Don’t Drink the Water!

It may have contributed to the madness of Nero and Vincent Van Gogh. Now that it’s been found in the drinking water of Brown University, Brunonians can consider themselves part of a grand tradition of lead-eating crazies.

While doing a lab on heavy metals for the course “Environmental Science in a Changing World,” Brown sophomores Megan E. Whalen, Matthew L. Wheeler, and Libby Delucia discovered that lead levels in certain campus buildings exceeded the federal limit. The lead content of the water in the applied math building peaked at 150 parts per billion—ten times the legal threshold.

But this startling discovery was old news to Brown professor Steven P. Hamburg, formerly a Bullard Fellow at Harvard. “One of the recommendations in an old city like Providence is that you shouldn’t drink water before having let it run,” he says.

Indeed, Wheeler notes that employees in the applied math building were already leery about their drinking water. “On the top floor there’s a really sketchy looking sink in a little hole-in-the-wall bathroom, and the woman working there was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t really drink this water,’” he says.

Although changing the water pipes would be a permanent solution to the problem of lead contamination, Hamburg was hesitant to support this plan unconditionally. “You have to be careful that you’re not swatting at gnats while you’re being trampled by elephants,” he says. “There are some things that would be nice to change, but we don’t really have strong evidence that they matter.”

But Spring Greeney ’09, former chair of the Environmental Action Committee, may have identified the real elephant in the room. “The fact that students were the one who discovered this shows some failure in the system,” she says.

Harvard EPS and ESPP concentrators, to your testing kits!