Today, Explained - Get the lead out

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

The Biden administration wants all lead pipes ripped up. It’ll take billions of dollars and rarely seen cooperation among government agencies. We ask UC Berkeley’s David Sedlak and American University’s Karen Baehler whether the plan is a pipe dream. This episode was produced by Isabel Angell, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Anouck Dussaud, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Noel King Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are more than 9 million lead pipes delivering water to homes in the United States. It's not great. We know that lead is bad for us. And in fact, the Biden White House has spent a lot of time talking about it. Over the years, I have traveled around the country and I have met many parents to talk about this very issue. So many parents, parents who were worried that every time they turned on the faucet to get their child a glass of water, that they may be filling that glass with poison.

And then recently, Biden's EPA upped the ante in a big way. Here's what it's proposing, that all of the lead pipes in this country be ripped up and replaced in the next 10 years? It's ambitious. It'll be expensive. Is it even possible? Ahead on Today Explained, what it would take to get the lead out. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino.

Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca It's today explained. Noelle King here with David Sedlak, who teaches in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. David studies water infrastructure and also why it's such a problem that lead is a big part of our water infrastructure. There are many things that lead does to the human body, but the one that we're most worried about when it comes to drinking water or environmental exposures is lead's action as a neurotoxin. It's especially toxic for children during their development. And exposure to very low levels of lead can result in reduced IQ and behavioral problems and other kinds of health effects that can follow someone throughout their entire life. Okay, so it's acting on the brain.

The brain is one of the places where it has the largest impact, especially in developing children. If lead is as dangerous as you've just described, how did we end up with it transporting our drinking water into our houses? Well, lead's been around and associated with our drinking water for thousands of years. Solway, Marcus, can you believe we finally have running water in our villa? All thanks to these incredible new lead pipes. Our Roman engineers really are the best. Hail Neptune. It was the Romans who pioneered some of the first systems to send water into cities.

And a lot of the pipe work and valves and ways to move water involved the use of lead. In fact, the word plumber comes from the Latin word plumbum for the name for lead itself. So lead was essentially synonymous with the piping and valves and other types of infrastructure used to move water because it was so easy to work with and malleable. You have to remember, in ancient times, there weren't a lot of the modern materials that we're used to today. There were no plastics, there weren't the high-strength iron and metal and steel, and so lead was this readily available material that could be molded into all kinds of shapes and perhaps, most importantly,

could withstand pressure. And so it was the obvious choice for pipes. In 2000 years, why didn't we make any advancements? How did it end up that here in the United States, a lot of the houses on my street, I know this for a fact, I was able to look it up, they have lead pipes bringing them water? As the modern water infrastructures that we built in cities in the 19th and 20th century grew, lead was the only real option, especially for the pipes that take water from the street into people's homes because they had to be flexible and malleable and easily installed. Basically, at some point in the 20th century, people came to recognize that lead might be an issue, and also other types of pipes became cheaper and easier

to install, like copper service lines. And so the places where we find the most lead water pipes and service lines is in the oldest cities. So you'll find the lead pipes particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Okay, so for a long time, we're just crack-a-lacking along making our pipes out of lead. And then at a certain point, we start to realize it is not just a substance that we make things out of. It's actually really bad for us. Can you tell us the how and the when of this happening, this realization? Well, the recognition that lead was a wide-scale health problem actually isn't related to drinking water at all. It was something that happened in the mid-1960s as scientists started to understand

the health effects of leaded gasoline. What comes from leaded exhaust is a polluted atmosphere and damage to children, like brain damage, learning disabilities. Estimates? 300,000 children have levels of lead in their systems that are considered dangerous. So in the 1960s and through up until the mid-1970s, lead was an additive in gasoline to make the engine run more efficiently. Where you could still get leaded premium. The spirit of 76. And it was distributed all over because it would come out of people's tailpipes. And so children had high levels of blood lead through the 1970s. And when scientists started looking

at where the lead was coming from, they decided that a lot of it had come from leaded gasoline and some of it had come from lead paint. So back in that era, a lot of the paint that was used on surfaces, particularly surfaces that got a lot of traffic, like the kind of paint that you would use on your kitchen cabinets,

were made out of lead-containing materials. It's pure white lead. It's Dutch boy. And it's ready to use. This new paint, like the famous paste, gives your home the long-lasting protection of pure white lead. So there were lots of sources of lead in the 1960s, and as we became aware of the fact that this was having health impacts, there was an effort to get it out of gasoline. Cars built after 1974 use unleaded. And once we recognized that that wouldn't do enough to remove the lead, people started to ask questions of why children still were showing up with lead every once in a while. And that turned people's attention to the possibility

that the lead pipes and the lead-containing solder in plumbing fixtures might also be an important source of lead exposure. And so the government's now realized, okay, there were a couple of sources of lead getting into us. Gasoline and paint are now, we've sort of cut them out. What did the government do when it realized the drinking water was a problem too? Well, the obvious thing to do would have been to say, let's take the lead pipes out.

But people realized pretty quickly that there were a lot of lead pipes and they would be hard to get to because they were not the big pipes that ran under the street, but they were the pipes that ran through properties and also that people had lead solder and lead fixtures inside their homes. And it's pretty unusual for the government to come into your home and try to repair your plumbing and pipes. And so one of the responses of the federal government was to pass a regulation, the so-called lead and copper rule in 1991. And this was an EPA regulation that told water utilities how to manage the chemistry of their drinking water. So rather than pulling the lead pipes out, we could change the chemistry of the drinking water to make it less conducive to corrosion. And that process of corrosion is one of the ways in which lead gets released into tap water. So the idea was that you could change the chemistry of the water and make sure that the lead wasn't being released into the tap water. Did it work? Did the

government's lead and copper rule and mitigation and treatment techniques, did that improve the situation? So the lead and copper rule made a big difference in many places, but there were some places where there were some other things going on in water systems that had unintended consequences. And the one that probably had the biggest impact on the way people think about controlling lead release from pipes happened in Washington, D.C. in the early 2000s. And the city of Washington was struggling to meet the EPA regulations on chlorine disinfection byproducts. That is, when we add chlorine to water to disinfect it, it produces small amounts of chemicals that can be carcinogenic or can lead to miscarriages and other things you don't want in your tap water. And so the city of

Washington switched the form of chlorine that they were adding to the water before sending it out in the pipes from so-called free chlorine or basically bleach to something called chloramines. And when they did that, that had an unintended impact on the release of lead from the lead-containing service lines, and the lead concentration shot up, and lots of people, especially children, were exposed to high levels of lead in the period immediately after the conversion from chlorine to chloramines. All right, so this is, we've got this issue in D.C. In my adult lifetime, we've had this crisis in Flint. Tens of thousands of residents exposed to high levels of lead when the city starts getting its water from the Flint River. In Newark, you had elevated levels

of lead in the public schools. These were all incidents that made big news. The public was aware of them. Why is it only now in 2023 that President Biden's EPA is saying we need to get all of the lead pipes out within the next 10 years? Why did it take this long? Well, the crises in Washington and Flint and Newark turned public attention to lead and they finally built the momentum and political support for the idea that, yes, we could afford something we need to do because no matter how hard we try, people are going to make mistakes and that's going to lead to lead exposure and that's just not something that we can tolerate. Folks, this isn't complicated. Every person in this country deserves to be able to turn on a faucet

and have clean drinking water. Through the infrastructure law, we're making historic investments to make sure that they can. President Joe Biden, before him, David Sedlak of Berkeley. Coming up, surely this isn't possible. A researcher has some good news. Thank you. and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join RAMP. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. If you're a finance manager, you're probably used to having to toggle between multiple disjointed tools just to keep track of everything. And sometimes that means there's limited visibility on business spend. I don't know what any of that means, but Ramp might be able to help. Ramp is a corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your back pocket. Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts, categorizes your expenses in real time. You can say goodbye to manual expense reports. You will never have

to chase down a receipt again. You can customize spending limits and restrictions so your employees are empowered to purchase what your business needs. And you can have peace of mind. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained. Cards are issued by Sutton Bank, a member of the FDIC, and terms and conditions do apply. It's Today Explained with Karen Baylor, a scholar at American University who studies environmental justice. Karen, what's in this new Biden EPA proposal? There's a lot in it, and a lot of it is genuinely

new. I think we might even say this is a non-incremental policy change, which is why a lot of people are excited about it. So really, the headline, I suppose you'd have to say, is there is a requirement now from the federal level for all lead service lines, which are the lead water pipes that lead from the water main in the middle of the street to people's buildings. All of those lead pipes have to be removed completely, all the way, the full length of the pipe in 10 years. And 10 years is a much quicker timeline than what we were looking at in the past. So the new proposed revised rule is full of potential improvements. Okay, so you referred to this as non-incremental, and you weren't even being snarky, which I appreciate, but non-incremental would seem to also mean somewhat ambitious.

This seems ambitious. Is it possible? Ambitious is an excellent word. We could also say, however, that it's late. I think it is possible if lots of people do the right things and a lot of work is done. Folks, this isn't complicated. Every person in this country deserves to be able to turn on a faucet and have clean drinking water. And through the infrastructure law, we're making historic investments to make sure that they can. I want you to walk us through exactly what goes into replacing these lead pipes and what they're replaced with. Tell me what I might be seeing if I'm walking through my own street here in Washington, D.C., and the Biden administration's proposal is going through, the lead pipes are coming out.

What's this going to look like? Well, you'll be walking down your street and you'll see a lot of trucks from D.C. Water, which is our local utility. And what they'll be doing is digging up the middle of the street because these lead service lines, as I mentioned before, run all the way from the water main, which is the great big pipe that runs down the middle of the street, to the house. So they have to dig up the street, and then they'll dig a trench all the way from the street up to your building. And then they pull out the lead pipes and have to handle them very carefully, of course, because they are a hazardous material. And then they will replace those pipes, reconnect to the water main,

reconnect to the house. Usually the replacements are made of copper. And then, of course, they have to cover everything up and they have to replace your sidewalks and replace the street. It ought to be able to be done in a week, you know, for a whole block if they're doing it all at one time. It seems like this could be expensive. How much money is going to be available to states to get this project done? And where's that money coming from? The cost is obviously very much a factor. There are so many different sources of money. It's kind of mind boggling. And this is part of the challenge for localities is to figure out how to sort through all of the different pots of money that are available. Fortunately, we have the bipartisan infrastructure bill or law, I should call it, that was passed recently.

And that contains $15 billion nationwide for this work specifically, specifically this lead work. It's also interesting, many people don't note that that law also authorizes $50 billion for water infrastructure in general. And so that's good news for utilities because it means that that money will take pressure off of other parts of their capital budget so that they could potentially spend more on the lead pipes. Some cities have put in money into lead pipe removal directly from their municipal budgets. And then our EPA has a state revolving water fund that funds this work. Of course, the final pot that's so important is potentially raising the rates on water customers. And that nearly always needs to be one piece of the whole recipe. What else is needed beyond money? If we can say, all right, the money is doable,

what are the additional hurdles? Well, one of the hurdles that you find in this new rule is the issue of legal access to the property itself. Generally, about half of the pipe is sitting on public land, and about half of it is sitting on private property. And there are various types of obstacles to that. And this varies hugely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction in terms of who owns that pipe. But in the past, we know that utilities were sometimes given not the best information about those restrictions. A lot of utilities were told, for example, that they could not spend ratepayer money to do anything on private land. But then a recent analysis just the last couple of years from some researchers at the Emmett Center at Harvard, the Center on Environmental Law, and also the Environmental Defense Fund, they looked at laws, policies, and court decisions in 13 states that have lots and lots of lead pipes. And what they found really was that those policies did allow the spending of ratepayer money on private land for lead removal because, of course, it's a public good.

It's a public benefit. It's not a private benefit only to the homeowner. Okay, so there are some very interesting obstacles here. You studied the lead line replacement program here in Washington, D.C. What were you studying exactly? What were you watching for? So in that study, we were looking specifically at the difference between full replacements and partial replacements of pipes. D.C. Water replaced water lines serving thousands of homes from 2004 to 2008. But homeowners were responsible for replacing any lead pipes on their side of the property line. It could be about $2,500 on average per house.

It's a lot of money, you know, when you're living on a tight budget. And so what the utility would do in those circumstances is a partial replacement. So the people living in the house, you know, still have a lot of exposure to lead because of the piece of the pipe that's on private property. The CDC says partial pipe replacement can sometimes cause more harm than good. The study found that children living in homes with partial lead pipe replacement had elevated lead levels in their blood. What we found was that in the districts within the city, known as wards, the eight wards of Washington, D.C.,

in the districts that had lower income, lower median income, and higher percentages of populations who identify as African American and black, they had more partial replacements and fewer full replacements. Now, what this essentially means, right, is that the people living in those parts of the city are receiving a less effective remediation and they're exposed to public health hazards that other parts of the city are not exposed to. So it's a real equity concern. Now, I should mention that our data was

from 2009 to 2018. So that was during the period when partial replacements were frequently done and accepted, and the cost sharing was in place. Fortunately, D.C. changed that rule in 2018. Oh, now D.C. is paying for homeowners to get it done? They are. They are. Yes, starting in October of 2019, they've been doing that. Okay. So what could other cities, a lot of cities are going to go through this, what could they learn from Washington, D.C.? Well, they absolutely could learn a lot. And, you know, when I read through the EPA's new revised rule, I think the EPA learned a lot from D.C. as well and from other

places in the country that have been successful about this. One of the big takeaways, I think, for other cities is that you really have to be quite deliberate in thinking about the equity implications of your lead removal program. How you do it, you know, really matters. In, you know, back in the old days, as we say, it was logical. You know, they'd say, well, we're just going to go to the places that have the most lead pipes. And we're going to try to get as much lead out of the ground as possible. If that means we do partials, then we do partials. If it means that, you know, we send our crews into wealthier, wider parts of a city because people there are, you know, willing to pay for these, then, you know, that's what we

do because our goal is to get the lead out of the ground. And so I think what we're learning, though, is that those approaches end up having unintended and pretty severe impacts on the equity patterns of access to this service. And so I hope other cities will learn that to target those neighborhoods where you really need to start doing the work. I think when people hear about proposals like this, oftentimes we're skeptical of government. We say this isn't going to happen even if the money is there. Government is such a mess. Agencies don't coordinate. People are suspicious.

You're telling me you've seen success stories. Can you tell me one of those success stories? Well, sure. One of the, I think, really inspiring ones is Madison, Wisconsin. In Madison, they started really wanting to remove the lead pipes in the early 90s. Now, the lead and copper rule, you know, was brand new at that point. And immediately, the city of Madison, Wisconsin is thinking, we're not just going to add chemicals to our water in order to avoid lead leaching.

We actually want to get these lead pipes out of the ground. We had done some studies using our water and demonstrated that there really was limited benefit. The alternative was to use orthophosphate. And as we know, that is what triggers eutrophication or the algae growth in Madison area lakes. So they really started the actual removals in 2001. And they had about 8,000 pipes that needed to be taken out. And it took them about 10 years. And it was a Herculean task. Madison is a model for the rest of the country?

I would say so. I mean, we made a decision 20 plus years ago to take out the lead. We don't have that in our system anymore. Now, Newark, New Jersey then, originally had a time frame of about eight years for replacing all 24,000 of their pipes. The water coming from Yvette Jordan's tap looks pure, but this year, she learned it contained lead levels nearly three times federal rules. The city says it's embarking on a plan to replace lead water pipes, but that will take some time, possibly years, to get all of that done. And they ended up doing it in about three years. Newark has become a national model for replacing lead water lines. We went through a

storm and then the sun came out and, you know, not all storms are there to wash you away, I guess. So, you know, these are just a few of the success stories that I think give us hope that we can scale this up. That was Karen Baylor of American University. Today's episode was produced by Isabel Angel and edited by Matthew Collette. It was engineered by David Herman and fact-checked by Anouk Dussault. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.