US legislators are calling for increased measures to protect American residents from toxic lead in their tap water.
A group of up to 15 US senators asked the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday to lower the levels of lead allowable in drinking water, require all lead pipes to be replaced in the next decade and ensure that low-income neighborhoods can benefit equally from the remediation efforts.
Lead water pipes have been banned across the US since 1986, but as many as 13m ageing lead pipes still connect homes to water in the US, leaving millions of Americans facing the risk of lead water contamination.
“It is unacceptable that communities across America continue to be at risk from exposure to any level of lead in their drinking water, which can cause serious health and neurological problems,” said Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of the signatories, in a statement to the Guardian.
Separately an Illinois congressman is calling for Chicago to start supplying filters to residents whose tap water proves to have more brain-damaging lead than is allowed for bottled water.
A recent series of Guardian articles has revealed that communities of color often face high lead levels and little access to remediation efforts, including in Chicago, the city with the most lead pipes in the nation.
A Guardian investigation revealed a third of 24,000 home tests in Chicago uncovered lead levels in drinking water exceeding the federal government’s limits for bottled water – with the worst results concentrated in minority neighborhoods.
“It’s deeply distressing to read that more than one in 20 tap water tests performed in Chicago were at or above US government limits and one third had more lead than is permitted in bottled water,” said Illinois congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, referring to the Guardian’s analysis.
Krishnamoorthi, who represents several Chicago suburbs and small parts of the city, said the city needs to act quickly to replace its estimated 400,000 lead service lines to protect public health and take advantage of newly available federal funding. But Chicago officials have said it will take 50 years to replace all the pipes.
“What’s happened so far is not acceptable,” Krishnamoorthi said.
The senators’ letter to the EPA commended the Biden administration for securing $15bn in federal infrastructure funding to address lead pipes and praised the EPA for its increased attention to the issue. But the senators called for tighter regulations to protect Americans’ health – including an update of the nation’s drinking water standards, known as the Lead and Copper Rule.
They urged the EPA to focus on protecting some of the populations most vulnerable to lead poisoning, by prioritizing replacing lead pipes in schools and childcare centers, Native American tribal communities and public housing projects.
The senators also called on the EPA to make sure that cities are not charging low-income residents for replacing lead lines, after a story this summer found that numerous water districts are replacing only the portions of pipe on city property. In those cases, residents who cannot pay thousands of dollars to replace the pipe crossing their private property are left with the risk of even more lead in their water following construction.
“Service lines should be fully replaced regardless of homeowners’ ability to pay and the costs should include repairs to homes from this replacement,” said the senators’ letter, which noted that a handful of cities have mobilized efforts to rapidly replace pipes and created jobs by training residents to help. “The City of Newark, New Jersey, has shown this can be done quickly, efficiently, and equitably while creating good-paying union jobs for local residents,” said the letter.
