President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
…
The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
Yes. 😕 They were originally coated on the interior so there wasn’t direct exposure of the lead to the water. But lack of funding (in some cases deliberate, see Flint, MI) for maintenance leads to the coating wearing away, resulting in contamination of the water. There’s plenty of Starving The Beast going on with things like this (also see bridges collapsing and public schools failing) by conservatives to try and grift on replacing public infrastructure with private ownership. Pretty disgusting.
Purely pedantically: the coating isn’t applied to the pipes, it forms there from a reaction between the water and the pipe material.
It’s not something that maintained by directly putting it on the pipes, but by managing the composition of the water supply, which they can’t not do.
http://www.sedimentaryores.net/Pipe Scales/Lead Solubility.html
The issue in Flint wasn’t that they cut maintenance funding, but that they cut water supply funding and so the utility switched from Detroit water (fine, stable and nice to pipes) to local river water which had a different acidity which destroyed the coating.
I agree with all your conclusions, just wanted to let you know why we’re not constantly digging up pipes to fix the coating. 😊
Appreciate the clarification/correction.