A decade after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis raised alarms about the continuing dangers of lead in tap water, President Joe Biden is setting a 10-year deadline for cities across the nation to replace their lead pipes, finalizing an aggressive approach aimed at ensuring that drinking water is safe for all Americans.
Biden is expected to announce the final Environmental Protection Agency rule Tuesday in the swing state of Wisconsin during the final month of a tight presidential campaign. The announcement highlights an issue — safe drinking water — that Kamala Harris has prioritized as vice president and during her presidential campaign. The new rule supplants a looser standard set by former President Donald Trump’s administration that did not include a universal requirement to replace lead pipes.
Biden and Harris believe it’s “a moral imperative” to ensure that everyone has access to clean drinking water, EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters Monday. “We know that over 9 million legacy lead pipes continue to deliver water to homes across our country. But the science has been clear for decades: There is no safe level of lead in our drinking water.’’
A lot of places have done a lot to replace these over the years but it’s expensive and these are not (until now) tracked. Anywhere.
I also think this was a casualty of our federal system - any previous attempt at systematically replacing these was probably ignored as an unfounded mandate from the feds for work that is local.
While I remember there was a big effort to replace lead water lines in Boston a couple decades ago, I think that was just the mains. You were expected to replace water lines to your house at your own expense. I don’t remember whether there was any effort to enforce it but the MWRA has a huge map of areas that still need to be remediated
Here’s a quick overview of the history that seems so American
Edit to add: MWRA has widespread lead monitoring and carefully adjusts water chemistry to avoid lead leaching out of pipes. They’ve had this in an annual report since well before Flint decided that wasn’t important