The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.
“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.
That seems implausible. Lead pipes are common pretty much everywhere and it’s usually not a problem due to a coating on the pipes.
It’s just an issue in the US because there’s been a few notable examples of that coating being damaged and causing contamination, which creates political will to do the replacements that everyone is doing at an accelerated pace.
Most places, in the US or not, just replace them during routine maintenance. The UK and Germany should have theirs replaced by 2100, if nothing comes up to make them accelerate the process.
The US hasn’t been good about replacing pipes in general, there’s even a good amount that aren’t even documented in some areas.
Didn’t they pull out some wooden pipes somewhere in the US within the last couple years? I remember seeing an article about it.
I believe someone found wood pipes still in use, it may have been flint, since they got a complete overhaul of their pipes.
30 years ago Boston was trying to map their pre revolutionary war wood pipes. I would expect flint was built with metal pipes, as that area is mostly known for iron.
Iron was further north, Michigan was a huge lumber state.
This year Germany passed a law to completely remove all lead pipes until January 2026.
But the allowed levels of lead in drinking water have already been lowered so much since 2013 (10 microgram per liter, this has been lowered again since to 5 microgram per liter) that any water that passed through a lead pipe cannot realistically fulfill the requirements, thus there are only extremely few households left with any lead in their pipes.
Coating the pipes is not a way out of this, since Germany has expressly forbidden this as a way to renovate.
Oh, I’m not saying we should coat the pipes, I’m saying that it’s not a massive continuous crisis is because there is a coating on the pipes created by the water treatment.
We definitely should replace all of them because that coating is too easy to damage and there’s no reason to take the risk, but “lead pipes” is unlikely to be a US specific health issue like was originally insinuated.
With this I agree wholeheartedly, the biggest factors for differences between the rest of the developed world and the US, including USians being considered more agressive, less intelligent, less patient and with less empathy are definitely located in different fields.
Imho. culturally religiosity, difference in education, worldlyness and levels of societal cohesion are the biggest factors, along with good old prejudice against the militarily superior.