From 24-packs of bottles of water in kitchen pantries to fridges and faucets adorned with filters, Black households hold a common unspoken rule: They don’t trust their water.
“When you turn on your tap, you should trust what’s coming out of it,” said Chakena Perry, senior policy advocate for the Natural Resource Defense Council.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently unveiled a new Lead and Copper Rule improvements proposal, requiring key milestones for lead regulation across the country, including a needle-pushing deadline to replace lead service lines within 10 years. The EPA plans to finalize the proposal next October.
Studies have consistently highlighted that exposure to lead can have mental and physical health impacts, including cardiovascular disease, asthma, cognitive impairment, and behavioral problems, particularly in children. The risk is more pronounced in Black children, who face a greater risk of having elevated blood lead levels than white children because lead-contaminated water occurs disproportionately in many communities of color.
Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute, said the proposal comes during a critical time.
“This proposal is to not only provide funding to eliminate and replace lead-based lead service lines, but also it has a timeline to do it pretty soon,” Filippelli said. “People have kind of reawakened to the hazards of lead in their environments. The problem with water pipes is that they’re underneath the ground. You don’t know if there’s a risk there, and it’s a ticking time bomb.”
Whereas most states, like Indiana, would be required to replace their lead pipes within 10 years. Chicago, whose lead pipe problem is more extensive than any U.S. city, gets an extension of 40 to 50 years to replace them all.
Perry, a South Side Chicago native, shares an all-too-frequent story with many households across the country that grew up not trusting their drinking water.
“Sometimes people don’t always verbally say it, but you see it from the actions, where families are budgeting for bottled water on a monthly basis. But this truth is that there’s something about the quality of our drinking water that we don’t really trust,” Perry said.
Low-income communities of color continue shouldering the burden of issues they did not create, Perry said.
“We didn’t install lead pipes into our communities. Yet, we’re the ones that are receiving contaminated water; we’re the ones that are disproportionately impacted by learning disabilities and behavioral issues and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases from just the lowest level of lead exposure,” she said.
Earlier this month, Indiana American Water Co. Inc. announced a new $97 million investment to replace and remove lead service lines across the state. Indiana American Water estimates that there were as many as 55,000 lead service lines (LSLs) in use just a few years ago, but now that number is down to about 25,000. The amount invested for LSL replacements or removals in Northwest Indiana alone is nearly $67 million, according to an IAW spokesperson.
IAW estimates approximately 20,000 lead service lines remain in the Northwest Indiana area that serves Gary and Lake County, according to an IAW spokesperson.
“Gary is one of those classic examples of an older community with a lot of industrial and transportation sources,” Filippelli said. “There’s a lot of leaded gasoline used back and forth in trucks and transport. And a lot of the housing stock is old in Gary. So, when we tested soil samples from the Gary area, they tended to be on par with some of the highest urban soil samples we typically see. It’s right up there in terms of lead risks.”
In typical households, there are two pipeline segments: the customer-owned portion and the service-owned one. Indiana American Water said it samples lead in drinking water on a routine basis, provides corrosion control treatment where needed, and treats both customer and service-owned pipes, which varies from the industry standard of only replacing or removing the service-owned pipes.
Indiana American Water secured approval for nearly $19 million in loans to accelerate the removal of lead service lines. These funds will be used exclusively through the end of 2025 in Northwest Indiana, their largest service area.
The NRDC listed Indiana in the top 10 states with the most lead lines, with an estimated 290,000 in 2021.
Perry said the EPA should also ban partial lead pipe replacement because partial remains can seep into drinking water and provide public access to standard-grade water filters while lead service lines are being replaced. But the biggest hurdle is local and national conversations around funding the replacements.
“Instead of us paying so much attention to the cost of lead service line replacement, just think about it from a public health side, how much money we will save as a country by making the decision to get this done quickly,” Perry said.
“It’s not just about removing a lead pipe,” she continued. “It’s a quality-of-life issue. No price is too high for safe drinking water.”
The EPA is currently accepting public comments on the proposed rule and will hold a virtual public meeting on Jan. 16.