Biden Administration to Require Replacing of Lead Pipes Within 10 Years

The main source of lead in the water supply comes from the service lines and goosenecks that connect homes to the water mains. These would be buried deep in your front lawn.

There is already some grant money that people can apply for to replace the connections in front of their house, but solving this problem for real would require utilities to systematically going house to house and digging up front yards at massive expense: ~$5k or more a pop.

Ideally you could save money if you have dedicated crews just going neighborhood by neighborhood and digging up the pipes. But because you are dealing with something outside of the normal utility easement, you are going to be upsetting a lot of residents if you just rip out their yard looking for the thing.

It's a pity that we don't have more community/volunteer organizations in our country that can get this kind of work done. It's something that's going to be ridiculously expensive and time consuming to have professional crews do. But the majority of the work involved is not particularly difficult or hard.

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The Biden administration is proposing new restrictions that would require the removal of virtually all lead water pipes across the country in an effort to prevent another public health catastrophe like the one that came to define Flint, Mich.

The proposal on Thursday from the Environmental Protection Agency would impose the strictest limits on lead in drinking water since federal standards were first set 30 years ago. It would affect about nine million pipes that snake throughout communities across the country.

“This is the strongest lead rule that the nation has ever seen,” Radhika Fox, the E.P.A.’s assistant administrator for water, said in an interview. “This is historic progress.”

Digging up and replacing lead pipes from coast to coast is no small undertaking. The E.P.A. estimates the price at $20 billion to $30 billion over the course of a decade. The rule would require the nation’s utilities — and most likely their ratepayers — to absorb most of that cost, but $15 billion is available from the 2021 infrastructure law to help them pay for it.

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