The Biden administration demands replacement of lead pipes within ten years

The Biden administration is proposing new restrictions that would require the removal of virtually all lead water pipes across the country in an effort to prevent another public health catastrophe like the one that struck Flint, Mich.

Thursday’s Environmental Protection Agency proposal would impose the strictest limits on lead in drinking water since federal standards were first established 30 years ago. It would affect about nine million pipelines that wind through communities across the country.

“This is the strongest guidance rule the nation has ever seen,” Radhika Fox, the EPA’s assistant administrator for water, said in an interview. “This is historic progress.”

Digging up and replacing lead pipes from coast to coast is no small undertaking. The EPA estimates the price at $20 to $30 billion over ten years. The rule would require the nation’s utilities — and most likely their ratepayers — to absorb the bulk of those costs, but $15 billion is available from the 2021 infrastructure bill to help them pay for it.

Tom Dobbins, the CEO of the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, said his members need both technical assistance and more financial assistance from the federal government to comply with the proposed regulations. He urged the EPA to “focus on providing drinking water systems with the resources and tools necessary to achieve this ambitious goal, and work to remove the real barriers that exist for many utilities.”

In a statement, the association said it has repeatedly drawn attention to a long list of obstacles that make it difficult to replace lead pipes, including rising costs, supply chain issues, labor shortages and incomplete or missing construction documents.

Lead is a neurotoxin that can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system and brain. It poses a particular danger to infants and children and can affect their cognitive development, cause behavioral disturbances and lead to lower IQ. From the country’s earliest days, lead was used to make pipes to transport water to homes and businesses. But if the pipes corrode, lead can end up in the drinking water.

The problem attracted national attention in Flint in 2014, when a change in water source and inadequate treatment and testing caused significant lead contamination. Lead and legionella bacteria leached into the tap water of approximately 100,000 residents between 2014 and 2015.

Lead levels in drinking water also rose dramatically in 2019 in Newark, where Yvette Jordan is a high school teacher. “Forty percent of our students have special needs,” she said. “We see all these effects every day in our classroom.”

The EPA estimates that its proposal would generate $9.8 billion to $34.8 billion in annual economic benefits in the form of reduced cognitive impairment and fewer health disorders, especially in children.

The proposal would not eliminate the allowable amount of lead in drinking water. Instead, the Biden administration wants to reduce the allowable amount from the current 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion.

That’s disappointing to many public health advocates, who have called for a standard between zero and five parts per billion. Scientists agree that this is so no safe lead level in drinking water.

“We have failed generations of children by not eliminating lead,” said Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Michigan pediatrician whose research helped expose the 2014 Flint water crisis. “If you have a poison that has no safe levels in our drinking water makes it impossible to ensure that our nation’s future is successful.”

She said she was frustrated that the permitted level was not closer to zero, but said lowering it would be “a good thing”.

“Finally having a rule requiring the removal of lead pipes is exactly what the government should be doing,” said Dr. Hanna-Attisha.

The proposal, which would update regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1991, is the strongest part of that a push on multiple fronts from President Biden to stop lead exposure. Mr. Biden has made it a central part of his administration’s efforts to address racial health disparities in the United States. Children in communities of color and in low-income urban areas are more likely to be exposed to lead from paint and aging water systems than their counterparts in areas with new housing and infrastructure.

“The Vice President and I have committed to replacing every single service line in every part of the country over the next decade, using – not most, all – we’re using every tool at our disposal to get it done,” Mr. Biden said in February speech about its leading reduction initiatives.

In the wake of the Flint crisis, the Trump administration required schools and daycares to test for lead in their drinking water and ordered water utilities to conduct inventories of their lead pipes and publicly report their locations. But the government also doubled the amount of time it took for utilities to replace lead pipes, to 30 years.

Under the EPA’s proposal announced Thursday, utilities would be required to remove lead pipes at a rate of 10 percent per year for the next 10 years. They should also take inventories of all their lead pipes.

Although the rule forces water utilities to bear the costs of the undertaking, there is a major loophole: They do not have to pay to replace the smaller portion of lead pipes located on private property.

Federal officials made access to the infrastructure law’s $15 billion for lead pipe replacement conditional on utilities replacing the entire lead water pipe, including portions on private property.

Ms. Fox said states and municipalities have the power to force local water utilities to bear the full cost of replacing lead pipes, including those on private property. She pointed to Newark and Washington DC as cities that had already done so. In 2004, there was a jump in lead levels in the water Washington was followed by a fourfold increase in lead levels in the blood of some children there.

The EPA will accept public comments on the proposal for 60 days and could make changes to it before it becomes final sometime next year.