Newark residents use water filters as city works on its corrosion treatment for lead.
Stacey Goods didn't think anything of the Facebook posts she read about lead being in Newark's drinking water. Nor did she think the three-family house - where she is a tenant - was affected in the West Ward.
"People play too much," Goods said.
The social media threads compared Newark to Flint, a narrative Mayor Ras Baraka continues to lash out against.
"What they did was purposeful and deliberate to save money," Baraka said during a press conference last week.
Goods heard him say the same thing hours later that night at a meeting at Berean Baptist Church in her ward. She went to the meeting to learn about lead and because she heard the city had been giving filters to residents in homes with lead service lines and elevated levels of lead.
Newark officials, including Baraka, told residents what the city had been doing when it thought initial elevated lead levels were coming from old pipes. But when a consultant's study showed that Newark's water treatment system was not working, the city began to distribute filters last month.
Kareem Adeem, the city's deputy director of water and sewer, said Newark's corrosion control treatment - sodium silicate - was not providing a protective coat inside the pipe to prevent lead from entering the water.
"The silicate was losing its effectiveness," Adeem said.
Newark residents attend meeting at Berean Baptist Church to listen to city officials explain what they have done about elevated levels of lead in drinking water.Barry Carter | NJ Advance Media
After the meeting, Goods was shocked to see her home on the list of some 15,000 to 18,000 homes Newark has identified with lead.
"I said OMG."
Since October, Newark has handed out 13,129 filters -- a figure activists say should be higher by now.
Kim Gaddy, the environmental justice organizer for Clean Water Action, said her organization will be going door to door with the consultant that the city hired to do the water study.
"We're getting calls from folks that don't know how to install it," Gaddy said. "It's too serious of an issue to think you're protected, but your filter is not working," Gaddy said.
If the light is green, it's working. Yellow means the filter is losing effectiveness; red is time to replace it.
See our inventory of lead service lines in Newark
Adeem said the city will canvass neighborhoods, too, to get the word out and he demonstrated how it should be used.
Jacqueline Bussey was at same meeting, waiting patiently to see if she needed one of the 40,000 filters that Newark has made available.
"All we can do is hope and pray that everything works out," she said after learning her house was affected.
She was nervous at first about the filter but felt better after the meeting.
"I'm not sure how this is going to play out," Bussey said. "They're doing what they can to rectify the situation."
Sample of lead service lines that need to be replace in Newark homes, which have elevated levels of lead in the drinking water.Barry Carter | NJ Advance Media
Baraka said Newark sent its pipes to the U.S. Department of Environmental Protection Agency and it rolled out a lead service replacement pipe program. It will be funded with a $75 million bond to replace lead service lines connected to affected homes. The cost to homeowners is a maximum of $1,000 each.
In the meantime, the filters are for a year, or at least until the new corrosion treatment takes hold in the city's Peqaunnock water system, which serves parts of every ward except for the East.
Adeem said the new corrosion inhibitor - an orthophosphate - takes about three to eight months to form a wall inside the pipes. That treatment is already used in the city's Wanaque plant, its second water system that serves the East Ward, and parts of the North, Central and South.
Gwendolyn Lynn, a resident, isn't nervous that she has had to attach a filter to her kitchen faucet. She uses bottled water and has had a water cooler.
"I'm going to do what they say, even though I don't like it," said Lynn, who's satisfied with how Newark has informed the public.
"It's almost too much information," she said.
Goods is not panicking, either, even though she had some initial worry. In the past month, Goods said she used tap water to cook a few times when she ran out of bottled water that she's been using for years.
"How much of this have I consumed?" she thought.
Goods will attach the filter, but doubts she'll be using it much. Her reliance on bottled water is a way of life after her son, now a college student, tested positive for lead when he was in elementary school in Orange. At the time, the home where she lived had to be abated.
This situation, she said, is "spooky," but she's she's okay.
"When he (mayor) broke it down, I was put at ease when he said this is not Flint."
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Barry Carter may be reached at bcarter@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL. Find NJ.com on Facebook.