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.”
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)
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.
This is huge…
I don’t get a chance to be happy with Biden often, but this is one of the rare times.
Lead poisoning doesn’t just hurt people’s health, it makes the stupid and belligerent. Like, those are the actual effects of it.
There’s a reason the benefits of banning leaded gas takes decades, it’s not helping those who already have lead poisoning, it’s just waiting for a new generation to grow up without it.
This is like one of those “best time to plant a tree” things.
The benefits are really far away, but doing it is a huge investment in our future as a society.
It’s reassuring to know society overall will be more sane when I’m old.
Sadly, this is barely enough to scratch the surface. We need a lot more money put into this, and it’s not like the presidents before Biden didn’t know about it. They just didn’t even do this much. It’s disgraceful.
Kind of true, but some lead pipes just aren’t an immediate issue. Like asbestos in a building that isn’t disturbed, it doesn’t hurt anyone until it starts to come loose.
Getting the worst of it solved is a good step.
The issue with not dealing with problems immediately, is that people have a tendency to push them down the line over and over until it’s not just immediate, it’s an emergency over a decade ago. Flint still doesn’t have clean water. This should have been a good first step Obama did, like he promised he was going to.
Flint actually does have clean water by most metrics and independent measurements, but public trust is reasonably deeply, deeply shaken.
This, and I don’t mean this as a bad thing, isn’t actually a thing Biden started. It’s a massive disbursal of funds allocated by the infrastructure bill to a program started in 1996 for upgrading water infrastructure and specifically removing lead pipes.
So this is something great to do, and we should keep doing more of it (there’s $12 billion more waiting for future rounds), and we can be slightly happy that we’re not complete fuck ups since we actually started nearly 30 years ago.
We shouldn’t have to live in a world where we need to advertise that the people entrusted to be basically competent at managing our public works are doing their jobs, but here we are, and we should probably advertise this stuff better.
It’s in conjunction with state and local funding as well. Your local municipality might be abke to aquire $4 million to replace the main lines through local bonds, while getting $2 million from the state and another $10 million from this federal program.
republicans now replacing their nonlead pipes with lead pipes
“Tonight on Hannity: Liberals want to take your Lead away!! The Romans used lead everywhere and they were a gigantic empire! Leave it to stupid liberals to think they know better than our ancestors! Take Back Our Lead!”
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Feels like they did that years ago.
Um… You guys are replacing them… Now?
That actually explains quite a lot.
Canada will get to it eventually
It’s especially bad in poor areas
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.
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
I also don’t live in Scotland.
You have no idea.
Also, leaded gas was a thing for, like, most of a century. And it’s still used in avgas.
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 leech lead. The problem Flint had 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.
“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.
Weve replaced all your lead pipes with covid vaccines
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Run fiber with the new pipes too.
Holy shit, we still have lead pipes in places!? I thought those were replaced in the 80’s.
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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.
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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”.
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.
there is normally nothing wrong with well water. I have lab reports on my current well to prove it.
Damn Libruls trying to take away our poisonous lead pipes
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.
How else do you explain there are still people voting for trump?
The US Education System
Same underlying deliberate underfunding problem.
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.
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.
Strategic lead reserve is being tapped… munitions.
Looking at historical data on lead prices, you might be on to something
Infrastructure updates? Fuck yeah!
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?
I don’t want to sound negative, but is this like show money, or an actual effective amount?
I found 1 article that says $28-60 billion to replace all the lead pipes Nationwide, so not enough to get all of them, but it’s a start
https://prospect.org/environment/2023-02-01-lead-water-pipes/
60 billion being the upper estimate is kind of wild to as while it’s an unfathomably large amount of money in terms of US government spending it ain’t even all that much. Baffling that this hasn’t been done before and just fixed the problem.
It’s basically been in process for decades. Pipes in the ground can last 50 years, so replacement of ones put in the ground in the early 80s are due to be replaced now. Each state has a Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program that gets funding from the EPA to replace waterlines. Until recently, the money has been focused on the oldest or most needed projects (some of which are lead), but this recent push has aimed to target specifically all lead lines in the ground.
AFAIK this is an additional $3B. The BIL has already been funding projects for 2 years, and every state is already in the process of identifying all of their lead service lines. Each waterworks is required to at least have an inventory by October.
And that’s in addition to multiple other infrastructure projects from this administration, including ARPA.
Cool, thanks for the answer.
Like, it feels like this should be the kind of money to put a real dent in the problem…but I worry that the corruption of local governments and the associated contractors will probably soak up a lot of this on tangential things (e.g. lead pipes crosses under this really old road at one point; guess we’ll need to tear up the road for 10 miles in each direction of the cross under point and then repave the whole thing, just to be sure)
Edit: modifying example for clarity.
So, that’s not actually corruption or diversion of funds for this problem, that’s basically what you have to do.
A lot of pipes we know are lead, but even more are unknown because they were installed long enough ago that we’re just operating under the assumption that they’re either lead, old style clay, or wood.It’s entirely expected that cities will say “there’s a water main under this road from 1901, so we’re ripping it up and replacing the pipe and road”, because that 1901 is entirely sufficient to say that pipe is shit.
You fight lead pipes by replacing all the old pipes, not by trying to selectively only get the lead ones.
I am not sure if you’ve seen the process through which public funding gets funneled through private companies to implement.
The decision to delegate the task to break one job apart for portions of the same job is a thing. My hometown had separate teams building a highway: one westbound one eastbound. They build things in the wrong place.
I am aware of the process. I’m not sure what that has to do with “sometimes a big project takes a lot of work, and other things also have to happen to do it”.
A lot of projects get a lot bigger and become a lot more work without doing much or other things.
Like a local decision to build a new police station, including shooting range requiring land clearing, versus utilizing that funding for the addressing the homeless population. It wasn’t what the money was originally for, but it got moved around legally enough.
If that’s really how that works, then I can see why the expense has been kicked down the line so long. I worry this allocated money won’t be enough then and that we’re probably talking “show” money vs “getting things done” money.
It’s complicated how it’s funded, but this isn’t the first or last time we’ve allocated funds for this.
https://www.epa.gov/dwsrf
https://www.epa.gov/water-infrastructure/bipartisan-infrastructure-law-srf-funding-statusBasically, in 1996 we setup a program to make it easier for states to get federal money for water improvements, either via long term loans or grants.
The EPA then doles out the money, and it trickles back over time from loan repayments. That’s why with $21 billion in funding they’ve provided $41 billion in investments.
Periodically Congress adds some more money to the fund, but it’s largely the feds turning the massive one time costs of these projects into reasonable long term investments.The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dumped something like $50 billion into that fund, which is a lot more than it usually has, and $15 billion of which is allocated to lead pipes replacement.
After a round of assessments of pipes and applications from different water providers, the EPA put together a $3 billion package of the most high priority projects that can get started this year.
Then Biden signed the order to issue the round of funding according to EPA recommendations.This is more like the first big paycheck after getting a new job than winning the lottery.
You just described using funds to do two things at the same time, which is efficient use of funds.
Yeah, but every dollar spent on repaving roads is a dollar that can’t be spent on lead pipes.
I suppose the example I’ve provided is flawed in a sense though. Probably a better example would be that an intersection gets torn up to replace pipes, but the local town council insists on using his brother’s asphalt company. “They might cost twice as much for the repavong, but I promise, it’ll be higher quality” kinda junk.
Yes, your second example would be corruption because it is being used to intentionally benefit a specific purpose instead of the public.
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.
Welcome to the 1800s.
