A decade after the Flint, Michigan, water crisis raised alarms about the continuing dangers of lead in tap water, President Joe Biden is setting a 10-year deadline for cities across the nation to replace their lead pipes, finalizing an aggressive approach aimed at ensuring that drinking water is safe for all Americans.
Biden is expected to announce the final Environmental Protection Agency rule Tuesday in the swing state of Wisconsin during the final month of a tight presidential campaign. The announcement highlights an issue — safe drinking water — that Kamala Harris has prioritized as vice president and during her presidential campaign. The new rule supplants a looser standard set by former President Donald Trump’s administration that did not include a universal requirement to replace lead pipes.
Biden and Harris believe it’s “a moral imperative” to ensure that everyone has access to clean drinking water, EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters Monday. “We know that over 9 million legacy lead pipes continue to deliver water to homes across our country. But the science has been clear for decades: There is no safe level of lead in our drinking water.’’
I mean good, but also Jesus Christ how is this even an issue in the states?
I always heard that Cook county Illinois has them MANDATED (yes, mandatory for the stretch of pipe that connects the trunk to the house) in the code because only union members have the training to work on them.
You’ve met us, right? Don’t we seem a little off? Now you know why.
It’s expensive and time consuming to replace pipes. Many cities don’t have accurate maps of their pipes either. The actual danger from the existing pipes is extremely low under normal circumstances.
Along with the other reasons, people were relatively content with the excuse that the layer of buildup within the pipes would protect from the lead.
People forget that the proximate cause of the lead contamination in Flint wasn’t the pipes themselves (which had been in use, relatively safely, for decades), but instead that locals in charge of the water system got forcibly replaced with an emergency manager appointed by the (Republican) governor, who ordered the system to be switched from sourcing water from Detroit (Lake Huron) to the Flint River to save money and failed to treat it with the usual corrosion-control additives that Detroit had been using.
To blame the pipes is to let the Republicans off the hook for their miserliness, incompetence and systemic racism.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know
https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2016/01/epa_official_says_he_was.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/chemical-study-ground-zero-house-flint-water-crisis-180962030/
The argument isn’t just about acute or symptomatic exposure, but any exposure.
Lead can bioaccumulate within our bodies and while we may not yet know to what extent of health issues it can pose, we do know it is a neurotoxic substance.
What you are arguing is the equivalence of putting all of the blame on a construction team for lead/asbestos exposure when neither should have been used in the beginning. Yes, Flint should have been handled better, but the pipes also shouldn’t have been leaded in the first place.
Big business pays off everyone from the top down to ignore that the issue is killing everyone, from the top down.