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.
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.