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PPS launches pilot program for new drinking water stations
3/18/2019Portland Public Schools will conduct a pilot program at six schools in an effort to find a cost-efficient way to make more drinking water options available throughout the district.
The program will fit highly-effective lead filters at select stations that would dispense safe, drinkable water to bottle fillers and fountains. The filters are designed to provide a school with 425 students and staff nearly two 20-ounce bottles of water per person, per day, during the course of a school year.
“We are not just going to a vendor to provide us with filtered drinking stations,” said John Burnham, PPS Senior Director of Environmental Health and Safety. “We are having our engineer create a unique design that incorporates custom high-performance lead filters. We will then do extensive monitoring to confirm that these custom water stations are performing as intended.”
The schools that will take part are Arleta K-8, Duniway Elementary, Jefferson High, Llewellyn Elementary, Rigler Elementary and Robert Gray Middle. The plan was presented to the Board of Education at its Feb. 19 meeting.
PPS has tested more than 2,500 water fixtures throughout the district through the $28.5 million allocated in the 2017 bond to reducing lead levels in drinking and food prep water. The majority of the fixtures have been returned to service, but about 500 tested above 15 parts per billion (ppb) for lead, the action level the district has set, which is below the action level of 20 ppb that had been set by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has since quit recommending a specific action level for schools, instead providing a guideline to “reduce their lead levels to the lowest possible concentrations.” The pilot program is intended to reduce lead levels in drinking water to below 1 ppb
Fixing the issues causing the high lead levels in the affected fixtures would require extensive pipe replacement that could require major wall destruction and replacement and cost millions of dollars. That cost would be significantly reduced if the filters work and can be implemented throughout the district. The PPS Water Quality Team in the Office of School Modernization will first test filters at existing bottle filler stations, and the filters will be tested rigorously during the pilot study for lead levels and estimating filter maintenance costs.
The pilot schools were selected because they had at least 15 drinking fixtures that still tested above 15 ppb for lead after their fixtures were replaced. The work is scheduled to begin in early summer and be completed before the start of the 2019-20 school year.
“We’re cautiously optimistic about this pilot program’s ability to significantly lower the lead levels in our schools water to among the lowest in the state while at the same time avoiding millions of dollars in plumbing work,” said Dan Jung, PPS Chief Operating Officer.
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