Advocates for clean water are celebrating Tuesday’s announcement from the White House that will require public drinking water systems to identify and replace lead water pipes within ten years.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements also require more rigorous testing of drinking water and a lower threshold for communities to take action on lead in drinking water.
Environmental Advocates NY Director of Clean Water Rob Hayes tells WAMC’s Lucas Willard the announcement will dramatically improve drinking water quality…
This is a public health accomplishment that advocates have been focusing on for decades. Finally, we are about to make lead pipes be a thing of the past. You know, there have been 500,000 lead service lines in New York, contaminating drinking water every single day, poisoning generations of children. And finally, thanks to the Biden administration, that is about to end in the next 10 years or so. So, we are incredibly excited about this new announcement, and there's gonna be a lot of work here to do in New York to make this a reality. So
The EPA has also announced $116 million in new federal funding to support clean drinking water improvements through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, that's for New York alone. But how do you feel about this money being made available to communities in time? Right now, New York is also making its own push. So, when do you expect this money to actually be rolled out?
It's going to take a lot of money to get these pipes out of the ground. We know that the sooner that the state is able to make funding available to help communities dig these pipes up, the better. We know that New York is getting about $500 million from the federal, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to jumpstart this work, but that's only going to address a fraction of the problem. You know, there's going to be at least $2.5 billion needed in here in New York to get to 100% lead pipe replacement, and that's where we think that New York State and Governor Hochul have a really key role to play. The state needs to step up with state level funding to help make these replacements affordable for communities. We know that the state budget is just around the corner in January, and we're hoping that Governor Hochul makes funding clean water and funding lead pipe replacements a top priority in this upcoming budget.
Now, under the New York Lead Pipe Right to Know Act, there is a deadline that is quickly approaching, by October 16, municipalities must submit their inventory of lead service lines to the state. What is your sense of the amount of inventorying that's actually been happening? I know there's been communities like Troy, where this has been very much in the public eye, or Poughkeepsie, but we're talking about municipalities across the board, big and small, and a lot of people may not have had such a close eye on things. So how does EANY feel about this inventory process right now?
We know that water utilities have been hard at work finding out where lead pipes are located in their distribution systems, and next week is that big deadline where they're required to submit their inventories. And in the next couple of months, we are going to know a lot more about the scale and the extent of the lead pipes crisis. Here in New York, there are still going to be, however, a lot of pipes that utilities still don't know whether or not they are lead, and that's going to be another challenge in the coming years, figuring out at all of those homes whether or not there's a lead hazard present.
So, could it be that if someone does not comply, or there is an inability to get that information about a lead service line that a municipality may say, ‘We have to dig it up and take a look ourselves?’ And obviously that comes with some expenses.
That's absolutely a possibility. You know, under the new EPA regulation, water utilities are required to find out what is the material of all of those unknown service lines. So, it's a lot more efficient when water utilities can be communicating with customers and getting access to that information, but at the end of the day, we need to know where this lead is, and water utilities are going to have to do everything possible, including physical excavation and examination to make sure that we're identifying lead pipes and ultimately removing every single one of them.
Now, Rob, has EANY done any advocacy to make sure that New York state residents are paying attention, that homeowners are complying with maybe those postcards that they received in their mailbox from their municipality or utility?
Absolutely. We're trying to highlight in as many channels as possible that this needs to be top of mind for New Yorkers to be, you know, if they have the ability going into their basement and seeing whether that pipe sticking out of the wall might be made of lead, but it'll also really be important that customers are engaged with utilities when they're planning these lead pipe replacements. You know, it's going to take some coordination between New Yorkers and water utilities to get them in the home, to disconnect the piping. You know, there might be some disruption among the streets and some of the lawns. So really making sure that people are working together is going to make this replacement program happen a lot faster and happen a lot more equitably.
