LOS ANGELES — The first thing you may notice when stepping into Eddie Williams’ apartment is his fish.

The long-time Watts resident, who moved to the South Los Angeles neighborhood in the 1980s, loves raising tropical fish and uses tap water in the tank, treating it first.

“When the water is treated, that’s what it looks like, clear,” he said.

But when it comes to drinking water from the tap, Williams said he’s more cautious. He doesn’t trust the water, so he relies on bottled water for drinking and cooking and for his dogs.

“It has an ammonia-like smell sometimes and then one minute, the cold water can show as white as snow, then it will be clear and then the hot water will do the same thing,” he said.

It sparked Williams to take part in a pipe retrofitting effort led by the Watts Labor Community Action Committee to combat clean water insecurity, which involves first collecting water samples from the community to test for any potential contaminants, such as lead or copper, that may be caused by aging pipes.

Lead exposure can harm children, damage the brain and nervous system, cause learning problems.

Danielle Hoague with the nonprofit Better Watts Initiative spearheads the study with UCLA researcher Christian Cabunag and another nonprofit, 501CTHREE.

She said the concern isn’t about the water supply, which comes from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The utility told Spectrum News that the water it provides “to all of its customers, including the community of Watts meets all state and federal drinking water quality standards” and that “LADWP can confirm Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) testing in 2020 determined lead levels in the City of Los Angeles including the Watts area to be well below the federal Action Level of 15 ppb at approx 5 ppb. The next LCR sampling is scheduled for later this year.”

LADWP said it plans to do LCR testing later this year and isn’t responsible for water quality once it’s delivered to a residence, which is where the study is focused according to Hoague.

“A lot of people are not aware that they live in an older home where their pipes could be leaching lead or other contaminants in the water,” she said, noting that it can cost about $10,000 to replace pipes in a home.

Cabunag said the study looks at water samples taken from homes and housing developments built before 1986, when federal law started banning lead pipes.

“We went to various areas in the community that were older and so we were able to recruit actual members of the community to help us be the sample collectors, establish trust in the community and guide us through their own neighborhood,” he said. 

It’s taken weeks, but their team has collected 600 samples so far and currently testing them for any contaminants.

Tim Watkins, president and CEO of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, said residents have expressed concerns over environmental hazards in the area for years.

He said back in 2016, brown water was intermittently coming out of the tap in Watts and while aggressive flushing helped, he started looking closely at potential causes and hopes this effort could be a solution.

“If we kind of get folks on a routine and their systems are either replaced with PEX or the copper pipe. You don’t have to worry about that plumbing for another 20 or 30 years,” he said.

Watkins says while community organizations are still determining funding sources for retrofitting pipes as needed, the water quality test results are expected in the coming weeks.