Experts See Big Holes In Federal Lead Rules

Experts say state and federal laws are not strong enough to protect water consumers from lead contamination.

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism investigated how lead is leaching from aging pipes in Wisconsin and whether rules might be able to keep consumers safe.

“At least 176,000 so-called lead service lines connect older Wisconsin homes to the iron water mains that deliver municipal water, according to an estimate by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Milwaukee alone, where 60 percent of the state’s known lead-poisoned children live, has 70,000 lead service lines,” the report said.

And the rules on the books are deeply flawed, according to the report. Regulators say the Lead and Copper Rule, the 25-year-old federal law, is failing in various ways, the report said:

• Methods for sampling often fail to detect the highest level of lead in a consumer’s home.
• Too few homes are sampled, and those that are may not be in the neighborhoods most at risk.
• The requirement that utilities replace some lead lines when they exceed federal thresholds may actually cause dangerous increases of lead in drinking water.

Lead is a widespread feature of U.S. infrastructure. An article in the American Journal of Public Health explained: “Although most cities in the United States were moving away from lead water pipes by the 1920s, it appears that this trend was not universal. National model plumbing codes approved lead into the 1970s and 1980s, and most water systems based their regulations on those codes.”

It is unclear just how many lead pipes remain in service across the U.S. The U.S. EPA surveyed 153 public water systems on this question in 1984, according to the journal article:

The number of lead service lines installed in US cities since the 1920s probably cannot be estimated with any degree of certainty. In the survey, approximately 30 percent of the respondents could not offer any estimate of the number of lead service lines remaining in their cities. Nevertheless, it can be stated that with so many large cities that continued to permit the use of lead pipes, such as Boston; Chicago; San Diego, CA; Philadelphia; and Milwaukee among others, the number is likely quite significant.

The lead crisis that hit Flint, MI, has focused regulators on this issue. Water Online examined how Flint fallout is affecting the regulatory landscape: “The federal Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) is destined for changes attributable to hard times in Flint, MI, and the agreement from an EPA advisory council that lessons must be learned from the latest crisis.”

For the latest news on lead in drinking water, visit Water Online’s Drinking Water Contaminant Removal Solutions Center.