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.’’
I mean good, but also Jesus Christ how is this even an issue in the states?
Lead has many amazing properteis in metalurgy.
floride is NOT toxic in normal quantities. That is a myth you hear from the same people who spread anti vax garbage.
Lead is traditionally used in piping, it was only relatively recently that health concerns over lead became major. Not some “CORPORATIONS WERE PUSHING BIG LEAD” conspiracy.
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-lead-pipes-20160204-story.html
“They did everything that becomes known as the signature of the tobacco industry,” said Rosner, who has aided anti-lead lawsuits and co-wrote the 2013 book “Lead Wars.” “In fact, they were really pioneered by the lead industries. … The [Lead Industries Assn.] can take credit for creating this giant doubt industry.”
Along with the other reasons, people were relatively content with the excuse that the layer of buildup within the pipes would protect from the lead.
People forget that the proximate cause of the lead contamination in Flint wasn’t the pipes themselves (which had been in use, relatively safely, for decades), but instead that locals in charge of the water system got forcibly replaced with an emergency manager appointed by the (Republican) governor, who ordered the system to be switched from sourcing water from Detroit (Lake Huron) to the Flint River to save money and failed to treat it with the usual corrosion-control additives that Detroit had been using.
To blame the pipes is to let the Republicans off the hook for their miserliness, incompetence and systemic racism.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know
https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2016/01/epa_official_says_he_was.html
Sure they shouldn’t be let off the hook (they probably will be, have been though), but this was just a workaround to mitigate the lead in pipes. It was a good idea for a temporary fix
Those water mains always needed to be replaced and we were making zero progress on that
The argument isn’t just about acute or symptomatic exposure, but any exposure.
Lead can bioaccumulate within our bodies and while we may not yet know to what extent of health issues it can pose, we do know it is a neurotoxic substance.
What you are arguing is the equivalence of putting all of the blame on a construction team for lead/asbestos exposure when neither should have been used in the beginning. Yes, Flint should have been handled better, but the pipes also shouldn’t have been leaded in the first place.
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
