Water Agency Fired Manager Who Warned of D.C. Lead

Erik Olson, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said yesterday that although the EPA began allowing invalidation of samples in 2000, the practice is "questionable."

Invalidation is "invoked when the system is close to the limit as one additional way to game the system," Olson said. In any case, Olson added, the District's results from 2000-001 "should have slapped [WASA] in the face."

Bhat said she told Boateng in 2001 that "we were lucky," a reference to WASA's narrowly avoiding the EPA action level of 10 percent.

The next year, WASA tested 53 homes. By March 2002, after 39 homes were tested and 17 were found to exceed the federal lead limit, Bhat sent an e-mail to Boateng stating that WASA would exceed the 10 percent action level.

In July 2002, she said she sent a similar e-mail to Rizzo at the EPA regional office in Philadelphia. Also that month, Bhat talked about the problem during a staff meeting at which Boateng was present, according to minutes from the meeting.

For his part, Boateng gave Bhat several negative performance reviews and complained that she had repeatedly contacted the EPA before WASA officials had a chance to examine the data properly.

He explained his decision to fire Bhat in a statement to an investigator from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration: "The primary reasons for my promoting her termination was a lack of teamwork and her aggressive behavior. Contacting individuals outside the agency, specifically the EPA, without my prior knowledge, was also a part of my rationale."

Rizzo, the EPA official, declined to comment through a spokesman.

In August 2002, Marcotte's report to the EPA confirmed Bhat's earlier conclusion: that more than 10 percent of the homes exceeded the lead limit.

On the same day as the 2001-02 report was forwarded to the EPA, Boateng recommended that Bhat be fired, Bhat and her attorney said. In March, she was terminated.

"The difference was Ms. Bhat being proactive and them being reactive," Schwartz said. WASA officials, the lawyer said, "either were lying about when they knew of the problem or they were just flat not paying attention."