The Environmental Protection Agency will soon strengthen lead in drinking water regulations, after decades when they essentially remained the same. Those decades have included numerous crises involving lead poisoning from tainted water, including Flint, Michigan and Washington, DC.
FILE - A cut lead pipe is pulled from a dig site for testing at a home in Royal Oak, Mich., on Nov. 16, 2021. The Environmental Protection Agency will soon strengthen lead in drinking water regulations. FILE - A lead pipe is shown after being replaced by a copper water supply line to a home in Flint, Mich., July 20, 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency will soon strengthen lead in drinking water regulations.
Now the agency is aiming to further reduce lead levels in drinking water and tighten a rule that failed to prevent recent drinking water crises in cities like Flint, Michigan and. Although the specifics aren’t public, the agency says it will propose requiring that utilities actively replace harmful lead pipes., lines that connect water mains under the street to homes and businesses and are responsible for most of the lead that seeps into drinking water.
The updated rules will arrive as the federal government attacks lead on several fronts, with announcements about the dangers in aviation fuel and proposed stricter limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and child-care facilities. After Levin’s analysis was leaked in 1986, she said the EPA distributed her work to members of Congress.Levin was part of a contingent of officials known as the “lead mafia.” The group pushed for strong lead regulations, arguing that many people would benefit, so even small health improvements were worthwhile.
But it was actually a lead crisis in Washington, D.C., about a decade earlier that first shattered public trust. “The Washington, D.C., lead-in-water crisis was far more severe than Flint in every respect,” said Yanna Lambrinidou, a medical anthropologist at Virginia Tech and co-founder of the Campaign for Lead Free Water. At the time, she said, there was a false mantra that lead in drinking water wasn’t that harmful compared to other sources like paint and could be ignored.
“CDC’s work was used in other cities with elevated water lead levels to dampen citizen concerns,” the congressional report said.
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