EDF Health

Selected tag(s): Lead

Clear communication about lead service line ownership is difficult – but here’s why it really matters

By Sam Lovell / Published: December 10, 2020

Sam Lovell, Project Manager.

Any successful initiative to replace lead service lines (LSLs) – the lead pipes connecting the water main under the street to homes – must be built on clear and consistent communications to residents. This will not only accelerate LSL replacement progress and equip people with information that impacts their health – it will also help build trust.

Many residents likely don’t even know what an LSL is, let alone that they need to take proactive steps if they want it fully replaced. In most communities, ownership of the water service line is split between the drinking water utility and the resident. Fully replacing an LSL entails removing the portions of lead pipe both on public and on private property. A partial replacement (when only one of the sides of an LSL is removed – see image below) is an issue because it can spike lead levels in the short-term and does not have the long-term benefit of reduced lead exposure seen with a full LSL replacement.

When describing LSLs and the replacement process, water systems must explain whether they are referring to the full LSL or only one of the sides, and the implications of this for the resident.

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Posted in Drinking water, Lead / Also tagged | Authors: / Comments are closed

In major step, Chicago announces lead pipe replacement plan – but could it widen the equity gap?

By Lindsay McCormick / Published: October 6, 2020

Lindsay McCormick, Program Manager

In September, Chicago took an important – albeit modest – step towards tackling its colossal number of lead service lines (LSLs) – the lead pipes providing drinking water from the main under the street to homes.

With an estimated 389,900 LSLs, Chicago has more than two times as many LSLs as any other city in the country. In fact, Chicago city code mandated their installation until 1986, when Congress banned it.  Since then, the city has largely turned a blind eye to the problem of existing lead pipes – that is, until now.

On September 10th, Mayor Lightfoot announced the city’s new Lead Service Line Replacement Program, acknowledging the problem and taking initial steps towards fully replacing its lead pipes.  While the starting investment is $19 million, Lightfoot estimates the full cost of the program, including restoration and bringing underground sewerage and water infrastructure up to code, at $8.5 billion. The city currently does not yet have the funds – or a plan – to fully cover the cost. Chicago’s move comes just weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency is slated to release its final revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule.  Read More »

Posted in Drinking water, Lead, Public health / Also tagged , | Comments are closed

ASDWA provides new recommendations to states and utilities for lead service line inventories

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: September 29, 2020

Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director

The Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA) released a new white paper to help states and utilities develop more useful inventories of lead service lines (LSLs). The paper builds on guidance the organization issued in August 2019. ASDWA partnered with BlueConduit to leverage that firm’s experience developing a statistical model for Flint, Michigan that accurately predicted which service lines were made of lead, galvanized steel, plastic or copper.

The guidance is timely as EPA prepares to finalize its Lead and Copper Rule revisions. We anticipate those revisions will require utilities to develop – and make public – inventories that identify the location of each service line made of lead or when the material is unknown and may be lead. Utilities would also be required to notify customers annually if they have a lead or unknown service line. Customers who buy a home and open a new water account would also be notified in the first bill.

The ASDWA/BlueConduit white paper encourages utilities to use five principles to best characterize the uncertainty in their inventories:

  1. Ensuring clean data management and organization;
  2. Not accepting all historical records as truth;
  3. Conducting a representative randomized sample of unverified service lines;
  4. Being transparent in public outreach and reproducibility; and
  5. Demonstrating accuracy on “hold-out sample.”

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Posted in Drinking water, Lead / Also tagged | Comments are closed

New study: Lead reduction prevented up to 99,000 heart disease deaths in 2014 alone

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: September 28, 2020

Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director

[pullquote]EPA needs to estimate reduced heart disease deaths when it evaluates the merits of four upcoming rules addressing lead in water, paint, and air.[/pullquote]

In 2018, we blogged on a study by Lanphear et al. that linked adult blood lead to a jaw-dropping 400,000 heart disease deaths annually. We called on federal regulatory agencies to give serious consideration to this and similar studies to develop a model they can use to quantify the socioeconomic benefits of potential regulatory changes designed to reduce adult exposure to lead. In June, 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) successfully completed the necessary peer review of a model. The review was completed too late to be incorporated into the agency’s proposed revisions to its Lead and Copper Rule (released October 2019), but we applied the analysis to estimate that replacing all lead service lines in the nation over ten years would provide societal benefits of more than $205 billion – and called on EPA to consider the benefits when finalizing the rule.

Last week, Abt Associates, EPA’s contractor[1] who developed the initial peer-reviewed model, published a refined model in Environmental Health Perspectives and used it to estimate that between 34,000 and 99,000 cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related deaths were avoided in 2014 due to reduced adult blood lead levels from 1999 to 2014. The analysis reports that between 16% and 46% of the overall reduced CVD deaths during those 15 years was attributable to reduced lead in adult blood. Read More »

Posted in Emerging science, Lead / Tagged | Comments are closed

In a vote for reducing lead exposure and for clean water, House passes lead pipe replacement amendment

By Joanna Slaney / Published: July 1, 2020

Joanna Slaney, Legislative Director, Health and Tom Neltner, J.D., Chemicals Policy Director.

Today is a good day in the fight against lead exposure: the U.S. House of Representatives has passed an amendment to provide $22.5 billion to replace lead service lines (LSL) – the lead pipes connecting the water main under the street to the home – across the country, prioritizing low-income and environmental justice communities. The amendment to the Moving Forward Act (HR 2), was sponsored by Representatives Tlaib, Kildee, Slotkin, Cicilline, and Moore, and it received bipartisan support.

Permanently removing sources of lead is critically important, as there is no safe level of lead exposure. From learning and behavioral problems in children to cardiovascular disease and hypertension in adults – lead exposure has major impacts on our health. And turning on the tap in a home with an LSL is essentially drinking from a lead straw.

That’s why EDF, with our partners, worked to strongly support this amendment. And that’s why we’ve been working on other initiatives that will accelerate replacement of these lead pipes across the country. With an estimated 9.3 million LSLs remaining in 11,000 communities, full replacement will be a massive challenge. But – as EDF has seen with our work recognizing states and communities taking action on LSLs – momentum is building. Our latest estimates show that:

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Every lead service line replaced yields an estimated $22,000 in reduced cardiovascular disease deaths

By Tom Neltner, Senior Director, Safer Chemicals Initiative / Published: February 20, 2020

Tom Neltner, J.D. is the Chemicals Policy Director.

See all blogs in our LCR series.

Using publicly available information from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), EDF estimated that fully replacing the 9.3 million lead service lines (LSL) in 11,000 community water systems (CWS)[1] across the country would yield societal benefits of more than $205 billion, or about $22,000 per LSL removed. This estimate is based solely on reducing lead exposure in adults in order to have fewer cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths over 35 years. It does not include the benefits to children’s brain development.

We submitted our analysis in comments to EPA on its proposed revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), the federal regulation that limits lead in drinking water. Given the magnitude of the benefits, we called on the agency to incorporate CVD mortality into its economic analysis and consider strengthening its proposal by requiring full LSL replacement as an integral part of every CWS’s efforts, instead of as a last resort when lead levels get too high.

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