EPA Announces Plan To Bolster Drinking Water Lead Regulations

Flink Water crisis.

The EPA is now ready to strengthen them.

Decades after authorities banned the use of lead in gasoline in new cars and blocked the sale of lead paint (a giant step toward eliminating a major source of lead exposure in the population), approximately 500,000 children in the United States they still have lead levels. Blood lead levels are considered high. , and experts say lead is a significant source in drinking water.

The agency is now trying to further reduce lead levels in drinking water and strengthen regulations, which have failed to prevent recent drinking water crises in cities such as Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey. While no details were released, the agency said it will propose requiring utilities to proactively replace harmful lead pipes.

President Joe Biden has already called for the removal of the nation's approximately 9.2 million lead pipes, the pipes that connect underground water pipes to homes and businesses and account for the majority of lead that enters the land and water drinking.

But sending workers to dig pipes, lay new ones and replant damaged landscaping is expensive. In many cities, homeowners must pay to have pipes repaired in their properties.

“This has huge implications for the entire population,” said Levin, a professor at Harvard University's School of Public Health.

Children are particularly sensitive to lead exposure, and elevated levels significantly reduce intelligence, impair coordination, and impair students' ability to concentrate and learn. The behavior may get worse. Federal officials say there is no safe level of lead for children and that even small amounts can lower IQ.

The updated rules come as the federal government attacks on multiple fronts, with announcements about the dangers of jet fuel and proposals to more strictly limit lead-based paint dust in nursing homes and daycares.

Some officials still focus more on sources like paint dust, but since Flint, more attention has been paid to water-related risks.

In the United States, decades of work have significantly reduced blood lead levels in children. But many children are still exposed to toxic metals, "and much of it comes from lead in the water," said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a Boston scientist. A pediatrician who this year became director of the environmental health program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Bernstein hoped that “as we remove the lead pipes, we will see the numbers continue to decline.” And that would be really cool.

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Try it first!
Lead is a nightmare to control because, unlike other water contaminants, it enters drinking water after leaving water treatment plants through pipes and pipes. It can be very different. A family that uses dangerous amounts of lead may live next door to a home that doesn't.

After Lewin's analysis was published in 1986, he said, the Environmental Protection Agency distributed his work to members of Congress.

Plumbers were worried about the prospect of new demand. “Everyone went crazy,” he said.

Levine was part of a group of officials known as "mob bosses." The group has pushed for stricter regulations, arguing that this would benefit large numbers of people and that even small health improvements are worth it.

Other EPA officials felt that Levin's analysis overstated the benefits of the new rule, and some CDC officials argued that the focus on drinking water distracted from fighting lead paint, according to Mark Powell's book on science from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Finally, in 1991, the EPA finalized its initial rule.

But “it was a tough battle within the EPA,” Levin recalled.

The agency did not force utilities to remove lead from drinking water, but instead required them to test homes for lead and add anti-corrosive chemicals.

It set an action level of 15 parts of lead per billion parts of water, but allowed 10% of samples to exceed that threshold. Utilities that exceed enforcement rates may need to replace lead pipes.

Crisis in Washington
Experts say the Flint disaster has had the greatest impact in making the threat of lead in drinking water a reality for health officials. Thousands of children were exposed to high levels of drinking water, prompting an emergency, lawsuits and prolonged attention from the media and national lawmakers.

But in reality it was the decisive crisis in Washington, almost ten years ago, that first shook public confidence.

An Environmental Protection Agency rule requires utilities to measure lead levels in household tap water and notify the public if the results are too high. This reporting requirement was supposed to be adopted in Washington in 2001, but local utilities falsified some of the EPA's findings, making it appear that the city was in compliance when in fact it was not.

The next year, officials sent out a 12-page brochure highlighting the problem on page three, after boasting that the plant "provides drinking water that meets or exceeds EPA requirements," according to documents from that year. Investigation of a law firm. After

It wasn't until early 2004 that Washington residents learned through the news that the crisis had been years in the making. Two-thirds of homes tested recently had lead concentrations above the EPA threshold of 15 parts per billion. This includes more than 2,000 households with outcomes greater than 15 times per billion and 157 households with outcomes at least 20 times higher.

“The lead in the water crisis in Washington has been much worse than in Flint,” said Yana Lambrinido, a medical anthropologist at Virginia Tech and co-founder of the Campaign for No Water. At the time, he said, it was mistakenly believed that lead in drinking water was not as harmful as other sources, such as paint, and could be ignored.

He said the CDC made the situation worse when, in March 2004, a report found that high levels of lead in drinking water in Washington did not significantly increase lead levels in the blood of young children.

The CDC has been criticized for downplaying the problem. Agency officials later said that much of the furor stemmed from misinterpretation. “I never said there weren't problems,” said the report's lead author, Mary Jean Brown, who headed the CDC's state Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Division at the time.

But a few years later, a House Oversight Committee report said the CDC had omitted important information and used testing methods for children that confused the relationship between lead in the blood and lead in drinking water. In fact, according to recent work led by Virginia Tech senior expert Mark Edwards, blood lead levels among Washington children increased significantly during the drinking water crisis.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to address the concerns of citizens in other cities with high levels of lead in their water,” the congressional report states.

Then, when Washington attempted to dig up the lead pipes, parts of the pipes were buried under homeowners' homes, which could have led to higher lead levels.

The city has now replaced thousands of lead pipes, distribution filters and improved monitoring. Lead levels in the city are well below the EPA's action level.

But DC won't be the last crisis.

Michigan's Flint water will be the fuel in the case, justified above

The problem remains
By the time the Flint crisis began in 2014, lead had ceased to be a public health priority. “It seemed like we had solved the lead problem in this country,” the CDC's Bernstein said. But Flint is now focusing on the problem and investing in preventing lead poisoning, he said.

Other crises occurred in Newark, New Jersey, in 2016 and Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 2018.

Joe Cotruvo, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Drinking Water Standards, said that while current standards work and should be credited with significantly reducing lead in drinking water, they are not adequately implemented and apply.

Others disagree. Current regulations help regulate lead levels, and cities haven't done enough to reduce them as much as possible, said Michael Schock, a recently retired EPA chemist who has worked on lead for years, decades.

“The public health impact is that much of the lead exposure could be avoided to some extent” if utilities were required to do more, Schock said. Schock said many people at the EPA are reluctant to significantly tighten standards.

Take the Newark crisis. In the past, low lead levels required a small number of tests every three years. According to a 2022 newspaper article, lead levels are more likely to rise if authorities test more sites more frequently.

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Newark and Benton Harbor ultimately received a more passionate official response. In both cities, lead pipes were quickly removed and lead levels decreased.

But events lead to disastrous consequences. Residents of Benton Harbor, where more than 40% live in poverty, lined up in parking lots at water stations to open the doors, fearing they would be left without free water. Parents, faced with frightening headlines about lead's harmful effects on the brain, worry whether their children's future has been compromised.

Levin said removing pipes and leaching lead into homes would reduce the problem.

“But you know, we've been having fun for 30 years,” Levine said.

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