Newark Schools Receive $7.5 million EPA Grant to Remove Lead from Water Infrastructure – TAPinto.net

NEWARK, NJ — A little more than a month after Mayor Ras Baraka declared Newark is nearly done replacing lead service lines to residents’ homes throughout the city, Newark Public Schools can now advance its own water infrastructure program. 

Baraka, NPS Superintendent Roger Leon and other dignitaries accepted a $7.5 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency from federal officials at Lafayette Street School on Friday. It will pay to replace the lead water infrastructure and other sources of lead of Newark’s aging school system.

Across the district, many of Newark’s 64 schools are close to 100 years old. The grant is part of an initiative under the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, which will award $39.9 million to 10 projects in communities where children are exposed to lead. 

“Last year, the EPA worked hand in hand with the city of Newark and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to help ensure that the city’s drinking water was safe,” said Jessica Kramer, the EPA’s Office of Water Senior Policy Counsel. “We are glad to be back in Newark today, acknowledging the great work the city is doing to protect public health and announcing this EPA grant funding that will directly help reduce lead in schools.”

Leon said that under the Newark Safe Water Initiative, the district has been working to remediate its current systems, replace them and maintain them with filters in the interim. Lead levels were found in Newark’s schools in 2016, prompting officials to shut off all sources of drinking water. 

“The impact of this grant, coupled with the work that the mayor and the city of Newark began, will undoubtedly move us from mitigating to eliminating,” Leon said. 

According to Steve Morlino, Executive Director of Facilities at NPS, the lead levels across the district are currently below 15 parts per billion (ppb), and many are below two ppb. The federal safety standard, known as the Lead and Copper Rule, is 15 ppb. 

Morlino attributes the accomplishment to the numerous lead reduction systems his team has installed since 2016. He said the EPA grant will enhance the work already being done and fortify testing as the city transitions out of its lead crisis. 

“We randomly test every school building to ensure the lead levels are correct, below the standard. Anything not below the standard is shut down immediately and is not in service until it is remediated,” Morlino added. 

Newark’s water crisis, which began around 2017, came to a head in 2019 when filters given to residents by the city failed, prompting the EPA to order the city to hand out bottled water. 

This July, officials reported that the use of a new corrosion inhibitor in its Pequannock water system — where the previous inhibitor failed in 2017 and caused lead to leach from Newark’s aging service lines into the drinking water — succeeded in bringing lead levels to 14.1 ppb.

More strides were announced in September as the city celebrated the final stretch of its lead service line replacement program, a first-of-its-kind collaboration by which Essex County loaned Newark $120 million to replace its water infrastructure. 

“The gravy, or the icing, is now we get infrastructure money to work on our school system so that the superintendent, Steve Morlino, everybody can do what’s necessary here in the schools so that parents can feel comfortable sending their kids to school whenever we get back there,” Baraka said.