A decade after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis raised alarms about the dangers of lead in tap water, President Joe Biden is setting a 10-year deadline for U.S. cities to replace lead pipes and make drinking water safe for all Americans.

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.’’

  • VubDapple@lemmy.world
    75·
    2 months ago

    Didn’t the corrupt supreme court just take away Chevron Deference? This needed rule will be disqualified by the captured courts.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      55·
      2 months ago

      Trump will mandate more lead pipes. “They took the sweetness out of the water! Water used to be sweet! It isn’t sweet anymore! We like sweet water, don’t we, folks?”

      • SeaJ@lemm.ee
        30·
        2 months ago

        That honestly would not surprise me if he did allow lead. He thinks asbestos is 100% safe and is only being removed because the mob lobbied for it to get the construction contracts.

        And let’s not forget that Reagan wanted to reverse banning the use of lead and had a study commissioned to show how much money it would save the economy. The person writing the report decided to add in the massive negative health and societal consequences of removing the ban which showed a huge cost to the economy by removing the ban.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      28·
      2 months ago

      It’s expensive and time consuming to replace pipes. Many cities don’t have accurate maps of their pipes either. The actual danger from the existing pipes is extremely low under normal circumstances.

    • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
      13·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        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

        https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/chemical-study-ground-zero-house-flint-water-crisis-180962030/

        • EtherWhack@lemmy.world
          6·
          2 months ago

          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.

          • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Okay but what you need to understand is that the EPA’s allowable level of lead for municipal water supplies is 15 parts per billion (PPB) (which is very low), and the standard doesn’t change based on what materials were used for the pipes. Getting below that threshold is not only achievable but expected even with lead pipes, if you treat the water properly. Flint’s problem was that it didn’t, because the Governor kicked out the people who knew what the fuck they were doing!

            As for your 20/20 hindsight, it’s just that: hindsight. A lot of these pipes date back to the early 1900s or earlier, when not only had plastic not yet been invented, even copper pipe barely existed because they hadn’t figured out how to efficiently manufacture it water-tight yet (source). That means the alternatives to lead pipes were really shitty, such as terracotta or wood, and even if they did manage to use early copper pipes or some other metal, guess what: the joints would all be soldered with lead anyway. Moreover, this was also back when they were so ignorant about the cumulative effects of exposure to lead that they still thought it was a good idea to put it in things like gasoline and paint, so why would they have concerned themselves with the relatively small risk from using it in plumbing?

            If Flint were a sunbelt city built mostly after 1950, then sure, using lead for the pipes would’ve been inexcusable. But Flint was already in decline by then, so most of it is older than that!

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
          4·
          2 months ago

          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

    • Erasmus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      Big business pays off everyone from the top down to ignore that the issue is killing everyone, from the top down.

      • bluGill@fedia.io
        25·
        2 months ago

        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.

      • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        Now I’m kinda curious what happens to all the arsenic you usually get from gold mines. Do you still make skincare products with it?

      • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        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.

          • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            You’ll notice that it says “to keep using” lead in plumbing and like applications, and that the early date cited for corporate pushback against health concerns for lead is 1923. Both of those back my assertion that the root cause of lead pipes is their traditional use, and that only relatively recently did health concerns over lead become major.

          • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

            “relatively recently” was the fucking Roman empire.

            “that health concerns over lead became major”

            But thanks for acknowledging that the use of lead in piping is ancient and has nothing to do with some glut of lead that the big mean corporations decided to poison Our Innocent Society™ with.

              • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                2 months ago

                Because our country has always been ruled by corporations and at one point we had a bunch of lead that companies couldn’t sell at a high enough price so the pushed it in all sorts of applications it should have never been in.

                Just reminding you what your argument was that I objected to. :)

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 months ago

      I always heard that Cook county Illinois has them MANDATED (yes, mandatory for the stretch of pipe that connects the trunk to the house) in the code because only union members have the training to work on them.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 months ago

      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

  • Tiefling IRL@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    44·
    2 months ago

    I expect SCROTUS to overturn this by saying Americans have the right to lead contaminated water, and if they don’t like it they can buy Nestle™ distilled water

    Coincidentally, all the conservative justices will be taking a 6 month long all expenses paid cruise around the world

    • skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de
      16·
      2 months ago

      they can buy Nestle™ distilled water

      Hah, they don’t waste the energy to distill it. They just pump it up from the ground on the other side of Michigan, filter it, and ship it back out. (As well as many other places where Nestle steals water.)

  • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.netEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    My city just did the lead pipe replacement. I did not do my house feed because I can’t swing 16k 6 months after they announced plans to do it (that’s also fully 1/4 of what I originally paid for the whole house 10 years ago, and I’m still making payments on that -I’m in a very low COL area, 40k is really good pay here, I usually make around 30k when I’m able to work-, so that is a SUBSTANTIAL amount of money for me), cuz yeah the city doesn’t cover from the main line into the house… (I do have a reverse osmosis unit, however, because I’ve known about the lead pipes since I bought the place, and all my drinking or cooking water goes through that, so I’m not like consuming lead all the time, just microplastics…)

    When I told them I can’t afford it because I’m unemployed and disabled, they told me I should just take out a loan for it. Yeah, because that’s a great idea when you don’t have money or know when you might… increase your monthly money needs! Brilliant! They then said I’ll have to do it by 2028 or my water will be shut off… cool, that makes me feel a lot better about being fucking broke.

    So like I’m totally on board with replacing them, but holy fuck does it suck for the affected areas. To say nothing of 4 months of constant structure-shaking construction.

    • baru@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 months ago

      In Rotterdam (Netherlands) they’re replacing the sewage system. People get a letter that they’re responsible for the bit on their ground. In practice the city also handled the line to the house.

      I don’t understand why in your area they’d not take care of that bit. With everything mostly open it should be much easier anyway.

      That the city doesn’t promise anything is likely for things like liability and unique/expensive exceptions. But not doing that in practice, so strange.

      • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.netEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        They decided to repair the sidewalks last year, just out of nowhere, and tacked the amount on to your property tax as a special assessment if you didn’t make arrangements of your own to have someone come out and fix it when they wanted it fixed by. Any little crack was enough for them to demand you rip out the whole slab, even though the sidewalks have been in disrepair for over a decade, so they clearly didn’t care before. It was not a fun surprise when the flyer came that basically said “these are the slabs we’ve decided to replace, this is what we are going to charge you, you have to pay the full amount this year.”

        And like, I know sidewalks are sort of a gray area, but I already take care of them (clear leaves, snow, etc) and stuff, I shouldn’t also have to privately pay for them to be maintained on my property when I can’t choose not to have them…

        So like my area is good for a lot of things, but that definitely isn’t one of them. I’m pretty sure because it’s a conservative area, the money is being intentionally funneled into specific companies doing the work, and they can’t charge nearly as much if the city picks up the tab. Probably friends with or bribing the people making decisions…

        • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          2 months ago

          They decided to repair the sidewalks last year, just out of nowhere, and tacked the amount on to your property tax as a special assessment if you didn’t make arrangements of your own to have someone come out and fix it when they wanted it fixed by.

          I’d like to highlight for a moment just how fucking outrageous and unacceptable this actually is. The sidewalks are part of the street. It is ass-backwards to be treating pedestrians as second-class compared to drivers!

          And like, I know sidewalks are sort of a gray area

          Absolutely fucking not. They are 1000000000000000% just as much the responsibility of the government as the rest of the street is. You should be fucking pissed that the city is shirking its responsibility for them and saddling you with it instead!

          • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.netEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            I mean yeah, obviously I’m pissed, that’s why I mentioned it. They decided to replace part of my driveway because it had drainage lines or something (idfk) raked into it, it wasn’t even cracked. I feel it’s a gross breach of the social contract. At the same time a lot of the areas I’ve lived have treated the sidewalks as public property when it suits the city and private when it suits the city.

            There’s just nothing I can actually do about it other than talk to people about it. A lot of people around here are fine with hurting everyone if it hurts the wrong people and boots them out, like me. They just don’t know they think I’m the wrong people, because I don’t “look” like one of their undesirable classes (tho I fit several unrelated to race). I get to hear all their thoughts about what should happen to people like me, and other “undesirables”.

            Nobody even runs against conservatives here. And I mean I would run, but I’m so disgustingly unqualified for public service. I’d probably win just for being an alternative, since we have never had any, but then what?

  • Donebrach@lemmy.world
    20·
    2 months ago

    I cant beleive how political lemmy is. cant we just have our lead pipes in peace and not have to deal with the politics about the made up story that lead pipes are bad ??

  • MobileDecay@lemmy.world
    16·
    2 months ago

    I mean Flint’s problems were caused by switching the water source to save money, not lead pipes. However, replacing lead pipes would be great as well. Most drinking water in America is very safe though. It just tastes like crap.

    • TeoTwawki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 months ago

      if the pipes hadn’t been lead the water switch would not have triggered the issue. we had 3 contributing factors: old lead pipes, water source change, and people in charge that made a decision they should not have been able to make with little to no consequences for doing it.

      Guess which ones out of those 3 we actually have the power to act on.

      • TeoTwawki@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        very much wish more people were on board with wiping out american crapitalism in particular.

        (not a typo)

        Instead its just a cancer spreading to the rest of the globe as people fail to see its just the logical conclusion to thier impossible to sustain forever growth model - given enough time, all capitalism will become this steaming pile.

    • KrankyKong@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      Where are you from? Lead pipes are still a thing most everywhere unfortunately. A relic of the past. They aren’t used for new construction, but they are a problem with older infrastructure.

        • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
          5·
          2 months ago

          Germany banned Lead Pipes in the southern region over a century ago but elsewhere still installed them in homes until 1973 and started regulating lead content in water in 2013, at which time A LOT of infrastructure was removed and replaced.

          Still, many people are not aware of the lead pipe problem. “Drinking water in Germany is generally of high quality, and that’s the message people take with them,” says Karin Gerhardy, of the German Technical and Scientific Association for Gas and Water (DVGW), which works closely with water suppliers and authorities.

        • KrankyKong@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          Well that’s good. I was reading that in the UK, they still have lead pipes, but they don’t repair them. If they have to repair it, they just replace it. I imagine it’s the same here. No one’s laying new lead pipes anywhere that I know of.

    • PresidentCamacho@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 months ago

      Hmmmm, lead water from my bidet, or asbestos toilet paper, which will poison my poor asshole quicker I wonder?

  • harmsy@lemmy.world
    9·
    2 months ago

    On the bright side, if Miami has any lead pipes, they’re about to get a head start on digging them out.