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.’’
Wow so ambitious, and then as we near the deadline we can extend it by 10 years!
Only 10 more years to enjoy that good old water with a tinge of “Roman sweet”.
The only pipelines we should be building
I expect SCROTUS to overturn this by saying Americans have the right to lead contaminated water, and if they don’t like it they can buy Nestle™ distilled water
Coincidentally, all the conservative justices will be taking a 6 month long all expenses paid cruise around the world
they can buy Nestle™ distilled water
Hah, they don’t waste the energy to distill it. They just pump it up from the ground on the other side of Michigan, filter it, and ship it back out. (As well as many other places where Nestle steals water.)
My city just did the lead pipe replacement. I did not do my house feed because I can’t swing 16k 6 months after they announced plans to do it (that’s also fully 1/4 of what I originally paid for the whole house 10 years ago, and I’m still making payments on that -I’m in a very low COL area, 40k is really good pay here, I usually make around 30k when I’m able to work-, so that is a SUBSTANTIAL amount of money for me), cuz yeah the city doesn’t cover from the main line into the house… (I do have a reverse osmosis unit, however, because I’ve known about the lead pipes since I bought the place, and all my drinking or cooking water goes through that, so I’m not like consuming lead all the time, just microplastics…)
When I told them I can’t afford it because I’m unemployed and disabled, they told me I should just take out a loan for it. Yeah, because that’s a great idea when you don’t have money or know when you might… increase your monthly money needs! Brilliant! They then said I’ll have to do it by 2028 or my water will be shut off… cool, that makes me feel a lot better about being fucking broke.
So like I’m totally on board with replacing them, but holy fuck does it suck for the affected areas. To say nothing of 4 months of constant structure-shaking construction.
In Rotterdam (Netherlands) they’re replacing the sewage system. People get a letter that they’re responsible for the bit on their ground. In practice the city also handled the line to the house.
I don’t understand why in your area they’d not take care of that bit. With everything mostly open it should be much easier anyway.
That the city doesn’t promise anything is likely for things like liability and unique/expensive exceptions. But not doing that in practice, so strange.
They decided to repair the sidewalks last year, just out of nowhere, and tacked the amount on to your property tax as a special assessment if you didn’t make arrangements of your own to have someone come out and fix it when they wanted it fixed by. Any little crack was enough for them to demand you rip out the whole slab, even though the sidewalks have been in disrepair for over a decade, so they clearly didn’t care before. It was not a fun surprise when the flyer came that basically said “these are the slabs we’ve decided to replace, this is what we are going to charge you, you have to pay the full amount this year.”
And like, I know sidewalks are sort of a gray area, but I already take care of them (clear leaves, snow, etc) and stuff, I shouldn’t also have to privately pay for them to be maintained on my property when I can’t choose not to have them…
So like my area is good for a lot of things, but that definitely isn’t one of them. I’m pretty sure because it’s a conservative area, the money is being intentionally funneled into specific companies doing the work, and they can’t charge nearly as much if the city picks up the tab. Probably friends with or bribing the people making decisions…
Dang… and the free market was just about get around to replacing those pipes too.
I mean good, but also Jesus Christ how is this even an issue in the states?
You’ve met us, right? Don’t we seem a little off? Now you know why.
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.
Big business pays off everyone from the top down to ignore that the issue is killing everyone, from the top down.
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.
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. It’s the same reason we add fluoride to drinking water.
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.
I never said fluoride was toxic in normal quantities, but the reason we put fluoride in drinking water is because of lobbying. Fluoride was and is primarily an industrial waste product that was thrown out for decades, until several mining and material refinement companies lobbied the federal government along side state and local governments to legally dump the waste in drinking water, using the new at the time research that fluoride can help tooth health as an excuse.
This is despite the fact fluoride has no effect on tooth health when consumed, and there are not high enough levels in drinking water to have a topical effect like in toothpaste. We’re quite literally just lucky it’s not toxic until you get to really high levels.
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.
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?
That’s so fucked up.
Feels like without the legislature this is something that’s way too easy to overturn
Didn’t the corrupt supreme court just take away Chevron Deference? This needed rule will be disqualified by the captured courts.
Trump will mandate more lead pipes. “They took the sweetness out of the water! Water used to be sweet! It isn’t sweet anymore! We like sweet water, don’t we, folks?”
That honestly would not surprise me if he did allow lead. He thinks asbestos is 100% safe and is only being removed because the mob lobbied for it to get the construction contracts.
And let’s not forget that Reagan wanted to reverse banning the use of lead and had a study commissioned to show how much money it would save the economy. The person writing the report decided to add in the massive negative health and societal consequences of removing the ban which showed a huge cost to the economy by removing the ban.
Trump is straight up trying to kill Americans. He is Russia’s most dangerous bioweapon
My town’s water system still has some “pipes” in use that are actually hollow logs.
They’ve lasted all this time, and are lead-free! If only we still had trees like that…
My fluids professor told us about that when someone asked why do we have wood on the material roughness tables. No one believed him so he brought in a small section of a wood pipe he took from a construction site.
I went with all PFAS pipes cause I heard they last forever
Seems better than lead at least?
Shockingly, that’s a much better option than lead and many customers moosiye pipe materials.
