The EPA estimates that nine million homes in the U.S. have lead pipes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20665840

President Biden on Tuesday announced $2.6 billion in funding to replace all lead pipes in the United States as part of a new EPA rule that will require lead pipes to be identified and replaced within 10 years using the new funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

    • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
      25•2 months ago

      You can pry my wine sweetener from my cold, dead, neurologically damaged hands.

    • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9•2 months ago

      Yup, it’s not ideal.
      For slight contextualization on why it’s not the worst: for the most part, the lead pipes have a layer of scale (material from water reacting with the pipe) that keeps lead out of the water.
      We stopped installing new lead pipes quite a while ago, and the program to fully phase them out was started in the 90s. This was relatively routine for developed countries, as lead pipes were extremely common across the world.

      After Flint, it became apparent that this wasn’t the “slow fix” problem everyone thought after we saw how easily it could go to full “problem”. So everyone accelerated the timeline.

      So while it’s definitely a problem, it’s not an entirely novel or extremely critical problem.

      • @olsonexi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1•1 month ago

        the question is why isn’t “made of literal poison” considered “broke” for something that carries drinking water?

        • 🔰Hurling⚜️Durling🔱English
          1•1 month ago

          I don’t have the answer to that, but I can only assume it’s like “well, it hasn’t killed us and it cost more money that we can pay to fix it”

    • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
      38•2 months ago

      It’s not supposed to cover the entire thing. Actual estimates for the whole thing are at $20 to $30 billion. This is just the latest round of funding for the pipe replacement, not the entire thing. The Biden administration has secured $15 billion in funding for lead pipe replacement to date.

      The article posted above reads: “The $2.6 billion is the latest disbursement by the Biden administration for lead pipes in the $50 billion from the 2021 infrastructure law for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure.” But you decided to read one paragraph in (which could I guess be further than average) and write a long-winded outraged comment that it isn’t enough.

        • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
          43•2 months ago

          I don’t support Israel’s genocide in Gaza either or the Biden administration’s ongoing support of it (I think all of that military aid should be going to Ukraine instead, for starters), but you really just shitted up the thread by deciding that reading past the first paragraph was too hard, went off on an unrelated whataboutism tangent, and then when it was pointed out you were wrong, you decided to be a snarky, immature jackass about it instead of just saying “oh, okay”.

                • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
                  21•2 months ago

                  Oh, I think I understand now: you think that $15 billion is all there is and ever can be because you don’t understand that “a decade” is 10 years and consequently that the EPA has time to get more funding for this over a period of – again – 10 years.

                  Since I know reading is hard for you, here’s something to enhance your comprehension of that $15 billion figure: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/so_far

                  Edit: and you never answered: where on god’s green Earth is 700 million coming from? Milwaukee? Because that’s one city, and cities have different amounts of lead pipes.

    • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      29•2 months ago

      The program has been going on for decades. The Feds put money in a big account the EPA manages that gives grants and loans to areas that need it to get the process completed faster.
      As loans get repaid over the years, the money is leant out again. Most areas have enough income to afford the project, but not enough cash on hand to afford to pay all at once.

      This is the first batch of additional money being added to the fund along with a mandate that the problem be resolved in a fixed timeframe.

      Currently the fund has used about $20billion to provide $40billion in upgrades over nearly 30 years.

      https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-issues-final-rule-requiring-replacement-lead-pipes-within

      Funding: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $50 billion to support upgrades to the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This includes $15 billion over five years dedicated to lead service line replacement and $11.7 billion of general Drinking Water State Revolving Funds that can also be used for lead service line replacement. There are a number of additional pathways for systems to receive financial support for lead service line replacement. These include billions available as low- to no-cost financing through annual funding provided through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) program and low-cost financing from the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA) program. Funding may also be available from other federal agencies, state, and local governments. These efforts also advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which sets the goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain Federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.

    • bluGill
      5•2 months ago

      Cities should take on most of the cost themselves. Some cities have already done this from their own revenue - pipes wear out over time and so on - why should those cities pay for cities that couldn’t be bothered?

      • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
        14•2 months ago
        • The citizens in those cities don’t deserve to have lead poisoning regardless of what city and state officials are willing to allocate to it.
        • Some cities just objectively have worse lead problems than others.
        • This feels like the “well I paid off my student loans through hard work, so why should they get theirs paid off for free?” argument. (They are still paying through their own funds too; they’re just receiving federal help to accelerate it.)
        • Having citizens that aren’t poisoned by lead is good for the whole of the country, full stop.

        I didn’t downvote you, by the way; I at least understand the rationale on a surface level.

        • bluGill
          5•2 months ago

          Citizens should be voting for politicians who do things. They for politicians who cleaned things up. Will you fire all those corrupt politicians in your town that didn’t clean things up? Remember those cities that did clean things up paid for the price on their own. I do not want to reward cities who vote to continue corruption.

          • TheTechnician27OPEnglish
            6•2 months ago

            You understand that lead poisoning most predominantly affects children, right? So even if your argument is that the minority of voting-age individuals who vote against these politicians should suffer the consequences of the majority who do (let alone that those majority deserve to have lead poisoning for voting in incompetent or corrupt politicians/living in a jurisdiction that can’t afford to rapidly replace these lines), you’re failing to acknowledge that the children who are most deeply affected here have no say whatsoever.

      • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8•2 months ago

        Because we live in a society.

        I don’t know how to convey that you should do things that keep people, particularly children, healthy even if they don’t live in the same municipal tax jurisdiction.

        • @basmati@lemmus.orgEnglish
          3•2 months ago

          If your thought was shared by society, we wouldn’t have lead pipes to begin with and you wouldn’t have cause to reply so smugly to someone merely suggesting people should get what they vote for.

          • @ricecake@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            7•2 months ago

            If people thought we lived in a society, than we wouldn’t have used lead pipes in the 1950 or before?
            In an era where we didn’t know there was as much risk as we found out over the following decades?
            What the fuck are you even talking about? Do you know when these pipes were even installed?

            Do you think that people should be held responsible for the votes of their great grandparents? Or, more specifically, that their children should get brain damage because of how their great great grandparents voted?

            What do you think we gain by letting poor communities be potentially poisoned? That hurts all of us.
            Hell, Flint (the prototypical example) didn’t even vote for the people who screwed them over. The state government imposed them on the city against their will.
            I suppose you think they deserve lead poisoning because they didn’t have the good graces to have a flourishing economy after the biggest employer in the city left?

  • @Zannsolo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12•2 months ago

    LIBERAL PLOT TO GET RID OF CONSERVITIVES!!! WE CANT TOLLERATE THIS DEEP STATE LIBERAL BIG GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE IN OUR HOMES. IF LEAD WAS SO BAD WHY WOULD THEY SELL MINERAL WATER, CHECKMATE LIBTARDS. /s

  • @ProbablyBaysean@lemmy.caEnglish
    2•2 months ago

    Lead culinary water pipes (or lead soldier) is a problem, but lead shower pans (that affect the sewer water) are the preference in many USA cities.