Galesburg city officials are pushing back against an article from U.K. newspaper The Guardian which names Galesburg as one of 33 U.S. cities which have “cheated” on testing for lead in water.
The article alleges that the municipalities used protocols to “temporarily hide” tests which exceeded Environmental Protection Agency standards for lead contamination.
Pre-flushing, or asking residents to run water prior to testing, The Guardian says, has been a method denounced by the U.S. EPA since 2008.
Galesburg is included in cities who allegedly instructed testers to pre-flush, but City Engineer Wayne Carl tells WGIL the city has always followed EPA guidelines that allowed for the method until April 2016.
“There was no purposeful intent to alter the tests in anyway,” Carl says. “We’ve always just followed what the EPA guidelines are and now people are coming in after the fact saying that places were trying to manipulate the tests and that certainly was not the case.”
In a news release, the city says that since April’s change in IEPA guidelines, instructions given in the most recent round of testing included the direction, “do not flush any water from your faucet prior to filling the bottle.”
David McMillan, manager of the Division of Public Water Supplies, Galesburg’s principal water regulator, in an email to Carl says the flushing “guidance was changed” prior to the city’s most recent round of tests.
City officials have asked The Guardian to remove Galesburg from it’s list of cities that have violated EPA policy. The paper has yet to do so.
