America’s lead water pipes, all 6 million of them, is one of its biggest infrastructure problems. Lead leaches into drinking water, affecting water quality and children’s health.
Lead can cause fetal deaths in pregnant women, prenatal abnormalities, and children who have ingested it can suffer from cognitive and behavioural abnormalities.
What happened in Michigan is an example of how lead contamination can become a public health crisis.
Replacing 100% of the country’s lead pipes across the states has been one of President Biden’s infrastructure goals.
According to the Bloomberg Law article, the health risks posed by lead pipes to both children and adults are enough reasons for its removal.
The states with the most lead water lines are in the Rust Balt across the Midwest. Illinois leads the states with the most lead pipes at 730,000, Ohio with 650,000, and Michigan with 460,000.
To locate and replace these lead pipes across the United States, the EPA set up the Lead and Copper Rule in 1991, which set outs the lead pipe replacement standard.
However, locating all the lead pipes in the country presents a considerable challenge because some cities did not record them well. To remedy the problem would require a visual inspection of every house’s service line.
To help the EPA do its job, the administration wants Congress to invest $45 billion into EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund and in Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act grants as pathways to replace all the lead pipes, including those located in schools.
However, some environmental groups say that the administration’s budget is not enough to replace all the lead pipes in the country because the scope of the problem is not fully known.
While it is true that America’s drinking water is safe and generally well-managed, it is also true that tens of millions of its citizens rely on the public drinking water system, which uses aging lead pipes.
This begs the question if these lead pipes pose serious health risks, why are they still there.
The answer is simple. Removing and replacing all the lead pipes will potentially cost up to trillions of dollars.
A study published by the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Department of Health finds that spending money in removing all the lead pipes in the state turns out to be an excellent investment that will yield good returns.
“This report estimates costs for removing the two most significant sources of lead to be between $1.52 billion and $4.12 billion over 20 years. Estimated benefits associated with removing lead from water include improvements in population mental acuity and IQ (and resulting increases in lifetime productivity, earnings and taxes paid). The projected range of benefits is $4.24 billion to $8.47 billion over 20 years, although there are a number of reasons to believe these benefits may be underestimated. Therefore, resources allocated to reducing lead in drinking water would be expected to yield a return on investment of at least twofold.”
Although the study’s findings pertain to Minnesota, it shows the benefit of removing lead pipes that other states, particularly those with high lead pipe fixtures, can also profit from.
Knowing the assets you manage through asset inventory or register, which also includes the condition and performance of your assets, is the foundation of a good infrastructure management practice.
Once this asset information is established, the next challenge, as examined by the article, is to proceed with the next viable steps, which in this case, is to remove all aging lead pipes throughout the states.
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