Canada - Letter from Riverdale: Trouble with the water

Letter from Riverdale: Trouble with the water
Posted: February 19, 2009, 9:57 PM by Barry Hertz
Yes, I am one of the 68,000. That’s the number of homes in Toronto, built before 1955, that use lead pipes to link up to the city’s water service.
For 15 years I (and our growing family) have been blithely drinking water from the tap in a series of three lead-pipe homes, giving no thought to the lead we ingest in the process. It only took one trip to Riverdale, though, to put the fear of God into me.
That’s where, last night, Councillor Paula Fletcher (Riverdale) organized an open house with Toronto Public Health and Toronto Water, to hand out water sampling kits and get people appropriately freaked out about all the lead that is coursing around in our drinking water. The place was crawling with worried residents, and small wonder.
“I and my youngest child had elevated levels of lead,” says Alice Terpstra, who lived 30 years on Ravina Crescent in Riverdale (she recently moved to Scarborough.) I asked her what effect the lead had on her.
“Anemia, lowered immunity, tooth decay, tremors, insomnia, upset stomach,” she replied. “All these chronic drag-down kind of things.”
Charts at the open house showed that Toronto Water has lab tested 344 Riverdale homes for lead in the past year. Of those, 44 had lead above the acceptable level of 10 parts per billion. The culprit is the stretch of pipe from the water main to your home, about 50% of which belongs to the city, and 50% to the homeowner...........