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apnews.com

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.’’

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      29·
      1 month 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·
      1 month 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·
        1 month 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·
          1 month 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·
            1 month 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·
          1 month 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·
      1 month 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·
        1 month 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.

          • localhost443@discuss.tchncs.de
            9·
            1 month ago

            You are so confident in refuting so much peer reviewed research that disproves what you’re saying. I’m all for ‘fuck the corporations’ on most things, but this is Facebook level nonsense.

              • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMEnglish
                4·
                1 month ago

                Leaded gasoline was peer reviewed and approved.

                Then please provide a source. Failing that, your comment will be removed for violating rule 8.

                  • Blackbeard@lemmy.worldMEnglish
                    2·
                    1 month ago

                    A link to a historical analysis of lead is insufficient for substantiating an assertion that peer reviewed studies confirmed its safety a priori. It was “approved” by fossil fuel companies insofar as it was useful in providing anti-knocking protection in primitive internal combustion engines, but the dangers of tetra-ethyl lead were known within years of its widespread introduction into gasoline. Ergo it was not “peer reviewed and approved” in the sense you’re suggesting.

                    Your comment wasn’t removed before, but it is now.

      • chaosCruiser@futurology.todayEnglish
        8·
        1 month 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·
        1 month 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·
            1 month 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·
            1 month 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·
                1 month 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. :)

                  • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    2·
                    1 month ago

                    Yes and it’s a correct statement. The reason we used lead pipes instead of steel or iron or even wood is solely due to cost and corporate lobbying downplaying the dangers we have known about for 2000.

                    Ah yes, corporate lobbying in pre-market feudal Europe.

                    Romans didn’t use lead for pipes, by the way, not until the very end of the empire,

                    Jesus fucking Christ. It’s almost impressive how insistent you are on getting basic facts wrong.

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 month 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·
      1 month 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