20,000 Hamilton homes have toxic lead pipes carrying water to taps. The city says it will take 40 years to fix the system

Thestar.com
November 5, 2019
Kelly Bennett

Every week, Lisa Svadjian and her husband lug plastic jugs of water into their renovated century home in Hamilton’s sought-after St. Clair neighbourhood.

The family drinks bottled water since a city worker told them a couple of years ago that the pipe leading to their house is made of lead.

The revelation irritated Svadjian.

“It’s like we’re camping,” she remembered thinking. “This is ridiculous, to have to drink from bottled jugs of water, as if you don’t have fresh water coming through your house.”

The Svadjians live in one of about 20,000 Hamilton homes with toxic lead pipes carrying water to their taps. They know kids are especially vulnerable to lead, but don’t know the exact level of risk for their four- and six-year-old girls. Instead of saving up thousands of dollars to hire a contractor to dig up and replace their pipes, they’ve focused on other priorities with fixing up their old house. In the meantime, they drink bottled water, which they admit is a hassle and a waste as the four-litre jugs pile up in their recycling bins every week.

Hamilton officials acknowledge the health dangers of drinking water from lead pipes but say overhauling the system will take up to 40 years. Like their counterparts in other Canadian cities, they urge homeowners with lead pipes to spend thousands of dollars on removal, or to rely on filters, or to flush the taps in the morning to lower the risks, or to use bottled water.

Meanwhile, many Hamilton homeowners like the Svadjians are unsure how serious the problem is. They’re faced with an invisible problem not of their making as they try to balance the costs of raising kids and dealing with any number of other old-house headaches that come up.

The city has not sampled widely from homeowners’ taps, and doesn’t offer testing to find out the level of lead coming into individual taps. Hamilton tested just 102 taps for lead citywide since last December. These tests found a range of lead levels up to 33 parts per billion (ppb) -- several times higher than both the Ontario standard of 10 ppb and the Health Canada recommended limit of 5 ppb.

More than 10 per cent of the tests exceeded the Ontario limit, with 12 taps showing levels exceeding 10 ppb.

The city relies on homeowners to pay for their end of the pipe to be switched out before it will come along and remove the lead connecting pipe to the water main. At a cost of a few thousand dollars, the process can be daunting for homeowners, if they even realize they have lead pipes, and even if they take advantage of the city’s loan program for replacement.

Last year Hamilton implemented a corrosion control program aimed at reducing the amount of lead leaching from pipes and fixtures. The city was required to do this after testing in 2008 and 2009 showed lead exceedances. The city says the program won’t reach its full effect for a few years.

Young families like the Svadjians have bought houses in Hamilton’s central and eastern neighbourhoods in great numbers in recent years, drawn by charming brick architecture and hardwood floors at lower prices than nearby Toronto.

But even as the neighbourhood fills up with eager renovators and young parents researching healthy recipes for toddlers, the fact that their neighbourhoods have toxic pipes snaking under the ground has not attracted much attention.

A crew from Baldasaro Contracting uses a small digger to make a trench for the new copper water pipe being installed at Melodee Hibma's Hamilton home last month.

Melodee Hibma had her pipes replaced in her previous house, near Tim Hortons Field, but didn’t get around to replacing the lead pipes in her current home in Hamilton’s east end until late last month.

In the meantime, for more than two years, the Hibmas and their sons, 5 and 2, drank unfiltered water from their tap.

She said she, too, has not sensed any urgency about replacing the pipes. She has occasionally seen ads on bus shelters about lead pipes. But it doesn’t come up in conversations on the playground.

“If it's that dire, why am I not hearing this more often?” she said. “Why is this not more in my face, if it's so important?”

Compare that to knob-and-tube wiring, for which home insurers deny coverage.

“It’s not illegal to continue to have a lead water pipe,” Svadjian said. “I guess it’s different because it’s not like it harms the value of your house or creates a fire hazard. But it harms your family.”

Unlike the dangers that they believed required immediate action when the Svadjians bought, like a leaky basement, getting their pipes replaced was not a prominent concern.

It’s easy for the existence of lead pipes to go undetected by house-hunters. The Svadjians’ realtor pointed out theirs. But there are no rules compelling realtors, home inspectors or landlords to disclose lead pipes to people moving into a house.

For more than two years, the Hibmas and their sons, 5 and 2, drank unfiltered water from their tap.

The city mails a notice warning of possible lead every time an owner or tenant’s name changes on a water bill. But the notice can get lost in the disorder of moving.

Even that notice doesn’t alert residents that they definitely have lead in their water. That’s because the city doesn’t know which houses specifically still have lead pipes. The 20,000 homes is an estimate based on how much of Hamilton’s housing stock was built before the 1960s, when using lead for service lines began to be phased out.

There’s no safe level of exposure to lead. The dangers are especially pronounced for pregnant women, babies and children under 7. The effect of lead on developing brains could impact a child’s intelligence, brain function and physical development.

The city’s water and public health departments put out annual ads about lead pipes and occasionally mount larger campaigns. In recent years, public health has given out filters to low-income residents.

But officials acknowledge there’s a gap in communication when residents say they’re confused about how much of a problem having lead pipes really is.

“Everybody thinks of cancer, and they think we’ve got to stop cancer,” said Matt Lawson, director of Hamilton public health’s health hazards program. “Lead exposure is not a very acute risk. It is something that slowly kind of comes in insidiously.”

If you wonder whether you have lead pipes, Hamilton officials will come to your house and check. But Andrew Grice, the city’s water director, said it’s not easy to convince homeowners to deal with the pipes.

“I don’t know if everyone is fully aware of the harmful effects of lead,” he said. “And if people look at the amount of drinking water they consume, maybe they think it’s minute enough that really, they’re not affected. But it’s not certainly something that I would support in my household.”

Tenants may also not know, nor have much chance of convincing their landlords to replace the pipes.

“Does [a landlord] want to spend the $3,000 to replace his lead service to ensure the safety of the people who are leasing the property? I would like to hope so,” Grice said. “But I would suggest that in all cases that may not be true.”

A crew from Baldasaro Contracting work to install a new copper waterline to replace the lead one currently delivering water from city lines into Melody Hibma's home.

Between 500 and 800 homeowners tend to get their pipes replaced every year, at a typical cost of between $2,000 and $3,000. More than 2,000 homeowners have taken the city up on a low-interest loan program to borrow $2,500 payable over 10 years to fix the problem. And a total of about 6,000 homes have had their lines replaced in the last decade.

Lawson, in public health, said governments and residents have a difficult balance to strike.

“There’s other health hazards that compete for our public dollars, our attention, how much of a burden to our health it is,” he said. “And when you look at things like infectious diseases and cancer, they seem to be either more devastating and/or acutely imperative to us.”

Water officials plan to present to council later this month on options to accelerate the replacement of lead pipes. There are challenges beyond securing the funding to speed up the process, Grice said.

“The big challenge for all municipalities is getting homeowners on board,” Grice said. “Even if anyone’s (city) council was to throw $10 million at this program, you still need that homeowner buy-in.”

Tainted Water, a year-long investigation by more than 120 journalists from nine universities and 10 media organizations, found hundreds of thousands of Canadians are consuming tap water laced with high levels of lead leaching from aging and deteriorating infrastructure. Read the stories at thestar.com/taintedwater