The EPA issued a closing rule requiring water techniques to exchange all lead pipes inside 10 years. Water advocates lauded the rule as a public well being victory, however say there’s a lot work to be finished.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
There are some 9 million houses throughout the U.S. getting water by lead pipes.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
And now the Environmental Safety Company says these pipes want to return out.
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MICHAEL REGAN: The science has been clear for many years. There isn’t any secure degree of lead in our consuming water.
MARTÍNEZ: That is EPA administrator Michael Regan. He says lead is dangerous, particularly to kids.
FADEL: NPR’s Pien Huang has been following this story, and she or he joins us now. Hello, Pien.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Hey, Leila.
FADEL: OK, so I received to confess – I used to be form of stunned this wasn’t already a rule. What’s the EPCA saying about it?
HUANG: Yeah, you’d assume, proper? I imply, it is positively one thing…
FADEL: Yeah.
HUANG: …That water advocates have been combating for for a lot of, a few years now. And the principle factor about this rule is that for the primary time on the federal degree, it requires most water techniques to exchange all their lead pipes inside 10 years. Now, Leila, this can be a downside with a protracted historical past, nevertheless it received quite a lot of consideration 10 years in the past with the Flint water disaster in Michigan. And there, there was a change within the water chemistry that brought on outdated pipes to leach excessive quantities of lead into the consuming water. And since then, some cities and states have really already been swapping out these lead pipes for copper.
FADEL: Proper. It was clear even again then that it wasn’t only a downside in Flint. Are there components of the nation which can be extra prone to depend on lead pipes?
HUANG: Yeah, locations with houses that have been constructed earlier than 1986. That is the yr that Congress banned lead pipes, however the ones that have been already within the floor have been allowed to remain there – till now. So there are lead pipes in each state, however some have greater than others. These embody Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York and New Jersey. All of these states have over half 1,000,000 lead pipes.
FADEL: Wow. In order that’s quite a lot of pipes. They’ll have to exchange all these in 10 years?
HUANG: Yeah. It’s quite a lot of pipes. And for essentially the most half, they should, however there are some attention-grabbing exceptions. So Chicago, as an illustration, has essentially the most lead pipes out of any metropolis – round 400,000 in Chicago alone – and that is as a result of they really required lead pipes there till they have been banned. So when this rule was first proposed, Chicago received a fairly large exemption – one thing like 40-50 years to exchange all their pipes, ‘trigger they only had too a lot of them. And quite a lot of advocates pushed again on that. They mentioned it is method too lengthy. That is generations extra individuals rising up with lead pipes. So within the closing rule, the EPA has tightened that up. Now, as a substitute of 40 years, they’ve extra like 20-25. I talked with Brenda Santoyo, and she or he’s a water justice advocate in Chicago.
BRENDA SANTOYO: It is positively progress. I feel that, like, the town, the state, ought to take, like, their very own measures to attempt to velocity up that course of as a lot as they’ll. We additionally don’t need our water techniques to be arrange for failure, for them to take shortcuts.
HUANG: Yeah. she says that the timeline appears cheap, as long as households are capable of shield themselves within the meantime.
FADEL: Yeah. I imply, even 10 extra years looks as if a very long time to be consuming water that may have lead in it. So what can households do to guard themselves?
HUANG: Yeah. Nicely, the 1st step is determining whether or not they have a lead service line. The service line is the pipe that brings faucet water into your home, and that may be the most definitely offender. In the event you can see that line, you may scratch it with a coin, strive a magnet on it. There’s some steering on-line that may assist you determine if it is fabricated from lead, copper or coated metal. And in case you are questioning – if it is simple to scratch and a magnet doesn’t persist with it, these are among the indicators that it could possibly be lead. They’ll additionally check their water for lead. There are some water districts on the market that provide free water testing, to allow them to test for that. And here is the factor – even when there’s lead within the water, widespread house filters can take them out, so pitcher filters, faucet filters which can be licensed to take away lead. All these are actually nice options till the lead pipes themselves get eradicated.
FADEL: That is NPR well being correspondent Pien Huang. Thanks.
HUANG: Thanks.
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