Higher Lead Levels Found in Water of Some Wayzata Schools

The Wayzata School District is taking steps to keep students safe after water testing recently revealed higher than recommended concentrations of lead found in some faucets.

School districts test lead levels in their water every five years. This year 27 locations in eight different Wayzata schools had lead levels higher than 20 parts per billion, which is higher than the EPA recommended amount.

On Wednesday, the school district sent out a plan to parents detailing how the district is going to fix the problem. The district believes the lead levels are isolated to those 27 locations.

“The elevated levels that we found in those 27 samples are sporadic,” says Jon Deutsch, director of facilities at Wayzata public schools. “They don’t seem to have any correlation to an area or even part of the city. It’s all over the building sporadically.”

6 Locations Were Water Fountains 

Of the 27 locations, six were drinking fountains. The others were faucets or sprayers that are not typically used as a source of drinking water. Right now, the district believes this is not a municipality issue. They believe it has to with the faucets and drinking fountains themselves. School workers taped and labelled the faucets with “do not use” signs.  The school is currently deciding the best method on how to handle the situation.

“There are a couple of way to remediate it,” says Deutsch. “One way, is to develop a protocol where sinks are flushed on a regular basis. We would do that only if flushing shows that it drops the levels below the 20 parts per billion. If they are older fixtures, a lot of times is just replacement of the fixtures.”

Schools Affected 

The fixtures with high levels of lead will remain off until the district decides how to fix the issue. The district sent a second round of samples to the lab Wednesday. Once they get the results they will then decide how to proceed with remediating the problem. For a the full report and list of schools affected click here. 

Plymouth