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To Remove Lead Water Pipes, First You Must Find Them

And then you have to make sure you’re removing the whole pipe, including the part on private property

Safe drinking water for everyone in America is an important goal, and Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan makes a $111 billion investment toward that. While the majority of the funding goes to modernizing water treatment and delivery systems and remediating potentially harmful chemicals like PFAS, what’s gotten the most attention is a $45 billion initiative to “replace 100 percent of the nation’s lead pipes and service lines.”

If we could manage to do this, it would make a huge difference. Lead exposure has been credibly linked to stunted child development, kidney disease, auditory problems, brain damage, behavioral challenges, and more provocatively, crime. We eliminated leaded gasoline and paint in the 1970s and yet it still lingers as a persistent problem. And part of that comes through water tainted as it flows through lead pipes.

But if you want to replace all the lead water pipes in America, the first thing you have to do is find all the lead water pipes in America.

This is surprisingly not easy to do. You hear a lot about water infrastructure to homes and buildings that’s as much as 100 years old, but on a related note, there was not a lot of good recordkeeping dating all the way back. “There are 50,000 water systems across the country,” said Mary Grant of Food and Water Watch. “A lot are tiny.” We don’t have a good handle on the extent of lead pipe service lines, and it will require extensive surveying.

The thirty-year-old EPA Lead and Copper Rule that sets a maximum level of lead in water (15 parts per billion, currently) was just updated to require all water systems to “identify and make public the locations of lead service lines,” but they have until 2024 to complete it. And once the rule gets finalized later this year, testing for lead will be done at day cares and schools for the first time (the EPA just asked for an extension.)

The American Water Works Association in 2016 estimated 6.1 million lead service lines to homes, and a $30 billion price tag for full replacement. Added to the surveying to find all the lead pipes, that eats up most of the $45 billion the White House reserved for this initiative. But if we’ve just started testing in schools, it goes without saying that we have no idea of the extent of lead in that water. There have been findings of lead in water in schools in Baltimore, Maryland, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere. A Harvard study from 2018 analyzed 12 states that mandate water testing in schools for lead, and found 44 percent with at least one elevated sample.

This leaves Grant believing that the administration needs to devote much more money to lead pipe removal on a lasting basis, if it wants to cover all homes and schools and child care centers. The WATER Act, which Food and Water Watch supports, creates a $35 billion annual trust fund, though that also includes money for treatment systems and other matters.

Meanwhile, finding the pipes doesn’t end the challenge. Lead pipe service lines go from the water main into residences through a water meter. At least part of that service line, by definition, crosses onto the property of an individual homeowner or landlord. In some states, you can’t replace that part of the pipe without the consent of the property owner. And normally, the homeowner must pay to have the lead pipes replaced on its side of the property line. The District of Columbia puts that cost at $2,000-$3,000, a difficult expense for many.

“We need full lead service line replacement,” Grant told me. “If you just do the utility part, it would make the crisis worse.” That’s because partial service line replacement can cause something called galvanic corrosion where the new, usually copper pipe meets the old lead pipe at the lot line. This can eat away at the old pipe and increase lead levels in water. The CDC has warned that partial replacement can “be linked to increased incidences of high blood levels in children.” And beyond service lines, internal home plumbing and fixtures, particularly in older homes, can use lead as well.

Grant counsels that the language in the bill must make clear that the federal investment, which would be done through the EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) and Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) grants, is for full lead service line replacement only. And the funds should relieve property owners from having to pay for their share of that replacement.

This brings up another problem. Right now the property owner must be willing to have the service lines replaced. The SRF does not allow for eminent domain to force the improvements. You can imagine a landlord that doesn’t want to bear ancillary costs, like putting residents up in a hotel for a week while the pipes get replaced, rejecting the work. “It needs to be super-clear that this is a matter of public health,” Grant said.

Finally, if as the CDC says there is no safe level of exposure to lead, especially in children, lead in water should not be the only priority. There’s a credible argument that remediation of lead in soil is a bigger problem than water, though of course the point here is that all of it needs to be eradicated. In older schools with parking lots, lead has sat in the soil from idling exhausts for 50 years or more. Soil remediation could cost as much as $100 billion by one estimate, so you can see why the administration opted to pick and choose. But the benefits to child health and welfare would be unbelievably large, and since you can’t remove half the lead and get the benefits, if you’re going to make progress here you have to be comprehensive.

What is good is that the Biden team put lead abatement, a critical environmental justice priority, on the radar, even if it only looked at one piece of the problem. “Too often water is forgotten when talking about lead,” Grant said. “It’s almost forgotten infrastructure, out of sight, out of mind.”

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