GLENDALE, Colo. — A high ranking official for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment acknowledged failures within his department in response to reports that a chemist manipulated water testing data for years.
In an interview Friday, CDPHE Chief Medical Officer Ned Calonge said leadership ultimately takes responsibility for what happened, adding that there is no risk to the public.
“I want the folks whose water supplies were impacted to know that we have no evidence of imminent health risk, and we are working to bring those water systems into compliance,” he said.
Calonge said the main reason for not releasing this information to the public is that it could have caused unnecessary panic about the safety of their water.
“I think, before understanding the scope and scale of what had happened, providing information could have, I believe — would have — led to undue concern for the people of Colorado feeling that their water is not safe without a measure of imminent risk,” he said.
Denver Investigates was the first to obtain and report on a third-party review that stated CDPHE learned about this chemist altering data in December 2023, but its actions were delayed due to communication breakdowns, a “culture of fear” within the agency and a reluctance to report issues.
Calonge said he’s hoping employees feel empowered to bring issues forward from now on.
“It’s a very serious accusation. The report as a whole has a lot of information that we can act on to improve things at the lab, and this is one of them,” he said.
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That third-party report was done by Transformation Point, LLC after it conducted interviews with 22 individuals over the course of 13 hours. It found that inadequate oversight, outdated equipment and technology, resource constraints and staffing issues, and communication and cultural challenges all factored into the data manipulation and the delay in its reporting.
It also outlined a timeline showing that the issue was discovered in December 2023, but no action was taken until the following February when the chemist was placed on leave. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wasn’t informed until April and later revoked some of the lab’s certifications for testing.
Calonge confirmed that the chemist was put on administrative leave in February and that she would have been fired had she not decided to resign in May.
“We would terminate any person who neglected standard quality control procedures,” he said. “This is a big lapse in performance.”
CDPHE tests water from across Colorado that is provided to homes in the state’s water districts. The chemist in question was manipulating data related to testing for metals such as copper, chromium and barium. Calonge said that 69 water systems were potentially impacted by the manipulated tests.
He added that CDPHE handles less than 3% of the state’s water systems for these tests. There are more than 2,400 systems in the state.
New documents obtained through an open records request showed that the chemist tested 8,570 samples between 2020 and 2024, including 1,023 drinking water samples.
Letters between CDPHE and the EPA provided more detail into the lack of communication and delays in notification. One letter from the EPA dated Sept. 13 states that CDPHE learned of the data manipulation on Dec. 29, 2023, but the lab director wasn’t notified until Feb. 1.
It adds that the quality assurance coordinator and a chemistry program manager urged the lab director to notify the EPA, but delays in notifying CDPHE’s executive director extended the process and CDPHE did not notify the EPA ahead of a scheduled audit in April.
In the end, Calonge said he would have preferred this information to come out from his office than in the media, and that they are working to improve their safeguards moving forward.
"I want to point out that laboratory directors don't think about their employees falsifying results, so we were surprised," he said. "It's not something I would have expected, especially knowing the people who work at the laboratory, but having a high level of checks and balances that, going forward, should someone take this route again, we can catch it, is really important."
