- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
deleted by creator
News flash: these pipes were laid up to 120 years ago, and the Flynt disaster was caused by republican leadership trying to cheap-out on water expenses for a primarily poor community.
Those pipes are all over the nation, under huge cities and small rural communities. This is no small task. Flynt isn’t fixed because it is not easy, and the administration involved was a combination of criminals and incompetents.
Cue someone making sure to inform you that all those military people, who are definitely 100% ready for an invasion, genuinely need to sit around and do nothing instead of actually making their country a better place.
Dude, this is not going to happen. They will be exposes to lead for 100 more years, not 10. This is just empty talk. Money for this will be stolen by private companies or corrupt officials. To do projects like this you need a strong central government which US doesn’t have. What was the last big investment in infrastructure they did? Energy lines are shit, railway’s nonexistent, public education sux, there’s no public healthcare and prisons are torture centres. They only ever do things if some corporation can make money off of it. My guess is companies will take money for this and then do nothing, same like happened with fast Internet.
This is great. 10 years seems long, but it is a huge project. Glad it will be started soon.
Edit: Aw shit. This is only a proposal. At least we are talking about it.
Huh, my reaction is how would you even find them all so quickly
I assume you can test the water at the outlet for lead.
Nope, you have to use historic records or dig holes in the ground. Lead Service Line Inventory projects can take a while, and many cities are already going as fast as they can.
Most of the time these pipes are not actually leeching lead into the water supply. Most of the time. The whole problem is kind of that it happens just often enough, and just locally enough that monitoring doesn’t catch it immediately.
The water authority where I live makes a point of saying they keep the water on the alkaline side to prevent leaching lead from pipes and solder. Presumably that costs money
They must know where at least some of them are so I guess they can start with those and work outwards on the connection. After all I lead the pipe is likely connected to another lead pipe.
Then I guess it’s just a matter of doing a lot of water monitoring for the remaining pipes.
There’s likely records of most currently used infrastructure. At least enough that the amount you have to go spelunking for would be negligible.
And within the home, there’s a lot of local, federally-funded programs where your water department will come out and test to see if you have lead pipes, and either help or completely cover the replacement costs.
These are service lines, as in assuming all the mains are already lead-free, these are the feeds onto each house. Many of them owned by the homeowner, not the utility. An estimated 9 million of which are lead.
When’s the last time leaded pipes were allowed? Surely at least half a century ago. I find it hard to believe there are good records that old, for every house, many of which lines are not even owned by the utility.
I’m picturing something much more exhaustive, like:
- search for all properties over half a century old (or whenever the last time leaded pipes were allowed)
- filter out any with a record of replacing the service
- test. Goto every fricken one and test
I have no way of knowing what records the water utility has but my house is almost 80 years old and the town’s property records are awfully spotty. And I’m in one of the newer houses in my town - my search included some back to 1890
Edit: 1986. Leaded pipes were allowed that recently, wtf. ( and Florida is number one in leaded pipes remaining: that explains a lot)
I think they were banned that year but basically nobody installed them after the late 70s.
But yeah some places are dabbling with machine learning or algorithmic data set collection. Most are just using what historic records they have and doing shovel tests for the rest.
You don’t need to do that though. Unless there are records otherwise you can just assume it is lead because they all are. Bring in a underground crew to the neighborhood and they can go house to house replacing service lines. Transporting equipment to one house for this is often more expensive than the work itself, but since they are doing an entire neighborhood they can do 10 houses in a day and the cost isn’t too much. Just dig the pipe into wherever, then go inside and hook it up.
Of course many houses have lead pipes as well. That is a lot more money. I’m working on getting the lead out of my house (copper pipes, but old enough to assume they have lead solder), but there are a lot of pipes in the walls that I don’t really have an easy way to get at without a major remodel. (I have a RO drinking water system to every sink so the lead pipes are mostly used for hand washing not drinking)
I think service water line replacement takes longer than a day. Probably a half a day to dig the trench and expose the utilities - and hopefully they aren’t under a driveway or a roadway, and then do the connection. Repave afterward.
The other issue is a lot of houses have lead pipes and lead solder in the copper piping, so they may still have life contamination after replacement of the water lines.
I just has natural gas installed, the outside work was a couple hours, but a crew that did a neighborhood could do a lot of things in parallel
30+ years after we found out they were bad for us “guys, we should talk about replacing those pipes…”
Lots of other pipes have been replaced, it’s just a few hours that are left. Detroit, Pittsburgh and other older cities.
Good. Drinking water is easy more important than many people realize. I hope we are always updating our pipes to the current standards.
Only 9.2 millions? Not 40+?
deleted by creator
Watch as soon as he’s out of office it gets put on hold
And it will be described as a Good Thing™
Trump saved us from losing our heritage! We grew off of lead pipes and those damn liberals were going to strip us of that!! Lol I hate that this is an actual possibility.
Obviously. Without lead poisoning, the right lose their base of support.
I love your username btw
Fortunately this is an avoidable problem.
In unrelated news totally not privately owned utility companies are about to sue the government with the argument, “the current Congress didn’t sign off on this regulatory change that an older Congress gave the agency the power to do.”
This and more in the decade long SCOTUS hates us all crisis.
Shouldn’t states and cities be responsible for doing this, not the federal government? People in one state shouldn’t be paying for the failure of another state to provide necessary infrastructure.
You may be surprised at where these lines are. Plenty of blue cities are loaded with them. The rural red areas near me didn’t even get public water systems until the 80s so none of them have lead.
I don’t even have a public water hookup, and I don’t have a water bill either, its great.
Depends on where you live. In Minnesota where I grew up rural areas don’t have public water and wouldn’t think of it - drilling a well is fairly cheap and a small hole gives you far more water than you could ever use. In Iowa where I live now my well is a very large diameter hole and if I’m not careful it will run dry. In Iowa almost all farms have public water supplies.
You forget that there’s currently some us states that have right wing bigots in charge that only care about being bigots
They will replace them with PVC or something else that we find out gives us all brain rot or cancer, and the cycle will start all over again.
It’s sure as hell taking its sweet time
Better the devil you don’t know than the devil you do.
Those that purposely destroyed the water systems with cuts in Flint Michigan should have been quartered in a public square.
Sadly in reality they probably received bonuses and perks.
A friend of mine was starting into a tirade a while back about how terrible it is that all water pipe installed in houses today is plastic even though we know BPAs are killing people. I suggested that they might be better than lead pipe. We still high five from time to time.
Does he mean PEX? Because that’s HDPE and is BPA-free.
This is one of those times I’m like why are mass shootings always schools and bars and not assholes like the people responsible for this
Wasn’t it a theme there for awhile to go Postal? I can’t recall if that was about co-workers, management, the general public or all of the above?
Those that caused the switchover to Flint River water that resulted in the disaster surfacing definitely should be drawn and quartered, no question. Snyder and his city managers put all this nonsense in motion and should be charged with crimes against humanity.
However, it’s also a systemic, deeper problem in the US. Flint’s pipes didn’t suddenly become terrible overnight. The entire water system was in disrepair for decades. The only reason it didn’t surface sooner was they were regulating the water going through it to hold the demons at bay. Even when it was working, pre-disaster, the water was safe to drink, but horrible from a drinking water perspective.
The whole system was a giant leaking piece of junk that basically kept working due to positive pressure pushing contaminants out of the leaks, and the pH level being maintained so the old pipes wouldn’t start leeching into the water. That a GM engine plant had to switch water sources because the water was damaging the engine construction is just mind-blowing. Human bodies are vastly more delicate than engines.
Flint’s not the only one either, many American cities with aging water infrastructure that wasn’t properly maintained all have/had similar problems.
We are such a short-sighted country that seems to so quickly forget that our infrastructure requires constant maintenance and updates. I really think the generation that got to live among all the New Deal and post WWII infrastructure just thought they lived in a magic time where all this stuff just exists forever, rather than realizing it takes stewardship to keep things “the way they are”. Now, we on the back end, reap the rewards of everything falling apart at the same time, faster than we can fix it.
We are such a short-sighted country
We see about as far as the next quarter’s profits. That seems to be the marker. Apparently, the future isn’t really worth looking at past that.
deleted by creator
I know people were charged for their involvement in the crisis but from what I can tell they got out of the charges. I think there may be a case that is still pending, though
deleted by creator
I linked an article in one of my comments that describes the criminal cases. They did not get off scot free as of 2021.
While we’re digging shit up, lets lay some fiber.
AT&T after taking my tax money: “hahahahahahahahahahahahahah no”
Can’t wait for the GOP to sabotage this so they can oWn ThE LiBs: “Lead free pipes are for socialists!”
“We don’t want any of your leftist ‘woke’ pipes!”
I’ve long wondered if lead exposure accounts for their behaviors over the past couple decades. Lead that accumulates in the bones over one’s lifetime leaches out into the bloodstream when one becomes elderly, like calcium does with osteoporosis. Cognitive issues and rage are associated with lead exposure.
I’ve long wondered if lead exposure accounts for their behaviors over the past couple decades.
That’s exactly what has happened.
Imagine, if you will, a country that has a lot of land area, which uses personal ground transport to grt around. Imagine if, for decades, those personal transport machines used large, ineffcient engines that ran on a fuel that caused aerosolized lead to be blown into the atmosphere at a staggering rate?
Do not forget lead paint, pipes and crystal.
Also more recently, people who will cycle 1000 rounds of cheap ammo through sixteen different guns as a hobby and then spread that lead contamination all through their car and home, and they’ll do this every week for years.
Shooting as a hobby isn’t new, but the volume and frequency people are doing it has definitely gone way up in some parts of the US in the past 30 years.
I remember watching a grand thumb (gun nut YouTuber) video where he found out about the lead poisoning and started wearing an N95 mask at the range.
He switched to lead free ammo IIRC. His buddies made fun of him.
I hadn’t thought of that one.
Imagine, if you will, a three by seven inch wooden frame – a frame that’s a gateway to a world of imagination. Wipe your mind on the welcome mat. You’re about to enter…
The Scary Door.
That’s a tiny door
It turns out it’s man.
Why replace lead pipes at huge costs when you can just shoot criminals?
It turns out that more lead was the answer all along
Think about how many bullets those old pipes can be turned into! This project would practically pay for itself with the cost of ammunition these days.
I love when people who grew up in the 70s tell me the world is so much less safe today.
I worked on a community gardening project in the city when I was in grad school. We had an ordinary urban residential lot and wanted to plant a community vegetable garden.
The soil was so incredibly contaminated with lead from 70 years old leaded gasoline that we had to scrape off the top 6 ft of topsoil and send it to a toxic waste dump, and the replace all of that. Then we built raised garden beds to mitigate lead uptake in the plants.
Most cities in the world are still heavily contaminated and lead will never go away.
I worry about this a little bit for myself.
I was just shy of twenty years old when leaded gas sales ended in California.
So I definitely grew up with lots of exposure. Hope it doesn’t dement me out in my final couple of decades.
I’m not sure about that, I’ve had lead poisoning for thirty years and I’m still not stupid enough to support those assholes.
it’s dose dependant, and while your particular neurological effects may be different, in population studies for almost every country where lead has been banned, there is a direct relationship to violent crimes as well. Lead gasoline use goes up, crime rate goes up. Lead gasoline stops, and as the lead is measured to leave the environment, the violent crime goes down.
Intelligence is only one possible thing affected. It’s also highly associated with emotional impulsiveness.
Oh I’m sure. I have many of those issues, but then I also did before I was poisoned and treated for it. How much it affected me is hard to say though overall because I’ve got adhd and have always been impulsive… My temper has been an issue since I was born, so I have a lot of practice suppressing it.
To me it seems there’s a lot more at play including lack of critical thinking skills and not just intelligence when it comes to their support.
How did you find out you had lead poisoning?
I burned my leg by getting splashed with a bit of molten metal when I was working at a metal foundry when I was around 21 years old. My family doc tending to it ran some tests and next thing I knew I was on medication for it… some kind of horse sized pills that were nearly impossible to keep down.
Late edit: Chelation therapy I guess it’s called.
People typically can see a ~3 IQ point deficit with long term lead poisoning.
I guess thankfully I had a couple to spare :)
Lead makes Republicans
It’s funny, because the hexbears basically have the same “Biden bad” reaction. Almost like there’s a weird amount of ideological overlap.
Not a hexbear, but the leftist “Biden bad” narrative wouldn’t demonize investing in infrastructure, they would call out shit like unconditional support for Israel or failing to meaningfully improve social safety nets via Medicare for All, or other such measures. Biden is a Liberal, at the end of the day, and that’s not going to please any leftist except by not being a fascist.
Never underestimate the effects of extremism on rational conclusions
deleted by creator
Came here to say this. I look forward to whatever their excuse is to not solve the toxic drinking water problem. And likely immediately spend more on DoD or cut taxes to the rich.
DoD
Dungeons or Dragons?
Department of Defense
deleted by creator
That would be infinitely cooler and more useful.
Sadly it’s the department of defense.
Amazing that this has not been done decades ago.
It’s such a staggering amount of work and money that I think is hard for most people to comprehend. Though, if dispersed properly, will benefit local workers as they usually require they get paid prevailing wage. Which can be pretty fucking high depending on where you live.
And even once all of the lead service lines are replaced, that’s just from main to the meter at most. All of the internal fixtures are the owner’s responsibility, and you better believe tons of old houses are still full of lead pipes.
This is something that is going to take decades, and you’re absolutely right that we should have started decades ago.
It’s just another case of “it costs too much to fix it, so just keep slapping a bandaid on it and kick it down the road”, just like the rest of our infrastructure. Yet we have billions available to “defend” ourselves 🙄
More than billions, I think our defense budget was $766 billion in 2022 alone, at around 12% which was actually lower than 2021 which cost taxpayers 15% and 801 billion.
It’s… it’s a big big problem, especially in a time where the U.S hasn’t had a war on it’s soil in a long, long time.
I get that we go to other countries and
help out a bitget involved but we have issues on our own turf killing us from the inside.Yeah, I just saw a YouTube video where the US has “frozen” the access to mega-yachts owned by Russian billionaires, but they can’t seize them because they can’t legally prove that the billionaires own them since they’re registered in one country and owned by a shell corporation in another country. So if we (and other countries who are doing this) can eventually prove that they own said yachts, we can sell them, but until then we have to pay the constant upkeep on them to keep them in pristine condition… Which costs like 10 million a year per yacht…and we have multiple of them🤦♂️
No money to pay our citizens more, invest in our own infrastructure, or fund programs that our citizens need!
Nope, none of that. Can’t even support our veterans that fought in the past wars that taxpayers had to pay trillions for but they can afford the salaries of the soldiers currently out there. It’s like when a corporation cuts the 401k’s of thousands of employees then turns around and hires thousands more…
The yachts ordeal is yet another example. All this $ frivolously spent on excess before basic needs of citizens are being met. The U.S could damned near be a utopia if we’d elect some people with common sense and quit voting in corrupt politicians.
I could rant about this for hours as it’s just basic stuff. It’s petty and boring so read on at your own risk.
We can’t afford guns until the needs of the common people have been met.
We can’t afford to imprison people for trivial stuff when they’re not an active threat to society.
Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.
Food is a right. No one should have to decide between paying the rent and eating a proper meal.
Housing is a right and shouldn’t be a for profit industry. Buying up tons of land in a scheme to get wealthy isn’t good for anyone.
Banks just… shouldn’t exist the way that they do. Neither should the credit system, predatory loaning practices etc. Prices just keep going up due to this.
If banks/credit ceased to exist and loans stopped being made, then the price of things would have to adjust to reflect what the average person can actually afford which just makes sense right? If an average person can’t make enough to afford their own home at regular wages within a few years by their self then either they aren’t getting paid enough or asking prices are way too damned high.
There are just some practices in this world that are bad for it. Everyone knows the shit but no one will do anything because the people with the power to actually enforce change are benefitting too much from the same system to kill it.
Oh, and another one. Flint Michigan is supposedly enacting an (iirc) $9-10 million dollar bill to repair/replace their pipes in order for the people their to have clean drinking water and not get sick or die from lead poisoning. $9-10 mill would make all that difference yet our government won’t pay it even though we’re spending the better part of a trillion each year blowing things up. How petty is that? Can’t take a penny out of our war money so people can have clean drinking water… pathetic!
Yep it’s disgusting. They’re only willing to put money into things that will (potentially) make them money.
That, and bombs. Nice username btw
Germany outlawed installing lead pipes in 1973, this year operating them got outlawed, though already ten years ago the permissible lead concentrations were so low as to be basically impossible achieve if you had even short runs of lead pipes. All the main lines got replaced IIRC in the 80s, latest, can’t find numbers right now, though apparently they rarely used lead there in the first place.
Also, btw, if you’re already digging up water pipes it’s quite easy to install some cable ducts while you’re at it, put all those power and telco lines underground and stop looking like a 3rd world country. That kind of last-mile infrastructure should be managed by municipal-level monopoly, if an ISP wants to sell you something they can hook up to the municipality’s IXP and rent the rest of the way to your house at fixed, fair, rates. It’s a natural monopoly: It makes as much economical sense to run more than two power or telco connections to a house as it makes to run more than one street to your house: Costs a lot of money to run that second street and as soon as you did your competitor is going to lower their prices, which they can do because their investment already amortised, and leave you stranded with your investment because why would the residents of the house switch to your offering if your competitor is cheaper. There’s an opportunity when switching from copper to fiber but fiber will last for the next 1000 years so it’s not really a solution.
Come on now, you’re actually making sense, we don’t do that here in the US. Money and the amount of effort required rule everything.
I actually just listened to a podcast about NYCs water supply. To back up your claim, they started pipe #3 around the 1970s and only recently finished (or should have by 2021, the episode was from before then)
Portland replaced most of its water and sewer pipes, AND built a massive 21 ft diameter sewer bypass and storage line 250 ft below the city over the course of about 10 years. When I was living there, the city went up and down every building on every street in my neighborhood to put in new sewer and water connections. Those crews were fast.
NYC is just too big, old and bureaucratic compared to other US cities.
Those crews were fast.
Doing whole cities and streets in one go is always the better option: The crews know what they’re doing, all the material and materiel is already on site and scheduling is uncomplicated.
Norderstedt’s utility hooked up the whole city to fibre 1999 to 2002, total investment 43 million Euro for just over 80k inhabitants, roughly 540 Euro per head… but that number is a bit misleading the utility only made a loss of 10 million over that time span, or 125 Euro per inhabitant. A couple of years later all the money was recouped and they started expanding to neighbouring villages and the north of Hamburg. Asymmetric gigabit for 50 bucks (upload actually costs ISPs money while download gets paid by whoever’s upload that is which is why asymmetric makes sense even if the connection is symmetric).
Kinda hard to do nowadays as the second Deutsche Telekom gets wind of any such initiative they suddenly decide that laying down fibre to replace their copper would, after all, make economical sense. Which is the reason why elsewhere here I’m advocating for municipal monopolies: Municipalities should be able to say “ok you didn’t want to invest here, now it’s too late you don’t get to compete”.
(And just in case btw you thought T-Mobile was a grand and nice company: No it isn’t. It’s a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary. The only reason they are customer-friendly in the US is because they’re up against the baby bells there, in Germany Deutsche Telekom is the bell, created by splitting up and privatising the postal service, they own pretty much all the copper everywhere in the country).
To be completely fair, a layer builds up in the pipe which stops the lead being an issue unless you royally fuck up like Flint. That said, it still should’ve been fixed
As someone who thankfulky doesn’t like in the un-united states of america How exactly did flint royally fuck up
They switched to a water source that wasn’t treated with orthophosphates. This change in water chemistry created an environment where the lead would dissolve off and be replaced with other metal deposits. My layman understanding is the water was treated in a way to bind lead to the pipes and the untreated water created an environment where the effect was counteracted.
“Orthophosphates create a mineral coating that keeps toxic lead stuck to pipes.”
“The absence of orthophosphates made the lead vulnerable to dissolving off the pipes and into the water supply. Meanwhile, other metals like aluminum and magnesium appeared to take the lead’s place.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/science/study-confirms-lead-got-flints-water
Well, the appointed officials switched to a water source and specifically chose to not treat it with required chemicals to save money.
Slightly different than just switching water sources.
Thank you, I wasn’t entirely confident that part got proven or not so I didn’t want to inappropriately make the statement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
They were buying water from Detroit’s water system. In order to save money, they switched to getting it from the nearby river, but they failed to account for how the new water source would interact with their pipes. They didn’t treat the new water correctly and it corroded all their old lead pipes, dumping lead into the water and giving everyone lead poisoning.
Even years later, after they switched back to Detroit water, they’re still having problems because the damage to the pipes is already done.
Waiting for a Republican to call this a woke, gay, Chinese conspiracy or whatever.
Why? I’m sure there are some vocal extremists who will shit on anything Biden does, but I know quite a few republicans and all them support this move. Do democrats and republicans really live under the illusion they’re so different from one another instead of almost exactly the same like they are?
I used to be a republican when I was young, mostly because they understand economics better, but then later I found myself disagreeing with them on social/censorship/privacy issues. One side wants to impede freedom one way, and the other wants to impede it the other way, that’s when I realized that both parties are hypocritical by nature. And I doubt it was knowingly designed this way, but all either side ever does is end up growing government and removing freedoms aside from the rare big wins towards actual liberty.
Didn’t mean to go into rant mode, it’s just annoying to me when democrats call republicans stupid or vice-versa. No, neither side is stupid. They have reasons for their beliefs, and while they do go through mental gymnastics to convince themselves their platform isn’t hypocritical, they’re both still coming from a place of trying to improve the world. But you bring that up and then people will use “whataboutism” all day to point to specific examples that seem particularly indefensible on one side or the other. This then makes productive discussion impossible. We all need to acknowledge that the “other” side aren’t heartless bastards who don’t care about the rich or who don’t know how money works or whatever ignorant complaint you have, actually take time and learn.
Edit: Truth struck much too hard for many people lmao
Republicans are heartless evil bastards. Abortion bans. LGBT existence bans. Book bans. No gun controls. Underfunded education. Climate denial. Unchecked capitalism and inflation. Housing and stufent debt crises. Grifting trillions from taxpayers. Witch hunts against politicians family members who stayed out of politics. Sketchy relationships with the Russians, Chinese, and Saudis.
Fuck off, both sider. They are not the same.
They are the same. I’m sorry that you see yourself so much in them that you feel the need to lash out at me, but if that works for you whatever I suppose.
What are you talking about?
Republicans absolutely are not better on economics in any way whatsoever. They borrow, spend, and saddle everyone with high interest. All of the trillions of debt is their doing, and theirs alone, and always has been.
Oh really? Let’s hear why you think this, I bet it’ll be good.
deleted by creator
Bless your heart.
Republicans are already against it.
deleted by creator
This is a hugely underrated win imo. We have no idea the damage lead is doing to us, we can only guess the damage in health problems is in the billions. Politicians usually don’t give a shit about this so for Biden to do so is a big outstretched hand and big achievement
It’s a win, but not really underrated. We can test for lead easily in both the water supply and people, there are some isolated areas it’s bad, but it’s not a problem in most areas.
Republican might loose a lot of it’s voter base
Champ!
