Tapped Out: Investigation finds deeper issues with New Orleans’ drinking water

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - Emails and interviews with Sewerage & Water Board officials, combined with an extensive analysis of their data, have revealed deeper, more extensive problems within New Orleans’ drinking water testing and sample collection programs than Fox 8 and our investigative news partners at the Louisiana Illuminator reported earlier this month.

For example, GPS data show a S&WB employee regularly diverted to his home for hours when he was supposed to be taking water samples.

The utility also appears to follow an unwritten procedure that allows its employees to substitute for inaccessible drinking water sample stops, not with other stops in a state-approved sampling site plan, but with locations left to the whims of sample collectors. The protocol, which federal regulations do not allow, has been in effect since at least 2018.

Additionally, it appears hundreds of drinking water samples tested for coliform — an indication of possible sewage contamination — were not incubated for sufficient durations over the same five-year period. Such systemic failures in testing protocols open the possibility of “false negative” results for bacterial contamination.

However, a key S&WB leader continues to consider these issues an isolated matter, although evidence points to supervisors having knowledge of skipped sampling stops.

“We’ve got 1,200 employees of the Sewerage and Water Board,” Steve Nelson, the S&WB’s deputy general superintendent for engineering and services, said in an interview after the first two installments of our investigative series were published. “So I’ll stand by my statement that the vast majority of the time we’re doing the right thing for the right reasons in the right places.”

Lakiethia Ross is one of the five S&WB employees identified in the Illuminator’s extensive data analysis as having skipped water sampling sites. She confirmed another finding from the review: Her colleague, Greg DeCuir, often diverted from his route to stop at his apartment in New Orleans East for lunch. She knows because she was with him on at least one such occasion.

“He went inside. He asked me if I wanted a water drink or whatever,” Ross said in an interview. “I stayed in the car.”

Nelson said DeCuir has “been counseled on those issues, and we’ll be making sure that that sort of thing isn’t repeated.” Asked why harsher consequences weren’t warranted, Nelson said the incident and the S&WB’s response will go into DeCuir’s personnel file “for later use if it becomes a repeated issue.”

Tapped Out Part 1: Investigation reveals S&WB employees skipped, falsified drinking water tests

Tapped Out Part 2: New Orleans’ drinking water test procedures don’t follow government regulations

Ross was fired earlier this year after failing a sobriety test following an accident in a work vehicle. She has admitted to wrongdoing in that incident but claims she never skipped testing sites and that S&WB personnel falsified the results she collected. In a Nov. 3 letter to the state health department, the agency confirmed eight of the instances when Ross skipped stops, using identical methods to those the Illuminator use in its investigation.

GPS tracking also shows Ross’ work vehicle making stops on multiple days at an Uptown school that wasn’t on her testing route. She confirmed she brought her daughter to school but said it wasn’t a personal use because she was already “in that area.”

Hundreds of samples substituted

Federal and state rules for collecting monthly coliform and chlorine samples are quite simple: Only go to locations listed in the system’s written sampling site plan, which the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH) approves.

Louisiana regulations make provision for instances when sites are inaccessible or unavailable. The sampling site plan includes 50% more sites than required each month. If a site can’t be reached, the sampler can turn to the oversized list for an approved address to use in its place.

“Systems must collect total coliform samples according to the written sample siting plan,” Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 spokesperson Joseph Robledo confirmed in an email.

However, the Sewerage & Water Board appears to engage in systemic avoidance of this regulation. The agency has an unwritten standard protocol for what to do when sampling personnel are confronted with an inaccessible sample site: Grab samples from anywhere else nearby.

This substitution process, which appears nowhere in the agency’s written sampling procedures for coliform or chlorine, has resulted in at least one substitution for more than 25% of the 332 addresses sampled from August 2018 through July 2023.

In total, just over 400 samples — or 3% of the more than 13,000 gathered – were skipped over the five-year period through improper off-plan substitutions. They are in addition to the 150 skipped sample visits between December 2022 and June 2023 that Fox 8 and the Illuminator uncovered.

The Sewerage & Water Board’s use of random substitute sites, instead of state-approved addresses in their sampling site plan, robs the agency of a key tool: The ability to see trends at a given site over time. If a site is being constantly skipped in favor of assorted substitute sites, any trend is in doubt because variations could be the result in the changes in location, not water quality. If a plan site with a history of substitutions was to experience multiple positive coliform hits, the resulting investigation will be hobbled by results of dubious value from the substitute sites.

Major water systems like the Sewerage & Water Board have pointed to the ability to track trends at fixed sites as a key advantage to the current sampling policy when the EPA developed it in the late 1980s, an argument that persuaded the federal agency to abandon its original process which lacked such standardization.

State health department backs S&WB process

In his interview, Nelson mentioned the apparent rogue nature of the substitution scheme.

“There is an allowance for substitute sites, but that’s supposed to be documented. It’s supposed to be requested,” he said. “I can’t find anything in writing that shows that.”

In response to our emailed questions, the Louisiana Department of Health backed Nelson, contradicting the EPA’s regulations. Officials claim substitution sample sites are allowed when “a normal sample tap is not accessible/available.”

“Systems are allowed to use a nearby tap, typically within five service connections. The substitution requires documentation as to why the substitute was used,” the health department said.

The state’s position appears not only to be at odds with the EPA, but also the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The section of the Act granting states such as Louisiana “primacy” authority to enforce drinking water regulations stipulates that the state’s own regulations can be no less stringent than the federal regulations. Variances and exemptions from certain federal regulations are allowed, but those dealing with coliform and E. coli testing are not among them.

Federal regulations themselves are even clearer: Variances and exemptions to the rules surrounding testing for E. coli, including the sampling rules, are specifically forbidden, a regulation also highlighted on the EPA’s website.

When asked specifically about Louisiana’s allowance of substitutions, the EPA’s Robledo said the federal agency had nothing to add to their original response that coliform samples must only be drawn from sites in a water system’s sampling plan.

The Sewerage & Water Board was presented with findings from the Illuminator’s analysis and was asked whether it would cease the substitution protocol in light of its apparent illegality. In response, the utility said the Illuminator’s analysis was “incorrect” without elaborating beyond a description of how they record substituted sites.

The Louisiana Department of Health has previously said it’s investigating the Sewerage & Water Board based on the Fox 8-Illuminator findings but did not provide an update on their probe for this article.

Incubation times for bacteria tests appear too short

Following the publication of the Fox 8-Illuminator’s first two articles about the S&WB’s testing regime, one of the topics the board pushed back on was about the duration of coliform analysis.

Samples for coliform analysis are brought back from the field and tested by the staff in the S&WB microbiology lab, led by Janice Walters. According to the S&WB’s compiled testing and sampling spreadsheets, most of the time a method known as “membrane filtration” is used.

The method for membrane filtration is prescribed in a standard incorporated into federal and state regulations. It involves filtering out potential pathogens from water samples using a vacuum, then placing the filter, or membrane, on a disk containing growth medium known as agar. The disks are to be incubated for no less than 22 hours and no more than 24 hours. If the presence of coliform bacteria is found on the incubated disks, a battery of confirmation tests and a test for the dangerous bacteria E. coli are conducted the next day.

The Illuminator initially determined nearly a fifth of sample batches the S&WB lab tested between December 2022 and June 2023 appeared to the 24-hour maximum incubation time. The Sewerage & Water Board claimed its “bench sheets” -- hand-written logs associated with the coliform testing -- showed all incubation times were within the 22- to 24-hour window.

The utility also claimed the start times reported on their state-submitted spreadsheets were not incubation start times, but included a half hour for sample preparation, a fact which appears to be at odds with the instructions for the spreadsheets, provided by the state.

The Illuminator redid and expanded the analysis, looking at over 13,000 coliform samples gathered from August 2018 to July 2023 but using the S&WB definition of “start time.” The findings were worse.

Not only did the spreadsheets contain data showing 1,000 samples which exceeded the standard incubation times, they also indicated more than 440 that fell short. While the overall percentage of samples outside the time limits dropped from 19% to 11%, the finding that 3% were apparently tested for too brief a period opened the possibility that S&WB staff missed potential positive coliform findings for years by stopping their analyses early.

When asked about the new findings, the utility again pointed to the bench sheets as showing no deviations from the required incubation times. They also claimed the Illuminator’s analysis, performed on documents and interpretations provided by the agency, was “based on incorrect assumptions.”

No bench sheets were provided to the Illuminator to support the S&WB’s claims.

S&WB response to exposed problems

Since the publication earlier this month of the first two parts of “Tapped Out,” the Sewerage & Water Board has reacted in varying degrees of acceptance and defense.

The agency has confirmed the most explosive allegations of skipped stops and falsified data, admitting immediately it happened on their watch and committing to stamp out the practice with stepped-up internal oversight.

In his latest interview, Nelson said the utility would start the use of TrackTik, a software package used in the professional security industry -- including by the utility’s own security force -- to track the movement of guards to ensure they meet expected benchmarks. S&WB sample collectors would have to take timestamped photographs of each sampling stop to prove they visited and the software would record their locations, just as the agency’s current GPS system does.

The software would be used alongside new cameras installed in samplers’ vehicles that will record both interior and exterior video. Nelson also promised to purchase additional software to automate the GPS analysis process, a process he said is currently “time consuming.”

The S&WB’s Nov. 3 letter to the state mentioned additional measures, including wider access to GPS records, quarterly reviews from the S&WB internal audit department, and lab staff periodically accompanying samplers on their routes.

As for the employees found to be skipping addresses, three of the five remain with the utility, while two others — Ross and Percy Randall — had already departed for unrelated reasons earlier this year.

Louis Pierre was removed from sampling duty after the Illuminator and Fox 8 brought our findings to the Sewerage & Water Board. The other two, DeCuir and Walters, continue with their duties.

Nelson has also climbed down somewhat from his prior doubts about the Illuminator’s findings of serious weaknesses in its chlorine sampling procedure. He said earlier the board had previously tested the time required for adequate reactions during chlorine analysis and that New Orleans’ particular water chemistry allowed its samplers to deviate from the standard method for reaction time.

Nelson now says the S&WB lab is currently “running controlled experiments to make sure that whatever time is in the (procedure) is appropriate per our regulators and also addresses the water chemistry.”

The Sewerage & Water Board has also talked to the state health department about the issue and will hand off work on recommending revisions to sampling and lab procedures to CDM Smith, the board’s newly chosen water quality master planning consultant, Nelson said. A board spokesperson said CDM Smith would begin work on the potential procedure revisions even though they do yet have a signed contract.

“If that’s the recommendation from our consultant and LDH, then that’s what we will do.” Nelson said.

Nelson’s boss, S&WB executive director Ghassan Korban, seemed to downplay the widespread nature and impact of the sampling and testing problems in his first public comments on the data falsification at Friday’s S&WB Board of Directors meeting.

“We appreciate the fact it’s been highlighted, but we want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the scale of it,” Korban said. “Where it’s a smaller one, it’s manageable, and we’re going to continue to improve how we do things.”

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