The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it will spend $3 billion to help states and territories identify and replace lead water pipes.
“The science is clear, there is no safe level of lead exposure, and the primary source of harmful exposure in drinking water is through lead pipes,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said, announcing the funding Thursday in an agency news release.
Lead poses serious health risks and can cause irreversible brain damage in children.
The funding announced Thursday is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2021. It sets aside $15 billion overall to identify and replace lead pipes.
No, my thought is we need to do it at a reasonable deliberate pace that also replaces the failing cast iron water mains. 10 years is far too tight a timeline without massive costs and major employee stress. This simply isn’t even a good plan, it’s knee jerk reaction.
And I can tell you, I am a longtime engineer for a water company. I am getting thrown a ton of extra work for no additional compensation. We’ve seen massive departures to other sectors from my fellow fed up employees.
And frankly I’m upset that lead paint is off the hook. No mandate to completely remove it. No massive fines for failing to get rid of that. And in my city, that’s the actual cause of lead poisoning.
Your tree is more important to you personally than the forest, but that isn’t a a valid reason to argue against positive and necessary infrastructure refurbishment.
Of course you are right to be angry that there hasn’t been a comparable current funding measure passed for lead paint for your city yet, but that doesn’t take anything away from the good that replacing lead pipes will do.
And you ignore all the negatives of this plan because there are positives, so long as someone else does the work and someone else pays for it (at least until you get pissed your water bill went up 200% because federal funding ran out). And I’m betting people will be mad when their 120 year old water main starts breaking constantly because we didn’t bother to replace it when we were digging up the street anyway.
I’m not ignoring the negatives, I’m disregarding possible scenarios that you’re anecdotally hypothesizing could go wrong during a necessary investment in public health and safety that now has funding where it didn’t before.
I’m suggesting you save your ire for the time something goes wrong instead of uselessly condemning an obviously positive step forward in necessary infrastructure refurbishment.
You’re complaining about a necessary positive public measure because it doesn’t conform to what specifically you want.
“Funding has been passed for new textbooks in schools!”
“This is garbage, I want new protractors in schools! I like protractors!”
“Okay Jerry fine, but it’s still nice that we have new textbooks. The old ones were riddled with mold and poisoning our children”.
Maybe you should run for higher office, if you prefer to influence those decisions rather than implement the decisions made by the electorate and their representatives.
No, it’s more like “we’re mandating you buy new textbooks to replace the moldy ones. Here is a check that only covers 20% of the costs. Oh, the ceiling of the school is also collapsing, but we won’t do anything about that. Nor will we fix the mold in the classroom that are also making the kids sick. But celebrate, new textbooks!”
That’s completely inaccurate with what we’ve already covered:
There’s been literally hundreds of billions devoted to the other infrastructure, the “ceiling” in your scenario you are incorrectly pretending is not funded, and multiple funding measures have already passed for decades about fixing “the mold” you’re talking about, lead paint.
Also, if we assume at our peril that your guesstimate 20% is accurate, that is 20% fewer lead pipes poisoning people.
You are still arguing against fixing 20% of the nation’s lead pipes in favor of…not doing anything.
“You can only replace one out of five books? Then let’s not replace any of them”.
Not a great argument.
You are completely misrepresenting me. I’m done
I’m directly responding to your inaccuracies with quotes from your comments in context and responding to them with facts.
That is not misrepresentation.