Elevated lead levels persist throughout the state

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

A Mariner East 2 pipeline construction site is shown off Valley Road near Media, Pa., on Aug. 22. The site is close to where Sunoco is digging up a section of the pipeline after discovering a coating issue that needed to be fixed.

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Something in the water?

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

A Mariner East 2 pipeline construction site is shown off Valley Road near Media, Pa. The site is close to where Sunoco was digging up a section of the pipeline after discovering a coating issue that needed to be fixed.

• Sunoco Pipeline parent Energy Transfer says it will resume drilling where prior Mariner East 2 construction damaged more than a dozen private wells in Chester County, preventing residents from drinking or bathing using their private well water — permanently, in some cases. Work could restart as soon as March 6. Susan Phillips has more for StateImpact Pennsylvania.

• Water testing in Lancaster County has turned up another school with elevated lead levels. LNP has the full story here.

• Lead in water gets a lot of attention, but paint is the leading source of contamination in certain areas. That’s the contention in Allegheny County, which has an abatement program — as do many communities — targeting low-income families with young children. The program isn’t meeting its goals, which officials blame on the scarcity of qualified contractors. In the meantime, families await relief while witnessing high lead levels in their children’s blood. PublicSource spoke to some of them for this story.

Best of the rest

Bastiaan Slabbers / WHYY

Lurline Jones, girls basketball coach, in her Mt. Airy home.

• Lurline Jones’s current gig coaching girls basketball at Martin Luther King High School in Philadelphia is, Avi Wolfman-Arent writes in this profile of Jones for WHYY, “about as far as you can get from the prep sports spotlight.” Jones knew it well, winning 647 games and 12 city championships during a 33-year career at University City High School in West Philly. How she got to where she is now, it turns out, is intertwined with her role in the civil rights movement.

• Pennsylvania’s supposed to save money by reducing the state’s prison population and shuttering facilities. But the DOC officials say they’re not planning any closures next year because they need to restore stability after a rough 2018, WHYY’s Bobby Allyn reports. More here on DOC’s budget talks with state lawmakers.

• Pennsylvania has more than 400 open missing person cases, the 10th-most in the nation. The stats are part of a report produced earlier this month to coincide with National Missing Persons Day, which is meant to raise awareness of the issue. PennLive’s Janet Pickel summarizes the Pa.-relevant information and delves into some of the cases in this post.