A coalition of advocacy groups is calling on the federal Environmental Protection Agency to force the City of Syracuse to do more to address its lead water challenges. Marissa Lieberman-Klein is an Associate Attorney with Earth Justice, one of the groups urging the EPA to step in.
“Under EPA's emergency authority, under the Safe Drinking Water Act, they can issue an emergency administrative order when a community is in imminent and substantial endangerment to human health, and where the city has not taken action," Lieberman-Klein said.
The coalition also accuses New York State of neglecting to address the problem. The groups say they have 1,800 signatures from residents questioning the city’s sampling techniques. At issue is where and how water samples were collected in previous years by city employees that returned high levels of lead. The city admitted errors in sampling procedures, but refuted the problem earlier this month. An independent contractor hired by the city using proper protocol shows lead levels well below EPA standards. Senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council Valerie Baron said there’s still enough doubt to question all the results.
“The numbers from 2023 and 2024 on their own are enough to make those of us who see water samples from across the country say we need to stop," Baron said. "We need to get filters on every tap, and we need to make sure that whatever is going on with the water in Syracuse is investigated and addressed.”
City leaders angrily dismissed the ongoing calls from the coalition to declare a state of emergency. Chief Policy Officer Greg Loh said in an email that the NRDC continues to repeat the same unsubstantiated claims about faulty testing, despite the city disproving their assertions multiple times.
"The Natural Resources Defense Council's petition is again filled with unsupported allegations that belie the facts," Loh said. "The facts demonstrate that the City of Syracuse’s drinking water has, once again, met EPA drinking water standards. The latest sampling results, administered by an independent contractor who performs this service for other municipalities, provide further evidence that the lead level exceedance that occurred in the first half of 2024 was the result of errors in the sampling protocol."
Loh adds they’ll continue to work with federal, state and county regulators to ensure water meets all regulatory requirements.
