Marking the 10th anniversary of the water crisis in Flint, Mich., President Biden on Tuesday gave water utilities 10 more years to replace virtually every lead pipe in the country, imposing the strictest limits to date on a neurotoxin that is particularly dangerous to infants and children.
The president, surrounded by yellow waterworks trucks and speaking to workers at the Department of Public Works field office in Milwaukee, described the new regulation as an overdue environmental justice breakthrough for disadvantaged communities that he said had “borne the brunt of lead poisoning for damn too long.”
The new rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, sets the most aggressive restrictions on lead in drinking water since federal standards were first set decades ago. Utilities will be required to take stock of their lead pipes and replace them over the next 10 years, a policy that four states — Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey and Rhode Island — have in place already.
It replaces less-stringent regulations, adopted during the Trump administration, on lead in drinking water.
“I’m here today to tell you that I finally insisted that it gets prioritized and I’m insisting it get done,” Mr. Biden said on Tuesday.
Beyond the immediate public-health goal of decisively purging lead pipes from drinking-water systems nationwide, the president told the crowd on Tuesday that the labor-intensive work involved would be an important source of jobs across all 50 states.
Vice President Kamala Harris has also called for replacing lead pipes, an issue especially important for underserved communities. And the president’s remarks on Tuesday, in a key battleground state, came with a clear political overtone: that the infrastructure upgrades and development projects he has pushed throughout his presidency also benefit the unions and workers who will see them to completion.
Flanked by local leaders and Michael Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, Mr. Biden also took a swipe at the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, and former President Donald J. Trump, both of whom he accused of stalling progress on environmental policy.
“The president understands the urgency of getting lead out of communities because he and Vice President Harris know that ensuring everyone has access to clean water is a moral imperative,” Mr. Regan said.
Lead poisoning can cause irreversible damage to the nervous system and the brain and poses a particular risk to infants and children, impairing their cognitive development and causing behavioral disorders. Service lines, the lead pipes that bring water into homes, are thought to be a major source of lead exposure for children. (Lead-based paint, sometimes found in older buildings, is another.)
The dangers of lead contamination came into sharp relief in Flint, Mich., a decade ago. A change in the water source in 2014, coupled with inadequate treatment and testing, caused high amounts of lead and Legionella bacteria to leach into the tap water of about 100,000 residents.
The improvements will protect millions of Americans from exposure to lead, the E.P.A. said. The rule will also protect up to 900,000 infants from having low birth weight, and will prevent up to 200,000 I.Q. points lost among children, among other health benefits, the E.P.A. estimated.
“This rule is historic. It’s a game changer,” said Mona Hanna, an associate dean at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine and a local pediatrician whose research helped to expose the Flint water crisis. “We’ve been living too long on our great-grandparents’ infrastructure,” she said.
Favored for their malleability and durability, lead pipes were installed on a major scale from the late 1800s, particularly in large cities. When the plumbing corrodes, however, lead can leach into drinking water. The federal government banned lead pipe in new plumbing in 1986. But tens of millions of Americans are still thought to drink water from old systems with lead-contamination issues.
Digging up and replacing the nation’s lead pipes to address that health risk will be a colossal undertaking. The E.P.A. estimates that water utilities must replace about nine million lead pipes at a total cost of $20 billion to $30 billion over a decade. While much of that cost will fall to the utilities, and most likely their ratepayers, $15 billion in federal funding is also available under the 2021 infrastructure law to help pay for the effort. On Tuesday, the E.P.A. announced $2.6 billion in new funding to support lead pipe replacement.
The rule was expected to face opposition from some utilities, which have cited rising costs, supply-chain problems, labor shortages and incomplete or missing building records as obstacles to the rapid replacement of lead pipes. Earlier this year, the group joined chemical companies to sue over rules requiring the cleanup of so-called forever chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks.
“What’s the government for if it can’t protect the public health?” Biden asked the crowd on Tuesday, including some workers who will oversee the removal of pipes themselves.
The new rule, which updates regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act, also lowers the allowable amount of lead in the meantime to 10 parts per billion, from the current 15 parts per billion. If the water supply repeatedly exceeds the new threshold, utilities must make water filters available. Some public-health advocates had called for a lower standard of between zero and five parts per billion.
The rule also does not require utilities to pay for the portion of lead lines that are on private property, including within a home. E.P.A. officials have expressed concerns that such a requirement would go beyond the agency’s legal authority.
However, environmental groups say that such an omission would shift the onus onto lower-income homeowners who may be unable to afford lead-pipe removal. Research has shown that Black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately more likely to receive contaminated water through a lead pipe.
People “who for many decades have already been disadvantaged, who live in communities that have lead pipes, lead paint, dirty air, and have suffered extra burdens,” could get left behind, said Erik D. Olson, the senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Nevertheless, he added, the policy is a big step forward.
The new rule allows some utilities with a particularly large number of lead service lines to go beyond the 10-year deadline. Under a draft version of the rule, Chicago, which has the most lead pipes in the nation, would have gotten as long as 50 years to remove them all. The final rule promises to shorten that timeline significantly.
Lead scares continue to pop up across the country. Earlier this year, testing in Syracuse, N.Y., found lead levels in the drinking water of some homes at many times the federal limit. Syracuse now plans to use state and federal financing to start replacing the approximately 14,000 service lines in the city, which expects to get to 2,400 of them next year.
“We’d been told for decades that our water was safe,” said Oceanna Fair, a retired nurse who found out a month ago that her home in Syracuse is serviced by lead pipes. Concerned for her grandchildren, whom she cares for during the day, she is now getting filters installed in her home.
She also looked into the cost of getting her pipes replaced: $10,000. “Most people can’t afford that,” she said. “We need help to ensure everyone gets safe and clean water.”
The post Biden Requires Lead Drinking-Water Pipes to be Replaced Nationwide appeared first on New York Times.
