‘It’s safe’: Vaughan assures residents after story about lead in water explodes

So far, few schools in Vaughan seem to be having a lead problem

Yorkregion.com
Nov. 12, 2019
Dina Al-Shibeeb

After more than 120 journalists published their investigative stories of how hundreds of thousands of Canadians are consuming tap water with high levels of lead due to aging infrastructure, Qaiser Naqvi, a Woodbridge resident, wanted to know what’s happening in Vaughan.

“We all know that lead contamination in water of our daily usage, including drinking and handling by children and the elderly, are a very serious source of concern, if not an emergency,” Naqvi said, asking for an official statement from the city of Vaughan on the “true status of this situation.”

“This needs to be addressed urgently as our memories of Flint, MI, are still fresh with us.”

Lead, a naturally occurring toxic metal, has resulted in extensive environmental contamination and significant public health problems in many parts of the world.

In an email to the Vaughan Citizen, the city said, “Residents can rest assured that the city of Vaughan’s water is safe and does not have any lead water services.”

Stretching out to more than 1,200 kilometres of underground infrastructure, including more than 90,000 water service connections, Vaughan removed the last batch of “lead water services in the 1990s.”

“As such, based on the current inventory, there are no lead water services in the city’s infrastructure.”

While lead services have been “removed on the public side,” the city said, “there is a possibility that lead service connections remain on the private side, which are the responsibility of the homeowner.”

“In the unlikely event that a homeowner discovers that the city portion of their service is lead, the city will replace the city-owned portion of the service when the private connection has been replaced.”

Homeowners or tenants can call the city to request a sampling so environmental services can complete the test free of charge.

So far, the city said it's “proactive” when it comes to “asset-management procedures” and that it takes 2,000 samples annually.

“Sampling results between 2008 and 2010 indicated that lead is not an element of concern in the city.”

However, “over the past three years, fewer than five samples detected lead through the lead-sampling program and only one exceeded the regulatory limit,” the city said, describing the location as being “subsequently resampled and the results were within the regulatory limit.”

Lead detected in schools

While the city suspects that private homeowners could possibly be at risk, there are schools that are considered public that have had problematic results with lead.

What the Toronto Star and the Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found is that more than 2,400 Ontario schools and daycare centres exceeded the current federal guideline for lead in drinking water in the past two years.

Also, before these publications unleashed their explosive stories, the Ministry of the Environment in 2017 said that high lead levels were found in the drinking water of 24 York Region schools in 2016.

Out of these schools, five were in Vaughan.

They were: St. Catherine of Sieana CES, which had 46 parts per billion (ppb); Our Lady of Fatima CES, which had 43 ppb; Father John Kelly CES, which had 39 ppb; St. Catherine of Siena CES, 19 ppb; and St. John Bosco CES, which had 11 ppb.

Ontario’s lead limit currently sits at 10 ppb, but Health Canada lowered its recommended guideline to 5 ppb. Both Health Canada and the World Health Organization say no amount of lead is known to be safe.

While we couldn’t check all these schools in the Toronto Star database, both Our Lady of Fatima and Father John Kelly have a 33-per-cent failure rate with six tests that exceeded 5 ppb.

Jennifer Sarna, a superintendent with the York Catholic District School Board, told the Toronto Star that it remains unclear how school boards are going to deal with the inevitable spike in exceedances with the lowering of the federal lead guideline.

Vaughan's water comes from Lake Ontario, and it’s treated by the city of Toronto and Peel Region and supplied to the city by York Region.

York Region also said it started testing for lead back in 1996. “Results are consistently well below the regulatory limit,” it said, not giving an explanation for why there is some lead in public schools.

“All results from 2019 for York Region storage facilities are well below 0.005 micrograms per litre. York Region is meeting both the current and the more stringent future standards,” it reiterated.