President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
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The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
Like, to actually do it? Or for companies to pocket the money and give up on it soon after, like with the infrastructure upgrade we should already have?
“Buh muh lead!1 gubment ruinin muh watuh!”
Waiting for the conspiracy videos where people are claiming they’are adding 4G modules to your pipes.
That would actually be really convenient and vastly improve cell coverage. Can they please do that?
Run fiber with the new pipes too.
Weve replaced all your lead pipes with covid vaccines
Damn Libruls trying to take away our poisonous lead pipes
Holy shit, we still have lead pipes in places!? I thought those were replaced in the 80’s.
Fun little fact that will probably make perfect sense: Florida has more lead service pipes than any state in the nation. US News
Wasn’t lead also linked to paranoia, and the likelihood to believe conspiracy theories?
It’s proven to damage the brain, cause mental illness, and increase aggession and overall criminal behavior, so… Yes!
So maybe in the coming decades, Florida won’t be the laughingstock of the nation anymore. Bad news for Alabama.
Bad news for any place that has to take in Floridian refugees
I would say they could just count on evolving gills for when climate change sinks their state, but they don’t believe in that either.
Nope, they’re actually still pretty common across the industrialized world. It’s not just a US thing.
We recognized the potential for harm decades ago, but for the most part it’s not a critical issue due to some minutiae of how lead pipes work in practice.
Incidents like Flint made it clear that the consequences of messing up that minutiae are big enough that we really, really shouldn’t be relying on them.
So this isn’t billions of dollars in emergency response, it’s billions of dollars in preventative maintenance, which is even better. 😊
We stopped using lead in the 80s - the existing pipes are mostly still there and working just fine. If you are in a building or city built before 1985 assume there is lead in the plumbing someplace and take action. The more important thing you can do is let drinking water run for a minute before drinking (or install a RO drinking water system that will remove lead - regular filters will not - RO is most common of that that will).
With a little care (much of it chemistry - meaning your water department - not much lead will leach from your pipes and you are okay. Okay should not be confused with good, 0 lead is what you want. However it isn’t feasible to replace all pipes in a day and so step one is doing as little damage as possible, then we reduce even that.
install a RO drinking water
People will get one for their whole house, which is great unless your home has leaded pipes…
It sounds like something people would think of, but they often don’t.
If your house has leaded pipes, you can get a small RO either by your sink, or before the hose that connects to your fridge is a better plan. It doesn’t have to be by your fridge, it can be where the hose meets pipe which is usually out of the way.
The real solution is replacing the piping, but that shits gets expensive.
A small RO to your fridge is doable even when renting, and if you get tests done and it’s high, some landlords would pay it just to show they’re not liable and did something to address the issue if it’s high.
A whole house ro filter is evpensive, so I doubt most will install one vs a drinking water system. Most plumbers won’t know about a whole house system much less sell one.
unless you live in an area where the water is so bad your showers dosen’t get you clean. Then you can get one - but you should have one.
Because of urban sprawl lots of homes in cities have wells still.
House built in the 40s before city water had expanded can still be on a well, and septic tanks.
Like lead pipes it’s something that just never got updated.
Although because of the risk of old septic tanks collapsing, some cities have programs where if you hook up the to city services for switching and filling in the septic can get spread over like 20-30 years as an add on to your water bill.
It’s worse than you think.
You know those old ill maintained public schools?
The combination of not just old lead pipes, but being shut down for extended periods mean lots of children are getting lead poisoning at school.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/protecting-children-lead-exposure-schools-and-child-care-facilities
So even if your house and local water is fine, your kids might be getting dosed up with lead at a young age, which is when it’s most impactful.
Lead is a serious problem that lots of people assume was fixed when we took it out of gas. It helped, but there’s still lots of lead around.
It’s going to be one of those things future generations look back on and go “no wonder they were so fucking crazy”.
Welcome to the 1800s.
Um… You guys are replacing them… Now?
That actually explains quite a lot.
It’s especially bad in poor areas
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19590124/
Ignorance is bliss.
Yeah, I don’t live in the EU.
Scotland still has lead pipes too. Hardly a water quality utopia compared to the EU or US.
https://www.scottishwater.co.uk/en/Your-Home/Your-Water/Lead-and-Your-Water
You have no idea.
Also, leaded gas was a thing for, like, most of a century. And it’s still used in avgas.
I think it’d be interesting to look at a worldwide map of lead pipes. Not that such a map can even necessarily exist; here in Liège, BE, the director of the water distribution company got fired a couple years ago for severely underreporting the amount of lead pipes left in the network. I can personally attest that lead pipes are still common in the nearby housing.
Lead pipes, like asbestos, were used so liberally that they are basically impossible to fully get rid of without spending a very significant portion of the GDP on it. So we just wait until we have to fully rebuild the street to replace the pipes.
Canada will get to it eventually
Infrastructure updates? Fuck yeah!
Jesus fucking Christ we are in an election year. How the FUCK are lead pipes a thing to begin with, let alone what you’d roll with on policy? Aren’t the boomers dead for the most part? Can we do something about wage stagnation or the absurd state of home ownership or OBNOXIOUS FUCKING RENT???!??!? I really am fucking sick of this hick ass bullshit backwater country. The only reason we mean shit to anyone is because they fuck us on taxes to fund a bloated ass military, and in turn line corpos pockets. Fuck me I’m done. Going to go live off the land (aka going to go starve to death like an idiot because fuck if I know anything about farming)
Geez someone’s been drinking lead pipe water
I’m confused, are you saying we shouldnt be removing lead pipes which have been in use for nearly 40 years minimum?
They are only still in use because “they are so covered in minerals it’s probably fine” ignoring the fact that even a minuscule amount of lead leads to problems in both children and adults.
Could they focus on other things? Sure. But there’s always going to be “something more important than this” so it’s either pick something, or do nothing. Which option would you like?
The US still has lead pipes for drinking water??? Wtf.
Yes. 😕 They were originally coated on the interior so there wasn’t direct exposure of the lead to the water. But lack of funding (in some cases deliberate, see Flint, MI) for maintenance leads to the coating wearing away, resulting in contamination of the water. There’s plenty of Starving The Beast going on with things like this (also see bridges collapsing and public schools failing) by conservatives to try and grift on replacing public infrastructure with private ownership. Pretty disgusting.
Purely pedantically: the coating isn’t applied to the pipes, it forms there from a reaction between the water and the pipe material.
It’s not something that maintained by directly putting it on the pipes, but by managing the composition of the water supply, which they can’t not do.http://www.sedimentaryores.net/Pipe Scales/Lead Solubility.html
The issue in Flint wasn’t that they cut maintenance funding, but that they cut water supply funding and so the utility switched from Detroit water (fine, stable and nice to pipes) to local river water which had a different acidity which destroyed the coating.
I agree with all your conclusions, just wanted to let you know why we’re not constantly digging up pipes to fix the coating. 😊
Appreciate the clarification/correction.
It’s actually not uncommon in industrialized countries, and a lot of countries have similar active projects to phase them out. Flint was a wake-up call to places outside the US as well, so everyone has been accelerating their efforts, since there’s a good example of how bad a “normal” error can make things.
Other countries don’t often have to advertise that their governments are doing their jobs as much as the US has, since they don’t have as much “all public spending is waste” rhetoric.
How else do you explain there are still people voting for trump?
The US Education System
Same underlying deliberate underfunding problem.
It’s OK, they’re only in places like Flint which is full of black people that nobody cares about, or Florida where everyone is already too brain damaged for anybody to really notice the difference.
And by lead pipe replacement I mean we’re replacing anti protester cop’s batons with lead pipes
It’ll be interesting to see all these lead pipes replaced, and watch the amount of religious people take a nosedive afterwards.
It will have an effect in decades. The people that got affected are unlikely to get better. The biggest damage is being exposed to lead during childhood.
I think we’re starting to see this effect from the lead we removed throughout the 80s, everything from crime to religion has been falling for the past 2 decades.
I don’t think it was all lead, but I think it’s playing a decent part.
Yeah, but decades is a blink of the eye, as these things are measured. And honestly, I don’t think a fair amount of Congress has even one more decade left in them.
I doubt it. While lead isn’t ideal for delivering water, it’s not as bad as you think. Once scale builds up in the pipe it didn’t lag lead. The problem Flint has is they switched water sources and destroyed the scale so it went back to bare lead.
I wouldn’t install new lead pipes but my point is that many old lead ones are probably fine. Ones that aren’t fine so need to be replace though.
I’ve seen this comment before. My counter: can you assure me that, for example, a new homeowner that doesn’t know better won’t disturb the scale? They won’t have a leaky faucet and mess with the pipes? Or something like Flint doesn’t happen ever again where necessary infrastructure changes necessitate disturbing the scale?
This ‘solution’ only ‘works’ if you leave it completely alone and never touch it. So don’t get new appliances, never have a plumber fix some things, never update that water main that’s gonna break down any time now. It’s a very short sighted ‘solution’ to the problem. I’d hazard it’s a good argument for triage. Cities that need new infrastructure anyway go first kind of thing. But fobbing it off as ‘its fine’ isn’t ok.
I don’t think they were saying that we shouldn’t replace them, but rather that it’s unlikely to have a marked impact on things like religious adherence.
For the most part, the concerning lead is in the municipal portion of the water supply, not in the areas a homeowner can disturb. (Not all of course, but it was largely phased out of home construction in the 30s). Replacing appliances or having a plumber work aren’t going to cause issues, and since the 80s having a service line or municipal water main break is a quick way to get non-lead installed.
Lead doesn’t contaminate water super fast, the water needs to be in contact with it for a bit before concentrations start to rise to immediately actionable levels. That’s why the biggest source of concern for contamination are municipal water mains and home service lines: water doesn’t flow as quickly so it can accumulate more contamination, and there’s a larger volume making it harder to flush the contaminated water. (If you have lead household plumbing, letting the water run for a minute or two will reduce the concentration below actionable levels. You can’t do that if the contamination is from the water main)You are entirely correct that pipe scale is not a “solution”.
There’s no safe concentration of lead, which is why we need to replace all the pipes, a process that started in the 80s. Usually doing it as part of routine maintenance is fine because it’s not usually an emergency. The original plan to be done by the 2060s made a lot of assumptions about infrastructure maintenance being done on time, and people not making short sighted dumbfuck choices like the Flint emergency financial manager.So we need to fix it as quickly as is reasonable, but we don’t need to freak out over it, and we probably won’t really see many marked changes like we did with leaded gas, just “no huge catastrophe”, and average water lead levels dropping from 3 parts per billion to 1 or less.
I don’t see how a homeowner could affect pipes upstream like that. I have been under the assumption they are talking about replacing city/count/state pipes and not pipes that landowners are responsible for. The article doesn’t state either way.
And there is no guarantee shit won’t get fucked up. But actually listening to people when they say what you want to do will fuck up the pipes sure helps. So, the opposite of what Flint did.
The first time I saw the argument, it was in relation to pipes in one’s home and I’m not an expert on plumbing. I just felt the idea of “leave it alone and it’ll be fine” is a really bad one and that it should be pushed back. I did acknowledge municipal pipes a bit, but my argument could use refinement.
IDK how much can even be done with $3 billion. It sounds like a drop in the bucket.
More than 0, and that’s the important part.
I don’t know how good this is, so I’ll say it’s bad.
People still have lead pipes? That would actually explain a lot…
They’re all sealed theoretically, but shit goes wrong like in Flint, still having the lead pipes with sealers is theoretically not dangerous but is considered a bit of a ticking time bomb.
And what did he do for the last 3.5 years? Not a damned thing, buying more votes it seems.
My city got rid of lead pipes decades ago, and now I’m mad other cities are getting free money to replace them.
(This post is about student loans)
Oh noes, others get help now while I did not? I hate everybody
I hate scientists because they figured out the cure for cancer before my meemaw died. All my homies hate scientists. It probably makes you gay anyway.
Hopefully lots of work to be done in conservative areas.
Looks like it outside of Cali and the north east, assuming they don’t fight it like they fight everything anyone on the left tries to do for them.
