Biden unveils $3 billion for nationwide lead pipe replacement

President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.

…

The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”

Default_Defect,
@Default_Defect@midwest.social avatar

Like, to actually do it? Or for companies to pocket the money and give up on it soon after, like with the infrastructure upgrade we should already have?

OldFart,

And what did he do for the last 3.5 years? Not a damned thing, buying more votes it seems.

RememberTheApollo_,

Hopefully lots of work to be done in conservative areas.

VinnyDaCat,

Looks like it outside of Cali and the north east, assuming they don’t fight it like they fight everything anyone on the left tries to do for them. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/406c0284-bd24-47ca-bd17-e6a2154fd9ab.png

ElPenguin,

People still have lead pipes? That would actually explain a lot…

kerrigan778,

They’re all sealed theoretically, but shit goes wrong like in Flint, still having the lead pipes with sealers is theoretically not dangerous but is considered a bit of a ticking time bomb.

Bosht,

deleted_by_author

    •
    KairuByte,

    I’m confused, are you saying we shouldnt be removing lead pipes which have been in use for nearly 40 years minimum?

    They are only still in use because “they are so covered in minerals it’s probably fine” ignoring the fact that even a minuscule amount of lead leads to problems in both children and adults.

    Could they focus on other things? Sure. But there’s always going to be “something more important than this” so it’s either pick something, or do nothing. Which option would you like?

    Bosht,

    No I’m saying our politicians suck so much ass that they’re literally 50+ years behind the curve. How the fuck are lead pipes still a thing at all??? Shit should have been done decades ago.

    evranch,

    Geez someone’s been drinking lead pipe water

    antidote101,

    Welcome to the 1800s.

    MSugarhill,

    You still…?

    werefreeatlast,

    Strategic lead reserve is being tapped… munitions.

    Juice,

    Looking at historical data on lead prices, you might be on to something

    Colour_me_triggered,

    Um… You guys are replacing them… Now?

    That actually explains quite a lot.

    FenrirIII,
    @FenrirIII@lemmy.world avatar

    It’s especially bad in poor areas

    ILikeBoobies,

    Canada will get to it eventually

    DragonTypeWyvern,

    pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19590124/

    Ignorance is bliss.

    Colour_me_triggered,

    Yeah, I don’t live in the EU.

    KonQuesting,
    @KonQuesting@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    Colour_me_triggered,

    I also don’t live in Scotland.

    azertyfun,

    I think it’d be interesting to look at a worldwide map of lead pipes. Not that such a map can even necessarily exist; here in Liège, BE, the director of the water distribution company got fired a couple years ago for severely underreporting the amount of lead pipes left in the network. I can personally attest that lead pipes are still common in the nearby housing.

    Lead pipes, like asbestos, were used so liberally that they are basically impossible to fully get rid of without spending a very significant portion of the GDP on it. So we just wait until we have to fully rebuild the street to replace the pipes.

    gravitas_deficiency,

    You have no idea.

    Also, leaded gas was a thing for, like, most of a century. And it’s still used in avgas.

    Fedizen,

    republicans now replacing their nonlead pipes with lead pipes

    Asafum,

    “Tonight on Hannity: Liberals want to take your Lead away!! The Romans used lead everywhere and they were a gigantic empire! Leave it to stupid liberals to think they know better than our ancestors! Take Back Our Lead!”

    PhAzE,

    Feels like they did that years ago.

    frezik,

    My city got rid of lead pipes years ago, and now I’m mad other cities are getting free money to replace them.

    ^(This post is about student loans)^

    blanketswithsmallpox,

    I hate scientists because they figured out the cure for cancer before my meemaw died. All my homies hate scientists. It probably makes you gay anyway.

    phoenixz,

    Oh noes, others get help now while I did not? I hate everybody

    TheUncannyObserver,

    It’ll be interesting to see all these lead pipes replaced, and watch the amount of religious people take a nosedive afterwards.

    takeda,

    It will have an effect in decades. The people that got affected are unlikely to get better. The biggest damage is being exposed to lead during childhood.

    TheUncannyObserver,

    Yeah, but decades is a blink of the eye, as these things are measured. And honestly, I don’t think a fair amount of Congress has even one more decade left in them.

    cm0002,

    I think we’re starting to see this effect from the lead we removed throughout the 80s, everything from crime to religion has been falling for the past 2 decades.

    I don’t think it was all lead, but I think it’s playing a decent part.

    Alexstarfire, (edited )

    I doubt it. While lead isn’t ideal for delivering water, it’s not as bad as you think. Once scale builds up in the pipe it didn’t leech lead. The problem Flint had is they switched water sources and destroyed the scale so it went back to bare lead.

    I wouldn’t install new lead pipes but my point is that many old lead ones are probably fine. Ones that aren’t fine so need to be replace though.

    maniclucky,

    I’ve seen this comment before. My counter: can you assure me that, for example, a new homeowner that doesn’t know better won’t disturb the scale? They won’t have a leaky faucet and mess with the pipes? Or something like Flint doesn’t happen ever again where necessary infrastructure changes necessitate disturbing the scale?

    This ‘solution’ only ‘works’ if you leave it completely alone and never touch it. So don’t get new appliances, never have a plumber fix some things, never update that water main that’s gonna break down any time now. It’s a very short sighted ‘solution’ to the problem. I’d hazard it’s a good argument for triage. Cities that need new infrastructure anyway go first kind of thing. But fobbing it off as ‘its fine’ isn’t ok.

    ricecake,

    I don’t think they were saying that we shouldn’t replace them, but rather that it’s unlikely to have a marked impact on things like religious adherence.

    For the most part, the concerning lead is in the municipal portion of the water supply, not in the areas a homeowner can disturb. (Not all of course, but it was largely phased out of home construction in the 30s). Replacing appliances or having a plumber work aren’t going to cause issues, and since the 80s having a service line or municipal water main break is a quick way to get non-lead installed.
    Lead doesn’t contaminate water super fast, the water needs to be in contact with it for a bit before concentrations start to rise to immediately actionable levels. That’s why the biggest source of concern for contamination are municipal water mains and home service lines: water doesn’t flow as quickly so it can accumulate more contamination, and there’s a larger volume making it harder to flush the contaminated water. (If you have lead household plumbing, letting the water run for a minute or two will reduce the concentration below actionable levels. You can’t do that if the contamination is from the water main)

    You are entirely correct that pipe scale is not a “solution”.
    There’s no safe concentration of lead, which is why we need to replace all the pipes, a process that started in the 80s. Usually doing it as part of routine maintenance is fine because it’s not usually an emergency. The original plan to be done by the 2060s made a lot of assumptions about infrastructure maintenance being done on time, and people not making short sighted dumbfuck choices like the Flint emergency financial manager.

    So we need to fix it as quickly as is reasonable, but we don’t need to freak out over it, and we probably won’t really see many marked changes like we did with leaded gas, just “no huge catastrophe”, and average water lead levels dropping from 3 parts per billion to 1 or less.

    Alexstarfire,

    I don’t see how a homeowner could affect pipes upstream like that. I have been under the assumption they are talking about replacing city/count/state pipes and not pipes that landowners are responsible for. The article doesn’t state either way.

    And there is no guarantee shit won’t get fucked up. But actually listening to people when they say what you want to do will fuck up the pipes sure helps. So, the opposite of what Flint did.

    maniclucky,

    The first time I saw the argument, it was in relation to pipes in one’s home and I’m not an expert on plumbing. I just felt the idea of “leave it alone and it’ll be fine” is a really bad one and that it should be pushed back. I did acknowledge municipal pipes a bit, but my argument could use refinement.

    Alexstarfire,

    IDK how much can even be done with $3 billion. It sounds like a drop in the bucket.

    maniclucky,

    More than 0, and that’s the important part.

    Telodzrum,

    I don’t know how good this is, so I’ll say it’s bad.

    Zehzin,
    @Zehzin@lemmy.world avatar

    And by lead pipe replacement I mean we’re replacing anti protester cop’s batons with lead pipes

    MrBusiness,

    Excuse me, officer. Before you dent my head, was that lead pipe recycled? Excellent, please continue.

    SteefLem,
    @SteefLem@lemmy.world avatar

    The US still has lead pipes for drinking water??? Wtf.

    takeda,

    How else do you explain there are still people voting for trump?

    Zehzin,
    @Zehzin@lemmy.world avatar

    The US Education System

    baronvonj,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    Same underlying deliberate underfunding problem.

    baronvonj,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    Yes. 😕 They were originally coated on the interior so there wasn’t direct exposure of the lead to the water. But lack of funding (in some cases deliberate, see Flint, MI) for maintenance leads to the coating wearing away, resulting in contamination of the water. There’s plenty of Starving The Beast going on with things like this (also see bridges collapsing and public schools failing) by conservatives to try and grift on replacing public infrastructure with private ownership. Pretty disgusting.

    ricecake,

    Purely pedantically: the coating isn’t applied to the pipes, it forms there from a reaction between the water and the pipe material.
    It’s not something that maintained by directly putting it on the pipes, but by managing the composition of the water supply, which they can’t not do.

    www.sedimentaryores.net/…/Lead Solubility.html

    The issue in Flint wasn’t that they cut maintenance funding, but that they cut water supply funding and so the utility switched from Detroit water (fine, stable and nice to pipes) to local river water which had a different acidity which destroyed the coating.

    I agree with all your conclusions, just wanted to let you know why we’re not constantly digging up pipes to fix the coating. 😊

    baronvonj,
    @baronvonj@lemmy.world avatar

    Appreciate the clarification/correction.

    Blackmist,

    It’s OK, they’re only in places like Flint which is full of black people that nobody cares about, or Florida where everyone is already too brain damaged for anybody to really notice the difference.

    ricecake,

    It’s actually not uncommon in industrialized countries, and a lot of countries have similar active projects to phase them out. Flint was a wake-up call to places outside the US as well, so everyone has been accelerating their efforts, since there’s a good example of how bad a “normal” error can make things.

    Other countries don’t often have to advertise that their governments are doing their jobs as much as the US has, since they don’t have as much “all public spending is waste” rhetoric.

    TachyonTele,

    Infrastructure updates? Fuck yeah!

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