NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | June 17, 2016 | PAGE 7
...Lead crisis in the schools
From Page 1
Pat Christensen, a union rep
at Plumbers and Fitters Local
290, says the mess is partly the
result of decades of underfund-
ing of maintenance. Christensen
worked as a steamfitter for PPS
for 22 years. Now he represents
the 11 plumbers and 11 steam-
fitters still employed by the dis-
trict, and he’s president of the
coalition of PPS trades unions
known as the District Council of
Unions (DCU). PPS employed
250 DCU members when Chris-
tensen started. Today it employs
84 —to maintain 78 schools
serving 49,000 students.
“It means they’re chasing
emergencies, putting out fires,”
Christensen said.
“When I hired on there in
1988, they had the skills to build
a school. They had everybody:
carpenters, glazers, painters, la-
borers, electricians. We remod-
eled and did major projects dur-
ing the summers.”
But decades of cuts have
made insufficient maintenance
the new normal, Christensen
said: “They continue to operate
under this model of letting
things deteriorate, and that con-
cerns us.”
At Creston and Rose City
Park elementary schools, water
tests found lead above the EPA’s
threshold at some locations.
Subsequently, over 500 students
at the two schools were
screened. Two students were
found to have lead levels above
5 micrograms per deciliter of
blood, the level that the Centers
for Disease Control calls ele-
vated.
If that means the district
dodged a bullet, it may be be-
cause students are in school just
six hours a day and 176 days a
year, and are not necessarily
drinking water from the school
when they’re there.
School employees are also
concerned about lead in the
drinking water, not just district
parents. Belinda Reagan, presi-
dent of 1,400-member Portland
Federation of School Profes-
sionals (AFT Local 111) says
she got dozens of emails and
phone calls from concerned
members after news stories
about lead came out.
Local 111 has filed a griev-
ance in response to the uproar. A
clause in the union contract
guarantees safe and healthy
workplaces, and the union is
asking as a remedy that the dis-
trict offer lead testing to em-
ployees who wish to be tested.
The good news is that there’s
no mystery how to get lead out
of the water — repiping, chang-
ing out fixtures, and installing
filters.
“We’re here to help,” Chris-
tensen said. “If you can get us
the funding, we’d like to send
you more people.”
To save the district money,
Christensen has even proposed
that the district use apprentices
for some of the work, at a lower
rate than journey-level workers.
But the lead scare points up
the cost of cutting too many cor-
ners on maintenance.
“The idea that we were going
to keep the cuts out of the class-
room by cutting all around the
classroom worked for a couple
of years. Now it’s been long
enough that the effects of that
are coming out.”
What’s lead doing in the water at schools?
Lead is a toxic metal that can accumulate in the body over time, and
can harm human health even at low levels of exposure. In children,
lead exposure can damage the central nervous system, impair
hearing, and cause learning disabilities. Lead is common in
plumbing systems installed prior to 1986 – in brass fixtures and the
solder used to join pipes. When those materials corrode, lead can
dissolve into water. Corrosion is greater in pipes carrying hot water,
and pipes where water sits for long periods of time. Like many other
water systems, the Portland Water Bureau reduces corrosion by
adding sodium hydroxide to raise the pH of the water. But there’s no
level at which lead is considered safe. The goal of the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) is that there be no lead in drinking water.
When tap tested at residences finds lead at greater than 15 parts per
billion, the EPA requires drinking water systems to take further
measures.