with no national mandate in place, only 18 states have implemented any kind of requirement around testing drinking water in schools, according to a 2021 report from the national association of state boards of education.

the lack of national regulations in the past have put students across the country at risk, with emerging contaminants such as pfas, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, being found in the water our students drink and being linked to developmental, reproductive, and immune problems. it has even been shown to increase the risk of cancers.

explore in this immersive podcast and multimedia story how students like lily hanson at linganore high school in frederick, maryland are reacting to water being shut down at their school and the impacts and solutions experts are pointing to to remedy this local, regional, and national epidemic.

you can listen to the full story below and explore the presentation to learn more!

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podcast transcript:

lily hanson: when i first heard that the water systems were shutting off, i was kind of confused and i was a little concerned. and i realized that like, when i talked to people, almost no one really understood why it was happening. people didn’t really like, they didn’t seem to care or like, they didn’t know that there was a larger issue at play and there really is.

so i think it’s something people should be aware of.

avril silva: that is lily hanson, an 18 year old student at linganore high school in frederick, maryland, telling me about how her school shut off their drinking water. hanson, unlike myself in high school, plays the flute for her school band and has been involved with her school newspaper since her freshman year.

lh: it’s something i’m really passionate about.

as: what makes you like really passionate about it?

lh: i just, i really enjoy finding different issues around the school or in the area that i want to talk about and then getting to explore that. it’s just very fulfilling.

as: but not unlike my high school experience, she and her peers don’t have water flowing in their fountains.

instead, they rely on a few water cooler stations posted around the school and small paper cups to drink water, all because of a chemical called pfas. how is it that a school just an hour from our nation’s capital has resorted to water coolers to alleviate the lack of drinking water? what is pfas and how are chemicals like it putting children at risk across the country?

my name is avril silva and let’s take a deep dive into frederick county’s waters and learn the dangers behind a silent killer lurking in the water we drink every day. pfas.

so, it is 11:58 am on november 22nd, 2024 and i made the drive up here to frederick, maryland to speak with principal dillman at linganore high school and take a look at the water situation here after three months of having their drinking water cut off.

when i asked principal michael dillman at linganore high school how he delivered the news about the heightened pfas levels at his school, he said he had no idea where to start. thank you. i mean, i don’t blame him. what is pfas anyway? according to the agency for toxic substances and disease registry, pfas, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are man made chemicals that have been used in products around the world since the 1940s to make everything from the cosmetics we put on our face to the non stick pans we use to cook our food.

the epa and state governments say that pfas chemicals get into the water in numerous ways. such as release from industrial sites, landfills, firefighting films, sludge, and sewage treatment plants. professor dengming xue, an environmental engineer at george washington university, is currently working to create new treatment methods for emerging contaminants like pfas and points to its proliferation, unknown qualities, and removal difficulty as its most dangerous characteristics.

danmeng shuai: we can find these emergent contaminants basically everywhere. like, for example, my research is heavily focused on water, so we can find these emergent contaminants in our drinking water, wastewater, natural water, basically all the kind of water system you can imagine. so the reason why we are calling them emergent contaminants, because these are newly found  contaminants that are always at a relatively low concentration, but still pose significant health risks to human beings. they are difficult to remove by using the conventional drinking water and waste water treatment. so that’s the reason why people are caring more and more in recent years.

as: one report from 2015 by the centers for disease control and prevention found pfas in the blood of 97 percent of americans, 97%!

but how dangerous can pfas really be? if we’re only bothering to worry about it now. washington post national investigative journalist silvia foster frau is working on a series entitled toxic taps that examines contaminated water across the u. s., including in the schools our children attend. with no national mandate in place at the time, a 2021 report from the national association of state boards of education found that only 18 states have implemented any kind of requirement around testing drinking water in schools.

pull out your calculator and do the math, and you get 64 percent of the country without any sort of requirements around testing the drinking water in schools where kids spend the majority of their day. that’s where sylvia comes in. her stories have revolved around water contamination found in private wells, like the ones linganore high school uses, and lead laced pipes in small communities and schools.

in one school she covered in east ramapo central school district in new york, the school has gone so long without running drinking water, that the community has started to lose hope in a future without water coolers.

sylvia foster-frau: what was particularly heartbreaking about this school is that by the time i went there, i think it had been 8 years since they had shut off the taps and they still had not fixed the water.

as: the taps were still closed?

sff: the taps were still closed.

as: oh my god.

sff: and the kids were still drinking out of coolers that were in the hallway, and and the parents i spoke to were packing their students backpacks with bottled water. like three or four bottles of water to last them throughout the day, throughout their extracurriculars, through gym, whatever they needed.

as: but again, how dangerous can it possibly be? in studies supported and financed by the national institute of environmental health sciences, they found a number of adverse health effects in children from heightened pfas consumption, from the decrease in bone mineral density to delayed puberty onset as an endocrine disruptor to even thyroid cancer and liver damage.

although foster frau’s work has taken her across the country, this is not a far away issue by any means. this is happening right in d. c. ‘s backyard. linganore high school’s water comes from four local wells, with most of the community depending on private wells at home. after testing in july, results from linganore show pfas levels surpassing epa guidelines.

the epa recommends testing for five different compounds, and at linganore, the initial testing for one compound tested almost seven points over the limit, and testing for another was over triple the enforceable level at 16. 1 parts per trillion. as a result, the high school cut off its drinking water supply in august, and has gone without potable water since.

according to principal dillman, the school receives anywhere from 100 to 120 5 gallon water bottles a week, with the majority going toward extracurricular activities such as athletics or marching band that can burn up to five of those bottles of practice. he did not disclose how much that was costing the county, but in our conversation he seemed concerned about how this issue gone untreated, has impacted faculty members at the school for decades and how he would deliver that message to the community.

michael dillman: there were always people in the old building that talked about lead pipes and, you know, all these types of water quality concerns, but we have people who worked in the old building and here. we have some staff that have been here for almost 40 years, so delivering a message that we’re going to stop drinking from our water fountains, that’s very scary.

and then you talk about pfas and, you know, learning that it’s not an issue that if you just drank it today that you have to be concerned, but what’s always been shared to us is it’s the longterm continual exposure. but i knew that even that message, while comforting to. maybe kids that have been here for a year or two and just drink a little bit.

that’s a very different message when you know you’ve been here for 13 years or drinking from our wells for 40 plus.

as: dillman says that the county’s central office has been working toward a permanent solution, but it looks like the school will not be able to reopen its pipes for another school year. so where do they go from here?

the epa notes that conventional physical and biological treatments are ineffective toward pfas chemicals. for many communities with utilities that are unwilling to pay for expensive treatments, professor shuai says that a solution could be as easy and inexpensive as harnessing the light around us in the form of his photocatalytic method.

ds: a long story short, basically a photocatalyst is able to utilize the solar energy, which is a sustainable energy and convert the photons into the chemical energy, and so the chemical energy is able to drive the degradation of these emerging contaminants. most of the time we are utilizing this energy to excite oxygen in the air and then oxidize the emerging contaminants because most of the emerging contaminants we are dealing with, they are organic compounds.

as: on a local and federal policy level, steps are being taken to address pfas contamination. with the biden administration allocating 10 billion last month to remove pfas from our water. however, the epa admits to not knowing enough about emerging contaminants, or as they dub them, forever chemicals, and have a long way to go before the issue is eradicated nationwide.

after reaching out to the maryland department of the environment about linganore high school, i received extensive information from the group through email about what the state is doing to remedy the issue. including a quote from their deputy director of communications, jay apperson, that states the following, quote, the health of school children is very important to us.

we will continue to work in partnership with other agencies and local governments on testing, fixing problems, and helping to fund the needed improvements, end quote. with however much or little the government may be doing to address pfas, the linganore community is finding ways to make sure the issue doesn’t drown.

like lily demonstrates, it can be as easy as picking up a pen and starting to write an article for her school newspaper.

lh: before writing this article, i hadn’t really heard about water contamination or like pfa’s that much. it was never something that was like discussed in school. and i was honestly really surprised as i was researching it how large of a scale the issue was and that it had never really been talked about to me that much, and that it didn’t seem like it was something people were familiar with.

as: yeah. after writing the piece, what was one of your biggest takeaways from it? what did you personally learn after covering it?

lh: i think one of my biggest takeaways was that it’s important to be mindful about what we’re consuming, and that we don’t really fully know the impacts of our drinking water, which is shocking.

as: or for principal dillman, seeing how the community can unite against these forever chemicals.

md: part of our plan when we talk about lhs community is being very transparent, being open, and being collaborative with our community about what’s happening. so, keeping them apprised of where we are and why we’re doing that.

i think that, that was an opportunity to say, we’re here to support, we have a plan. and we’re going to work through this together. it was very comforting in a way, because we put it right as soon as we knew. this wasn’t something that was out in the news and then they started hearing about it. i mean, we’re sort of ahead of it, right on the cusp.

it was just emerging in other districts. and so i think it was great that our system got hold of it quickly and said, yes, it’s four years out, but we’re addressing it now. so i think people are seeing that we were clear. we were upfront. we have a temporary plan that’s working. students have not been without access and that’s been fantastic and that they are working quickly to see if they can come up with a solution.

so i think, i’m grateful that our community has responded so positively to, they’re trusting that we’re taking care of it.

as: water, food, and shelter. these are basic human needs. at the end of the day, lily, what do students want to see from the water at their school?

lh: i think students just want to see like water that they know it’s, it’s going to be like it’s safe to consume and it’s gonna be, like, taste normal, honestly.

and they just, they want to see that consistently and they want to know that it’s safe.