for ahead of time,” Nason said. “You find whatever signals in your data match the database entries. For example, we did not initially decide to look at disinfectants in the sludge, but we found several of them through our suspect screening analysis.” She added that they used other analytical standards to confirm their key findings, “so we are quite confident in our results.”
Peccia said the expansion of sludge testing could be used to study infectious diseases like norovirus; adenoviruses, which cause fevers, diarrhea, and more; all of the coronaviruses that cause colds; and bacterial diseases like tuberculosis and legionella, which causes legionnaire’s disease.
Sewage As A Resource
The long but spotty history of testing sewage for disease dates to the 1960s and a Yale study of the polio vaccine in Middletown. For at least 20 years scientists have been studying sewage, but much of their work focused on environmental issues. Human waste can reveal whether industry is following environmental regulations, and scientists can test for banned chemicals, such as fire retardants, linked to cancer.
These studies analyze the sludge left in the bottom of primary tanks after the water has settled. Scientists can also collect human waste by sampling the diluted soup of water and solid waste that flows under the streets.
Yale University Photo
Jordan Peccia
Peccia maintains that sampling the concentrated sludge is the most efficient method. Sewage treatment “takes in wastewater and it separates the bad stuff from the water. It puts out clean water, and then you have tons and tons and tons of material that was separated from that wastewater. Most of the bad stuff in the wastewater treatment plant gets left behind in the sludge,” he said.
However they are found — whether in the water known as “influent” or the settled sludge — Peccia said he estimates that more than half of infectious diseases show up in waste.
He said testing sewage could transform how doctors recognize and treat diseases where diagnosis is difficult and not always accurate, such as Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses, and Eastern equine encephalitis and other mosquito-carried diseases.
Tracking substances like nicotine, alcohol, heroin and opioids in sewage sludge shows how drug uses changes on weekends. “Those pieces of information are hard to come by otherwise,” Peccia said.
These studies will provide information that will correlate with other studies of human illness and behavior. “If hospital prescriptions and disposals of fentanyl increase over the same period of time as fentanyl concentrations in sludge increase, we can start to put together a story,” Nason said.
“But if that is not the case, the sludge data could be a sign for public health officials that illegal use needs to be further investigated,” Nason continued. “Overall, the sludge findings are most valuable when they can be supported with data from other sources that relate them to public health.”
]]>The paint around a window at the back of the house was deteriorating. Beneath the window was Rocio’s favorite play area, a sloping basement door that was the perfect ramp for an energetic toddler. Next to the basement door was a patch of dirt where she loved to scratch with sticks. White chips of paint were visible in the dirt.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says 5 micrograms or higher of lead per deciliter of blood constitutes lead poisoning.
Rocio’s mother, Fanny Quille, said her daughter’s blood tests show a lead count of over 70.
Lead poisoning, a major systemic crisis, damages the health and development of hundreds of thousands of children across the U.S. every year, including thousands in Connecticut.
Although Connecticut has worked hard in its fight against COVID-19, its efforts against the much older plague of lead poisoning have been halfhearted.
“Unfortunately, Americans, in typical style, tend to react to very dramatic things, but they don’t tend to react to the chronic stories,” said Yale pediatrician Carl R. Baum, M.D., director of Yale’s Lead Poisoning And Regional Treatment Center.
“For the most part, lead is an ongoing problem, and some of the lead levels that were seen in [the Flint water crisis of 2014] are nothing compared to what we see in New Haven,” Baum said.
He referred to one young patient the Yale clinic has been treating for over a year whose peak lead level was 118 micrograms. “And we still haven’t gotten it down to an acceptable level.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Investigator Charles Tate prepares to scan a doorway to a second-floor porch on Wood Avenue. The ceiling and railings are also peeling. Tate found high levels of lead in the paint.
The Connecticut Department of Public Health (DPH) has reported 14,000 cases of lead-poisoned children under 6 since 2012.
At least 2,000 children were poisoned every year from 2012 through 2016, DPH numbers show, with fewer cases reported in 2017 (1,665) and 2018 (1,332).
However, testing deficiencies and gaps in reporting by municipalities and medical providers mean the true number of lead-poisoned children in Connecticut is unknowable and almost certainly higher than DPH’s figures.
Then there’s the COVID-19 factor. Connecticut law requires children to be tested for lead twice before 3 years old. But Kaiser Health News recently reported “massive” reductions in lead testing in many parts of the country, including the Northeast. Lead blood tests are usually given at children’s 1- and 2-year-old checkups. Not only did the virus force many families to postpone or skip those visits, but people have also spent more time indoors, where children are most likely to be exposed to degrading leaded paint and lead dust.
One of the most poignant aspects of this crisis is that children are often poisoned by their own homes. The interior and exterior walls of hundreds of thousands of homes have undercoats of leaded paint, which wasn’t banned until 1978. As paint degrades, it chips and creates invisible leaded dust that can be inhaled or ingested by babies and toddlers as they become more active.
Connecticut children are also victims of the state’s weak lead inspection statutes, which reflects an extraordinary lack of urgency and concern for a problem that can cause permanent cognitive damage and neurological issues.
In 2012, in a major shift, the CDC stopped advising investigations into sources of poisoning based on a child’s lead level. Instead, the agency said, preventing any exposure to lead should be the priority because “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.” It did, however, recommend case management if a child’s lead level was 5 micrograms or higher.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Using an X-ray fluorescence (XRF) instrument, Bridgeport lead inspector Charles Tate prepares to scan an interior doorway of a multifamily Wood Avenue apartment. Looking on are Rocio Valladares, 2; and her brother Angel Valladares, 14.
In response, the other New England states toughened their laws and their actions.
In Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island, a 5-microgram lead test result now triggers an active investigation into how and where a child is being exposed. New Hampshire’s 7.5-microgram trigger is slated to drop to 5 in July, while Massachusetts requires investigation at 10 micrograms.
In an emailed statement, Jim Vannoy, an environmental health section chief at DPH, pointed out that Connecticut, in fact, adopted the CDC’s more stringent 5-microgram standard for action in lead-poisoning cases.
But state law doesn’t require active inquiry until a child’s lead blood count is at least three times — 15 micrograms in two tests given three months apart — or four times that level — 20 micrograms in a single test.
If a child shows 5 to 14 micrograms of the neurotoxin in a blood test, the state only requires a local health official to call the family or send them educational material about the dangers of lead.
Racial Inequities
Just as COVID-19 has spotlighted racial inequities in housing and health care nationwide, the lack of a concerted campaign against lead poisoning has racial and racist undertones.
Black children are poisoned at more than twice the rate of white children, and Hispanic children at 1½ times the rate, in part because Black and Hispanic families are more likely to live in older, substandard housing.
Despite Connecticut’s mandatory screening laws, and despite DPH efforts to reach Black and Hispanic families, just 13% of all children tested in 2017 were Black, its latest available breakdown of race and ethnicity numbers show. Twenty-six percent were Hispanic, and 61% were white.
Jennifer Haile, M.D., pediatrician at the Hartford Regional Lead Clinic, run by Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, said, “Just because we have [state] screening mandates doesn’t mean the pediatricians are actually doing it. The numbers are getting better, but they’re not great.”
David Rosner, professor at Columbia University and coauthor of “Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of American Children,” said, “Lead is a major indicator of a much larger problem we have in our culture and the racism that pervades it.”
He added in an email,
“Do you think we’d allow this outrage to continue if it were suburban white children who were its primary victims?”
— David Rosner
An Insidious Enemy
For most of the 20th century, lead was added to paint to increase water-resistance and durability.
When ingested, lead’s damage can be irreversible. It’s especially harmful to babies and young children, who are at their peak period of brain development.
“Even low-level lead exposure can negatively impact a wide range of cognitive functions, such as attention, language, memory, cognitive flexibility, and visual-motor integration,” says a study on the website of the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry.
In June, social scientists at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio published the results of their 20-year study into the “downstream” effects of lead exposure.
After following more than 10,000 Cleveland children from birth through early adulthood, the scientists concluded, “[C]hildren with elevated lead levels in early childhood have significantly worse outcomes on markers of school success, and higher rates of adverse events in adolescence and early adulthood, compared to their non-exposed peers.”
Exposed babies and toddlers are lead sponges.
“Kids who are younger absorb lead at [many] times the rate adults will absorb it,” said Dr. Hilda Slivak, founder and former director of the Hartford Regional Lead Clinic.
They’re closer to the ground, and their breathing rates are higher than that of adults. Because they learn by crawling, touching and tasting, a floor with leaded paint chips and leaded dust is hazardous terrain.
One City Does It Right
Residents in poorer cities are particularly at risk. Indeed, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford consistently have some of the state’s highest numbers of reported cases.
Hartford’s streets are lined with older, poorly maintained homes, quintessential sources of lead poisoning. From 2012 through 2018, the DPH reported nearly 1,150 lead-poisoned children in the Capital City.
Yet because investigations are required only when children’s lead blood levels hit 15 or 20 micrograms, Hartford’s lead program looked into less than 12% of those cases, its own numbers show. In 2018, when DPH reported 109 children with lead poisoning, the program conducted 7 investigations.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Rocio Valladares, 2, lies on the couch in the Bridgeport home her family rents. She was found to have elevated levels of lead in her blood. High levels of lead were found in the peeling exterior paint near what had been her favorite play area.
New Haven invariably has the highest number of cases, with 2,266 children reported lead-poisoned from 2012 through 2018.
It reported investigating 24% of properties linked to children with elevated lead levels in that period. New Haven’s lead program has been mired in controversy over the past few years, and has been sued for inadequate inspection and enforcement of lead laws. The longtime program director and the city’s public health director have resigned.
Typically, investigations and lead abatement actions in Connecticut are triggered only by reports of a poisoned child.
Except in Bridgeport.
“We don’t have to wait till kids hit 15 or 20 [micrograms],” said Audrey Gaines, who, as Bridgeport’s code enforcement officer, manages environmental health, housing code and lead prevention.
“If it’s not supposed to be there, why are you waiting for it to get higher before you help them?” Gaines said.
DPH reported 2,000 cases of lead-poisoned children in the state’s largest city from 2012 through 2018.
But after 2013, numbers dropped annually, and dramatically. In 2013, the city reported a high of 402 cases. In 2018, the city reported 137, a 66% decrease.
This accomplishment so surprised Tsui-Min Hung, the longtime epidemiologist of the DPH lead program, that she called Gaines to ask what her secret was.
Rather than relying on a child’s blood test to point inspectors toward a contaminated home, inspectors focus on “what the actual problem is, and that is the housing stock,” Gaines said.
The city reported inspecting nearly 1,900 buildings from 2012 through 2018.
“If our housing code inspectors find something that is in violation, and if there are children in those houses, they report it to my lead inspectors,” Gaines said. “It’s not rocket science. It’s just simply working cohesively together.”
Gaines also uses Connecticut’s Uniform Relocation Assistance Act to move families when necessary.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Lead investigator Charles Tate shows the XRF results after scanning wood trim on the house. Levels above 1.0mg/cm squared are actionable. Levels here are 31mg/cm squared.
“If … a landlord is not capable or not willing or cooperative enough to want to make the repairs in that unit, to make that unit lead-safe, then we start sending him to court,” she said. “And, according to that Relocation Assistance Act, that family can be moved.
“You’ve got to go beyond state [lead] law,” Gaines said. “It’s not going to create the culture to be progressive, to get what you want done.”
She said the city is working to enroll the owner of Rocio’s Wood Avenue home into a federal housing program that will cover the cost of lead abatement or removal. “Once the enrollment process is completed, all work will be completed within a week,” she said.
Angel Valladares, Rocio’s 14-year-old brother, says his sister, who will be 3 in February, “knows a few random words, but is not really speaking.”
Their mother worries, he said, because Rocio cries a lot. “She’s always crying,” Angel said.
And these days, he said, his mother “barely brings her outside.”
This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington, D.C.
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But more children showed higher levels of the toxin in their blood than in 2016, the report says. In 2016, there were 105 children whose blood lead level was 20 micrograms per deciliter of blood or higher, at least four times the measure at which they’re considered poisoned. In 2017, the number had risen to 120 children.
DPH epidemiologist Tsui-Min Hung said the improved overall numbers were at least partially due to the department’s more aggressive prevention activities, which 42 local health departments took advantage of, as well a social media campaign.
The report also shows that there were 1,034 new cases of young children with lead poisoning in 2017. That was 16% fewer than the 1,231 new cases in 2016, and nearly 30% fewer than the 1,473 reported in 2015.
The 2017 report is the DPH’s fifth since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tightened its standards defining lead poisoning. CDC’s previous standard was 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood. The CDC now says that a child whose blood test shows 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter or higher is poisoned. It always adds that no level of lead in the blood is safe. Connecticut amended its own standard to mirror the CDC’s in 2013.
New Haven, Bridgeport, Waterbury and Hartford, in that order, had the highest numbers of children with elevated blood lead levels in 2017. Nearly half of all Connecticut children with lead poisoning in 2017 lived in those four cities.
New Haven’s rate was significantly higher than the other three cities’ rates, including Bridgeport, the state’s largest city. There were 290 New Haven children under age 6 who were lead poisoned in 2017. Forty percent—or 175 children—were new cases.
Although Bridgeport had the second-highest number of lead-poisoned children, 2017 was the city’s fifth consecutive year of declining numbers. Bridgeport reported 209 children with lead poisoning in 2017, compared with 402 children in 2013.
Hartford’s numbers also improved. Whereas 170 children under age 6 in the capital city had lead poisoning in 2016, that number fell to 145 in 2017, a 17% decrease.
Waterbury’s numbers fell 35% from 2016 to 2017, the report shows, from 218 young children with lead poisoning to 162 the next year.
Racial and ethnic disparities in lead-poisoning numbers decreased somewhat, according to the report, especially among young Hispanic children. DPH officials said the state’s lead program and the Latino and Puerto Rican Affairs Commission partnered in a media campaign that targeted the Hispanic population in 2016 and 2017. This resulted in lower numbers, although Hispanic children are still 1.4 times as likely to be poisoned as non-Hispanic children.
Black children remain more than twice as likely to have lead poisoning as white children.
CT Department of Public Health, 2002-2017
Number of lead-poisoned children under 6 years of age, by calendar year, and by blood lead levels.
Exposure to the heavy metal can damage cognitive ability, including an irreversible loss in IQ points. Lead poisoning is linked to speech and developmental delays, hyperactivity, hearing loss and behavioral problems, although these may not show up until years later.
The continuing lead problems in Flint, Mich., started several years ago when the city switched its public water source. Lead poisoning in older cities in the Northeast is usually attributable to lead paint, which was widely used before being banned by the federal government in 1978.
Even when older homes are painted over, paint chips can be leaded. Babies and toddlers, the most likely victims of lead poisoning, are also especially developmentally vulnerable to its harmful effects. These vital developmental years are defined by children’s hand-to-mouth exploring, making them more liable to ingest flaking paint chips. Another hazard is lead paint dust, created by doors and windows in older housing opening and shutting, grinding down the paint. Soil near the base of older, dilapidated buildings is also frequently contaminated.
The DPH report said that every Connecticut child had at least one lead test before turning 3, but state law requires two tests, one annually. Connecticut has struggled to reach its testing goal, although its numbers inched up to 57.4% in 2017.
The town-by-town results for lead-poisoned children.
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He posted a photo of the discharge on two Black Rock neighborhood Facebook pages, writing “This is disgusting.”
A week before Clough captured that photo, equipment malfunctioned at the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility. Fecal matter and other suspended solids spewed at two times the maximum limit allowed under a discharge permit issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) ordered the city to make all repairs and upgrades by 2039.
The West Side facility, the larger of two sewage treatment plants in the city, sends its treated waste through a 72-inch discharge pipe into Black Rock Harbor.
When the flow of waste and rainwater overwhelms the system, as it does several times a year, untreated sewage releases out of combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes into the harbor. It sluggishly works its way to the open water of Long Island Sound. The plant also discharges partially treated waste during storms or equipment failures. Those discharges are called bypasses. Like the CSOs, the bypasses are legal and will remain so for decades.
Every 10 days, on average, a sewage discharge flows into the harbor, according to July 2014-July 2019 data from DEEP. There were 99 CSOs and the West Side plant bypassed partially treated waste 85 times. Overflows from the CSO pipes range between 100,000 gallons and 500,000 gallons. The legal plant bypasses ranged from 1 million to 16 million gallons.
Most of the overflows rush out during rainstorms, but residents interviewed said that they have seen regular overflow discharges for years on dry days and that they suspect West Side facility equipment malfunctions are the cause.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Sunbathers along Seabright Beach. The beach was closed to swimmers most of the summer.
The city’s sewage plant manager maintains that 99 CSO spills over five years is not a high number. “During a heavy rainstorm, depending on the intensity and duration, [the CSO pipes] can overflow,” said Lauren McBennett Mappa, general manager of the Bridgeport Water Pollution Control Authority. “The overflow is very diluted raw sewage that can overflow for a short period of time. This happens very rarely.”
Residents are unhappy that DEEP, as enforcer of federal clean-water laws, gave the city so many years to fix its overflow problems. Although DEEP’s records show that most overflows are legal, residents say they have witnessed other spills that they believe aren’t documented, such as the scene in Clough’s photo.
“People look in the water, and they’re just shocked,” said resident Bruce Williams, who runs his family’s Captain’s Cove Seaport, a complex of shops, a marina, and restaurant that also leases space to sailing teams. On a recent Sunday, he said, “People from Long Island were staring at it. It looks like a horror movie. They were just stunned.”
The Culprit: The Plant
Part of the problem is the way the West Side facility operates. The Bostwick Avenue plant, built in the 1940s and last upgraded in 1996, is three times larger than the city’s east side plant and handles the majority of the city’s waste. Stormwater and waste together are pumped into the plant, and then travel through treatment by gravity. On a dry day, 18 million gallons enter the plant, which is designed to handle 30 million gallons a day. On a wet day, as much as 90 million gallons can enter the plant’s main raw sewage pumps. Usually one pump operates, but in heavier flows, up to four pumps move the water.
Over a 12-hour period, the waste normally circulates through three screening tanks, where human feces, sanitary napkins, tampons, condoms and other items are screened out. Then the water enters tanks where the remaining solid material is allowed to settle to the bottom. These solids are later trucked to landfills. The water then continues to aeration tanks, where sprayers speed up the breakdown of bacteria. Next chlorine is added, and then bisulphate is added to dechlorinate the water.
But if a flow equal to more than 58 million gallons per day enters the plant, the facility enters “bypass mode,” which speeds up and eliminates some steps in the process. During this mode, the system screens out solids, chlorinates the water, dechlorinates it, and then discharges it. The level of rain that triggers a bypass depends entirely on the accumulated water level in the street. Some official documents list the amount of rain that triggers this as four-tenths of an inch in 24 hours.
Since last year, DEEP has issued two administrative correction orders to the city, including one in 2019 that addressed the April 2018 permit violations. A June 2018 order requires the city to stop all discharges out of its CSO pipes by 2039. Eleven projects separating stormwater pipes from sewage pipes must begin by 2021. Some of this work has begun. An order issued earlier this year sets deadlines for fixing sludge processing and nitrogen removal systems that malfunctioned earlier. Construction on those must begin by the end of 2022.
Floating Condoms
Captain’s Cove rents the city-owned waterfront across Bostwick Avenue from the West Side sewage plant. Williams’s office overlooks the sewage discharge pipe. “I’m here every day. This happens all the time. I will go down to check that no condoms or sanitary napkins are floating in the shipway.”
So much is unknown about health threats in this water. But human contact with fecal contamination can result in gastrointestinal sickness like norovirus, respiratory illness, ear and eye infections, and rashes, health experts report. Regular water-quality testing is geared to the swimming season at some public beaches.
Bridgeport tests some of its beaches for bacteria that can indicate fecal matter and therefore disease-causing microbes. Swimming beaches like the neighborhood’s Seabright Beach, about 200 yards from one of the CSO pipes and 800 yards from the main discharge pipe, were closed for swimming most of the summer. The nearby Seaside Park, one of the most popular destinations, was rated “D+” for high bacteria by Save the Sound, a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
‘Not Normal’
For 13 years, Kevin Blagys, who owns KB Dive Services, has been diving in Fairfield County waters. Wearing a wet suit and snorkel gear, and holding a scrub brush in one hand, he cleans the barnacles and particles off boat bottoms. As he swims underwater, he passes through striating sections of brown and clear water. Sometimes the visibility is so bad he can only see a few inches. As the summers progress, the quality of his work zones worsens with floating black mud and the combination of heat, sun and nitrogen that makes hypoxia—oxygen too low to support life. He then hauls out dead horseshoe crabs. In some years, he has steered his small boat through slicks of dead menhaden, fish that typically thrive on Connecticut’s coast.
Blagys, a native of Greenwich, has been frustrated for years by the water quality in Black Rock Harbor, where “we have a discharge pipe at the end of a dead-end harbor.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Kevin Blagys of Bridgeport, who owns KB Dive Services, lifts a dead horseshoe crab found in Captain’s Cove.
Living and working so near the discharge pipe gives people in the area a sense of the water’s condition, Blagys said. “The whole neighborhood knows when it’s gross and when it’s not normal.”
Bill Lucey, the Long Island Soundkeeper, a watchdog scientist for Save the Sound, has docked his research and education boat at Captain’s Cove since spring 2018. This year he tested for dissolved oxygen in the water near the sewage discharge. In mid-August he was recording oxygen saturations of 0, the result of nitrogen from the sewage discharge combined with heat and light. High levels of nitrogen result in harmful algae growth.
The harbor could handle some nitrogen, Lucey said, “but that is only OK if it’s being discharged into a pristine environment,” which Black Rock Harbor is not. “The whole system is overloaded.”
Lucey thinks nitrogen levels should be lower than they are, but Mappa said nitrogen tests at the plant’s outflow between July 29 and Aug. 2 were “all very good numbers.”
Everyone agrees Black Rock Harbor is polluted. Residents called Peter Spain, their 130th District City Council member. He organized a public information meeting on the plant’s permit, attended by Save the Sound, DEEP, business owners, and residents, including some students. Residents hoped to share their concerns, but DEEP engineer Ann Straut spoke for much of the reserved time in a local school auditorium. She explained in detail each step required to plan, approve, fix and check plant upgrades. Public questions were cut short. Lucey trimmed his presentation on the health of the water in Long Island Sound to a few minutes.
Residents, business owners and students had already decided to take part in a regional Unified Water Study of Long Island Sound, coordinated by the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. Spain helped fund the study out of his City Council stipend.
Although Blagys never got a chance to address the meeting, he said he would have told those in attendance, “I’ve maintained boats underwater throughout the [Black Rock Harbor] and western Long Island Sound, from Milford to Greenwich. Of all the harbors—like Milford and Norwalk and Southport—Black Rock Harbor stands alone. It is clearly the most stressed environment.”
Visit the Save the Sound, Sound Health Explorer to view bacteria levels and other information here.
Coming Thursday, Part 2: A catalog of West Side plant malfunctions and sewage discharges into Black Rock Harbor; how sewage problems persist in other cities.
Coming Friday, Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
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At the most inland tip are Santa Energy’s oil tanks. On the east side stretch asphalt runways at Pratt & Whitney’s test airport and a city landfill. On the west side stand O & G Industries sand and stone yard, an empty industrial building, a city landfill, a trash-to-energy plant, the regional aquaculture high school, a seaport, shops, a restaurant and sailing teams’ docks.
Last on this list is the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility, the city’s largest sewage treatment plant, which began work this year on a 20-year plan to correct chronic overflows.
All those buildings lie at the end of Bostwick Avenue, near the constant hum of I-95, a short distance from Seaside Park and within view of a historic lighthouse and beautifully restored park called St. Mary’s by the Sea.
Sewage filters and breaks down at the West Side plant. The treated effluent pours through a 72-inch discharge pipe into Black Rock Harbor. Several times a year, stormwater mixed with sewage overwhelms the system of pipes leading to the plant. Then untreated sewage and rain diverts directly into the harbor through combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes. Although the city has shut down some of its CSO pipes, 30 of them still are active, including the five in the Black Rock area.
Graphic by Wes Rand.
Storms also regularly threaten the plant itself. Instead of flooding, the plant will speed that waste through a partial treatment called a plant bypass. Waste also bypasses treatment when equipment fails. Like the CSOs, the bypasses are legal and will remain so for decades.
The Legal Overflows
Every 10 days, on average, a sewage discharge flows into the harbor, according to July 2014-July 2019 data from DEEP. During that time span, CSO pipes in the Black Rock area discharged 99 times, and the West Side plant bypassed waste 85 times. CSO overflows were estimated between 100,000 gallons and 500,000 gallons. Bypasses ranged from 1 million to 16 million gallons each.
Of the five pipes in Black Rock reported overflows include:
• One at Admiral and Harbor Streets, at Santa Energy, which has overflowed 26 times since 2014.
• A CSO at St. Stephen’s Road and Anthony Street—the location of the Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School—which has overflowed 22 times.
• The CSO nearest the neighborhood beach, Seabright Beach, sends untreated waste off Brewster Street and Seabright Street, overflowing four times in late October 2017.
The 85 bypasses of partially treated sewage over the last five years—varying from 1 million gallons to 16 million gallons—discharged from the plaint’s main pipe below the Captain’s Cove Seaport office and next to its restaurant deck.
Reports of bypasses from 2019 include:
• Between April 26 at 4:40 p.m. and April 27 at 3:45 a.m., nearly 12 million gallons
• July 12 between 1:25 and 4:15 a.m., 11 million gallons
• Between July 17 at 5:50 p.m. and July 18 at 2 a.m., 11 million gallons
• Between July 22 at 6:30 p.m. and July 23 at 1:30 a.m., nearly 10 million gallons
Christine Woodside Photo.
This CSO pipe is closest to Seabright Beach overflowing four times in five years, all in late October 2017.
Lauren McBennett Mappa has been the city’s water pollution control authority manager since January. She maintains that during heavy rainstorms, CSO pipes can overflow, but that the raw sewage being released is “very diluted,” and that it happens rarely.
The Orders
The state issued two orders to the city to correct its sewage overflow problems. Those orders cite violations of the federal discharge permit, issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES).
Bridgeport’s required long-term control plan is designed to bring its sewage treatment into compliance with federal laws. By Nov. 30, 2020, the city must submit a report to the state detailing a schedule for completing upgrades to the plant. By May 31, 2022, “100% design plans shall be submitted” to the state. Construction on the upgrades must begin 4½ years from the date of the order, or September 2023, and must be finished by September 2026. The city and DEEP spent six years negotiating this plan, which requires new sludge storage tanks, odor control units and dryers. DEEP said chlorination and dichlorination of wastewater should have been automated a decade ago. The project is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Marcelo Borges, the West Side water treatment plant supervisor, explains the plant’s operations.
Those who work or relax near the plant’s discharge pipe, and near the five combined sewer overflow pipes that empty into this harbor, describe ugly-looking waste coming from the West Side plant at 205 Bostwick Ave. even on days when it is not raining.
Just ask Gail Robinson, who sells local real estate. Several years ago, she took a potential buyer to visit the open-air restaurant deck of Captain’s Cove Seaport. They stood admiring the view over the harbor. Then Robinson heard a gushing noise, and an ugly brown discharge rushed into the water just below her and her client. “I lost the sale,” said Robinson, who later founded the Ash Creek Conservation Association to advocate for clean water in that tributary of Black Rock Harbor.
Captain’s Cove Seaport manager Bruce Williams’ office overlooks the West Side’s discharge pipe. Often the discharge looks like chocolate mousse, he said. “There’s particle matter in that outflow. It settles and settles and settles, covering the bottom with a brown slurry a foot thick.”
Problems Persist In Other Cities
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Treated waste rushes through the chlorination channel at the West Side plant while Pollution Control Authority Manager Lauren McBennett Mappa, center, talks with two staffers.
Sewage problems aren’t unique to Bridgeport. The problem persists in three other Connecticut cities: New Haven, Hartford, and Norwich. “It went from 13 cities to four remaining,” said Jennifer Perry, assistant director of infrastructure management in the water bureau of DEEP. “We’ve been working with [all four] for a pretty extended period of time.”
In Hartford, a $300 million project to store untreated sewage underground during storms is under construction. New Haven’s 80-year-old sewage plant—also serving East Haven, Hamden, and Woodbridge—overflows regularly. A 2009 consent order dictated plant upgrades, separating storm and sewage pipes, and bioswales. The predicted completion date is 2036.
By permit—until they fix the problems over the next few decades—these cities may divert raw sewage mixed with rainwater directly into rivers, inlets and Long Island Sound.
Anyone spending time in Black Rock, smelling the plant and seeing the discharges and overflows, might ask: Why in an age of robots and space travel can’t society treat its own human waste without polluting its beloved waterways in a time frame faster than over 20 years?
Part of the reason is that the work involves undoing a century-old infrastructure in the state’s largest city, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Perry said Bridgeport had resisted separating sewer from stormwater pipes because it costs so much. But the city has begun separating some of the pipes. For other areas, its plan is to build underground storage tanks that would hold waste during storms.
The city itself admits its sewage treatment plants fail. In a pamphlet Bridgeport distributes, it says its two plants don’t always properly operate, can’t handle flow from common storms and fail to meet the federal standard of “nine minimum controls” that include a ban on discharging waste on days when it isn’t raining.
Perry said she’s not sure people realize what happens in Bridgeport when it rains. “We as an agency talk about it, but I’m not sure many people pay that much attention,” she said. “It happens when it’s raining and no one’s outside.”
Since 2012, by law, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection records sewage outflows on maps. You can view the maps here.
Coming tomorrow Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
A child whose blood test shows 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter or higher is considered poisoned. The 2015 numbers show 98 new cases of children with lead levels of 20 micrograms or higher, four times the threshold number and a 32 percent jump from 2014.
“We cannot, with any certainty, explain why this is the case,” said Krista M. Veneziano, coordinator of the Connecticut Department of Public Health’s (DPH’s) Lead, Radon, and Healthy Homes Program, about the disproportionately larger numbers of higher toxicity.
Exposure to lead can damage cognitive ability, including a measurable and irreversible loss in IQ points. It can also be linked to speech and developmental delays, hyperactivity, hearing loss and behavioral problems, though these may not show up until years later.
Babies and toddlers are the most likely victims of lead paint poisoning and are especially vulnerable to its effects during these vital developmental years. With their hand-to-mouth exploring, they are more liable to ingest flaking paint chips, which taste sweet, or leaded paint dust, created by doors and windows in older housing opening and shutting, grinding down the paint. Soil near the base of older, dilapidated buildings is also frequently contaminated.
These numbers from the DPH are just an estimate because of under-testing. Although state law requires all children to be tested twice, a year apart, before they turn 3, only 55 percent of 1- and 2-year-olds had both screenings in 2015.
Connecticut is not alone in deficient screening and, in fact, does better than many states. A national study of 1- to 5-year-olds published May 2 in “Pediatrics,” an American Academy of Pediatrics journal, concluded that “undertesting of blood lead levels by pediatric care providers appears to be endemic in many states.”
The state started testing children for lead poisoning in 2002. In more recent years, as knowledge of the continuing impact of the neurotoxin and of the importance of testing have widened, children with elevated blood lead levels have been reported in nearly every town and city.
But the highest numbers of poisoned children are always in the four largest, poorer and minority-dominant cities—Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford and Waterbury. Hence, black children under 6 were twice as likely to be lead poisoned as white or Asian children in 2015, and Hispanic children were 1.6 times as likely to be poisoned as non-Hispanic children.
More than 75,000 children under 6 were screened in 2015, with New Haven reporting 196 new cases of children with lead levels at or greater than 5 micrograms. Waterbury reported 186 cases; Bridgeport, 179; and Hartford, 113.
Combined, children in these cities comprise close to half of all the new cases of poisonings in 2015.
Dr. Patricia Garcia, co-director of the Regional Lead Treatment Clinic at Connecticut Children’s Primary Care Center in Hartford, said the clinic’s current caseload is 179 children, who generally come from the from the top half of the state. Lead patients from Fairfield and New Haven counties are more likely to seek treatment at the lead clinic at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital.
And although there are a fair number of children from the city, Garcia said, “If you live in Connecticut, you are at risk for lead.
“Our housing stock is old, we’re from New England, it’s part of our heritage. … [This] means every child is at risk, and it doesn’t matter what socioeconomic class you come from.”
Since 2014, when Flint, Mich., changed its water source and poisoned thousands of its residents, awareness has grown nationwide that lead remains an unresolved problem.
Connecticut’s lead problems, as in most New England states, are linked more to lead paint, which wasn’t banned nationally until 1978. Nearly 60 percent of the state’s housing stock was built before 1970, and percentages in the cities can be higher.
More than 75 percent of New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford’s housing stock is pre-1960, with the three cities generally swapping positions at the top of the state’s lead-plagued municipalities.
DPH numbers show that among 135 dwelling units investigated and reported in 2015, 84 percent had lead-based paint hazards, 59 percent had a lead dust hazard, and 34 percent showed lead in the surrounding soil.
The lead numbers will be fleshed out when the DPH issues its full 2015 lead surveillance report in the next few months.
The total number of Connecticut children 6 and under with lead poisoning in 2015 was 2,156, which includes children still being treated from previous years. This is about 130 fewer than in 2014.
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