The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.
“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.
It’s such a staggering amount of work and money that I think is hard for most people to comprehend. Though, if dispersed properly, will benefit local workers as they usually require they get paid prevailing wage. Which can be pretty fucking high depending on where you live.
And even once all of the lead service lines are replaced, that’s just from main to the meter at most. All of the internal fixtures are the owner’s responsibility, and you better believe tons of old houses are still full of lead pipes.
This is something that is going to take decades, and you’re absolutely right that we should have started decades ago.
Germany outlawed installing lead pipes in 1973, this year operating them got outlawed, though already ten years ago the permissible lead concentrations were so low as to be basically impossible achieve if you had even short runs of lead pipes. All the main lines got replaced IIRC in the 80s, latest, can’t find numbers right now, though apparently they rarely used lead there in the first place.
Also, btw, if you’re already digging up water pipes it’s quite easy to install some cable ducts while you’re at it, put all those power and telco lines underground and stop looking like a 3rd world country. That kind of last-mile infrastructure should be managed by municipal-level monopoly, if an ISP wants to sell you something they can hook up to the municipality’s IXP and rent the rest of the way to your house at fixed, fair, rates. It’s a natural monopoly: It makes as much economical sense to run more than two power or telco connections to a house as it makes to run more than one street to your house: Costs a lot of money to run that second street and as soon as you did your competitor is going to lower their prices, which they can do because their investment already amortised, and leave you stranded with your investment because why would the residents of the house switch to your offering if your competitor is cheaper. There’s an opportunity when switching from copper to fiber but fiber will last for the next 1000 years so it’s not really a solution.
Come on now, you’re actually making sense, we don’t do that here in the US. Money and the amount of effort required rule everything.
It’s just another case of “it costs too much to fix it, so just keep slapping a bandaid on it and kick it down the road”, just like the rest of our infrastructure. Yet we have billions available to “defend” ourselves 🙄
More than billions, I think our defense budget was $766 billion in 2022 alone, at around 12% which was actually lower than 2021 which cost taxpayers 15% and 801 billion.
It’s… it’s a big big problem, especially in a time where the U.S hasn’t had a war on it’s soil in a long, long time.
I get that we go to other countries and help out a bit but we have issues on our own turf killing us from the inside.
I actually just listened to a podcast about NYCs water supply. To back up your claim, they started pipe #3 around the 1970s and only recently finished (or should have by 2021, the episode was from before then)
Portland replaced most of its water and sewer pipes, AND built a massive 21 ft diameter sewer bypass and storage line 250 ft below the city over the course of about 10 years. When I was living there, the city went up and down every building on every street in my neighborhood to put in new sewer and water connections. Those crews were fast.
NYC is just too big, old and bureaucratic compared to other US cities.
Doing whole cities and streets in one go is always the better option: The crews know what they’re doing, all the material and materiel is already on site and scheduling is uncomplicated.
Norderstedt’s utility hooked up the whole city to fibre 1999 to 2002, total investment 43 million Euro for just over 80k inhabitants, roughly 540 Euro per head… but that number is a bit misleading the utility only made a loss of 10 million over that time span, or 125 Euro per inhabitant. A couple of years later all the money was recouped and they started expanding to neighbouring villages and the north of Hamburg. Asymmetric gigabit for 50 bucks (upload actually costs ISPs money while download gets paid by whoever’s upload that is which is why asymmetric makes sense even if the connection is symmetric).
Kinda hard to do nowadays as the second Deutsche Telekom gets wind of any such initiative they suddenly decide that laying down fibre to replace their copper would, after all, make economical sense. Which is the reason why elsewhere here I’m advocating for municipal monopolies: Municipalities should be able to say “ok you didn’t want to invest here, now it’s too late you don’t get to compete”.
(And just in case btw you thought T-Mobile was a grand and nice company: No it isn’t. It’s a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary. The only reason they are customer-friendly in the US is because they’re up against the baby bells there, in Germany Deutsche Telekom is the bell, created by splitting up and privatising the postal service, they own pretty much all the copper everywhere in the country).