The image at the top of this post shows a completed section of a Seattle water supply pipe near Renton, WA around the year 1900. More about this image here. Although this photo shows a particularly early example of water infrastructure being created in the U.S., still most of the water infrastructure in this country was laid down decades ago, before most Americans alive today were born.
Do Americans take safe drinking water for granted?
Most likely, according to Marc Edwards, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech. Edwards won a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called a “Genius” grant. Edwards – an expert in drinking water safety – said Americans have better access to quality drinking water than most of the world.
He should know. He’s worked on a national scale to ensure safe drinking water, through an aging and sometimes dangerous water-delivery infrastructure.
Marc Edwards: Most of the water pipes and treatment plants in our country are over 40 years old right now. And they’re nearing the end of their useful life.
Edwards said one problem is lead – that the U.S. has over 5 million lead pipes in its water infrastructure. He said it would cost $1 trillion to completely correct this problem. Over time, lead corrodes and leaches into the water and fosters bacteria growth.
There are no laws requiring lead testing or replacement of plumbing. Lead poisoning in young children can lead to neurological problems. Meanwhile, Edwards said only 10% of schools have tested their drinking water in recent years.
Marc Edwards: There are simple measures we can take that are very inexpensive to mitigate this problem. For example, installing filters where the water comes out.
Lead pipes have been used since the Roman Empire began building aqueducts.
Marc Edwards: Lead is a good quality plumbing material, from the perspective that it lasts a long time and it does not break. Unfortunately, the little that can leach from those pipes into the water is sufficient to pose a serious health concern. More recently, the issue we’ve been discovering is pieces of lead from these pipes, and from lead solder, sometimes detach and essentially fall off into the water in pieces. This is very disconcerting, because in some cases you can take a single glass of water and if you’re unlucky, and it has that piece of lead in it, you can get a very high dose of lead, similar to that which you could obtain by eating lead paint chips.
In 2004, Edwards testified before Congress about his discovery of lead contamination in the Washington, DC area – the lead levels were off the scales. You can read his Congressional Testimony.
Marc Edwards named MacArthur Fellow for drinking water safety efforts
Mr. Edwards states that there are no laws requiring testing for lead or replacement of plumbing is inaccurate. The EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule requires water utilities to obtain representative samples at the tap and requires the replacement of lead service lines if the lead “action level” is exceeded. I trust that Mr. Edwards was misquoted as this is a very misleading statement.
Mr. Poirier,
Mr Edwards is actually correct, there is no law requiring the testing of plumbing. The Lead and Copper Rule requires the testing of water that passes through the plumbing, but there is no requirement to actually test the plumbing, and therefore the source of the lead in the water cannot definitely be determined. As mentioned, lead can come from lead pipes, lead solder or even leaded brass used in faucets and fixtures. It is these aspects of our plumbing system that are lacking sufficient regulation. There are standards, but these standards are outdated and not based on health effects. Many other countries and California, have better standards than we do nationally. It is time for us to do better.
In the course of condensing a lengthy conversation into a 90 second radio spot, it inevitably becomes necessary to cut some qualifying verbiage, which in turn can cause misunderstandings. It was requested that I provide additional background to elaborate on questions arising from the shortened version of the interview.
There are currently no laws requiring regular testing for lead in the water of day care facilities, public schools, public buildings or private homes served by wells. Public water systems are required to conduct periodic testing for lead in a relatively small number of homes under provisions of the EPA lead and copper rule, but this testing is intended to track the overall effectiveness of their corrosion control program for lead and copper. Compliance with the EPA Lead and Copper Rule cannot be construed as any kind of explicit or implied guarantee that the drinking water will contain low lead throughout a system. I agree with the statement posted by the EPA:
“Most water systems test for lead as a regular part of water monitoring. These tests give a system-wide picture and do not reflect conditions at a specific drinking water outlet.â€
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/lead/leadfactsheet.html
Indeed, under the EPA Lead and Copper Rule, some water samples can be collected from homes with hazardous levels of lead, and no action whatsoever is required. There is currently no maximum allowable amount of lead in drinking water—even brand new buildings sometimes have taps that test for lead above the 15 ppb EPA action limit.
While the vast majority of taps in the U.S. dispense potable water with relatively low lead, people concerned about their own children’s exposure need to test their own water, even if you live in a city meeting the EPA LCR. Unfortunately, due to the nature of particulate lead release and deficiencies with our existing sampling protocols, even if you do test your water and find low lead one time, in homes built with lead solder (i.e., many homes built before about 1986-1988) there is a surprisingly significant high chance that your next glass of water could still contain high lead. This is because pieces of lead solder in the plumbing, which have gradually deteriorated from corrosion over decades of exposure, fall off into the water sometimes and not others.
To protect vulnerable children under age 6 from such hazards when they are present, parents can utilize filters certified by the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) to remove lead, or use bottled water, for cooking or drinking.
The cost of dealing with these problems in some older buildings is so high, for the cases where they exist, it makes more sense to simply switch to bottled water. This is what Baltimore schools recently did after several years of good faith effort to mitigate lead hazards in their schools (e.g., http://wjz.com/local/local_story_311120641.html). Like Baltimore, we need to do a better job of identifying similar problems in homes, schools and day care facilities all over the country, and in the few cases where serious problems are identified, we need to implement common sense/low cost solutions that protect vulnerable children.
In terms of the pipe replacement, it is true that for utilities exceeding the lead action limit, a certain percentage of their lead pipes must be “replaced” every year. Or to be more precise, we actually only “partly replace” the lead pipe, because in most cases we leave the customer’s portion of the lead pipe right where it is. Recent monitoring data has shown that in many cases these “partial replacements” actually cause worse lead problems than if we had done nothing at all, perhaps because of disturbance of the lead scale (e.g., lead rust) and galvanic corrosion of the lead pipe. The worsened lead leaching is known to persist for months and months in some of these cases, and no convincing data exists that the situation completely corrects itself. Replacing part of a lead service pipe is not defensible from either an economic or public health perspective. In fact, in light of what we know about this problem, I challenge someone to put forth a rational argument that speaks in favor of “partial replacements.”
Marc,
The “partial replacement”, IS in fact limiting the source of the lead exposure. The source of lead corrosion is lead, it is the limiting factor, thus any reduction of lead in a piping system is a step in the right direction. It’s that simple. I can understand the potential health effects of an increased lead exposure due to disturbances, that water must be avoided. Perhaps consumers and community water systems should be placed on a long-term (months) flushing schedule to purge itself of this temporary increase in lead contaminated water. All the while using bottled water for a couple months until sampling at consumer taps provides a “snapshot” of lead free water. One would expect the amount of lead in a partially replaced distribution system to be less after a few months of consumer flushing, just from exhausting amounts of lead scale and availability of galvanic corrosion.
As you mention in the article, it appears to be a temporary increase “months and months in some cases”. What is months and months of an increased lead exposure when you are ultimately lowering the long-term levels of lead corrosion by limiting the source of lead to be corroded in the first place? One must look long-term.
I will conclude by saying, partial replacement is a partial solution but not a complete solution. I would wholeheartedly support elimination of lead from drinking water pipes. But for the sake of this argument, I would say that there are both economic and public health protection benefits of partial replacement when looking long-term.
According to Dr. Edwards and other sources, there are millions of lead pipes and goosenecks as part of our drinking water infrastructure. How much are we willing to trust our government on this important issue of lead in our drinking water? How well did the government do on testing our children’s toys? Lead is known to leach from lead pipes. Lead is a known hazard to health. Rather than testing toys, perhaps we should place more emphasis on testing our water pipes for lead and less dependence on the water utilities to test the water for lead for our children and us. As a parent, I would not risk my family’s health with water passing through service lines if I knew they were lead. If I lived in older housing, I would want to be sure to test the pipes as well as the windowsills for lead. As a parent, I would support that in all cases of known childhood lead poisoning, the water pipes should be investigated along with other environmental causes.
Experts disagree on the safety of lead service lines as in concepts discussed at this EPA workshop:
page 3 The best long-term direction to reducing lead in drinking water is to “Get the Lead Out†of contact with water.
page 13 Should the goal be no lead service lines?
http://www.epa.gov/safewater/lcrmr/pdfs/summary_lcmr_review_simultaneous_compliance_workshop_05-04.pdf
How much reliance should parents put in the EPA assuring us the water has a passing grade on lead levels based on the Lead and Copper Rule?
As a former chemist with the Washington Aqueduct, I contacted the EPA Office of Inspector General (OIG) with specific concerns about research in which I was involved on lead levels in drinking water passing through lead service lines and concerns about how representative the compliance samples were of true distribution levels to which they replied on October 25, 2007. My concern was that the sampling protocols were being gamed to make lead in water look low when it was not.
EPA’s reply to my concern:
Dear Ms. Kanen:
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Office of
Inspector General (OIG) Hotline has reviewed concerns you have
expressed in your e-mail of May 1, 2007, regarding the level of lead
found in District of Columbia drinking water.
As you know, EPA issued new national water regulations
published in the Federal Register Volume 72, Number 195 October 10,
2007, (40 CFR Parts 141 and 142), with specific requirements related
to lead in drinking water. The OIG has decided not to open an
investigation on this water issue at this time due to the
involvement of other District and Federal agencies, including the Government Accountability Office and the Corps of Engineers.
We do appreciate and share your concern for human health and
our environment.
Sincerely,
Cheryl Campbell
Hotline Coordinator
Office of Congressional and Public
Liaison
Office of Inspector General
Environmental Protection Agency
cc: Hotline 2007-447
A related article:
All city schools to get water coolers – Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore school system is abandoning 15 years of efforts to remove the lead in its water fountains and will instead provide bottled water in coolers to all schools.
Yesterday’s announcement came after the city Health Department discovered that 10 fountains that had passed previous tests still contained unacceptably high levels of lead. Once schools chief Andres Alonso learned that it would be cheaper to provide bottled water to all schools than to continue lead testing, he said, the decision was a “no-brainer.”
Doug,
It is not that simple. During a partial replacement, copper is placed in front of and often connected to the lead pipe. This can actually INCREASE lead leaching from the lead pipe that remains, via deposition corrosion and galvanic corrosion. This was proven in England decades ago and we have confirmed it here at Virginia Tech. There are no studies that prove “partial” benefits from partial lead pipe replacement.
Marc
Marc:
We’ve talked before regarding the addition of Zinc Ortophosphate to our Village water supply. That legislation passed about 2 weeks ago but there are still some questions regarding the safety of this chemical in our water supply. These seem to be the major concerns:
1. There was a reference on the internet that implied that the process of adding Zinc Ortophoshate will cause lead which becomes coated with phosphate to produce lead phosphate. This is considered a carcinogen on another web site. The concern is that Lead Phosphate particles will detach from the coated pipes in homes and become a hazard. I suspect that these particles are smaller than EPA standards and not a problem, OR Lead Phosphate is not a by-product of adding Zinc Orthophosphate to our drinking water. Filters at the kitchen tap and refrigerators dispensing cool water would help if this is a real problem but that’s as expensive solution and adds to the cost of adding Zinc Orthphosphate. Can you help answer this question for our residents?
2. The Copper Development Association, the marketing arm of the copper industry, is touting BARE copper as a metal to kill certain bacteria faster than other metals especially in hospitals where stainless steel seems to be preferred. A resident raised the question that if we coat our copper pipes, will that reduce the benefits of copper since chlorine may not kill some bacteria like staph infections or MRSA? I believe there are other ways to control bacteria including chlorine. What’s your advice?
3. You were referenced in an interview as calling for filters to prevent the ingestion of lead from plumbing. Some residents believe you were identifying this technique as the principle solution but I believe you were calling for an immdiate solution if no other was available. By the way, our County Department of Health has stated that filters are not an acceptable solution compared to other solutions since to assure that the filters are properly maintained and replaced, Water Department personnel will need access to everyone’s home. We have some home owners who haven’t let our water department staff in to check/replace water meters in months. Can you elaborate on what you consider the most effective solutions for municipalities and individuals to take to reduce lead in their drinking water?
By the way, thanks for the email with your tips regarding lead in water supplies, which I passed on to residents and our local newspaper. It was very helpful to all and we owe you a dept of gratitude for you help! Thanks to you, I fully supported the use of Zinc Orthophosphate. I plan to have our water tested and to purchase a water filter based on the results. Keep up the good work!
Bob
Marc,
this is a topic that is critical for north of the border as well. In Canada, the regulators at Health Canada and others are closely following what is going on at EPA, NSF and other states and concurrently trying to re-examine the human health toxicity for lead. More to come on this in the new year. Good gob!
Marc responded to an email that I sent him after my prior posting above. Here is the entire text:
Bob,
I already answered those questions in response to a consumer in a prior e-mail. You are free to post the response.
Marc
>>While it is true that lead phosphate and copper phosphate have adverse health effects, the “bad” part of these compounds (even if you believe that copper is bad)…is not the phosphate. The bad part is the lead and copper. Hence, it is the total amount of copper or lead in water that should concern you. It is my experience, and that of many others, that zinc phosphate almost invariably drops the lead and copper levels of the water quite remarkably. So adding zinc orthophosphate is generally a very good thing.
On the issue of zinc phosphate versus filters, the problem is that those consumers most vulnerable to danger from lead (poor families, young children and infants) are also least likely to buy and use the filters. Thus, while I am a strong proponent of lead filters to reduce lead hazards, I cannot recommend them instead of corrosion control, because we currently believe that corrosion control (such as zinc orthophosphate) reduces lead in everyone’s water. Even those individuals most vulnerable to lead dangers who cannot, or who would have difficulty, using filters.
While there have been a few minor problems reported for zinc orthophosphate use, those are the rare exception, and the problems zinc orthophosphate might create are not as big as the problems it might fix in my opinion. I hope this clarifies my perspective on this.
At 05:49 PM 12/5/2007, Bob Wintermeier wrote:
Marc:
I posted some questions on this web site about a week ago assuming that you would be notified of the posting:
http://www.wqa.org/index.cfm
Some residents still have concerns. Of the 3 questions I posted, you answered #2 recently so there is no need to address it again.
To save you time, I’ve copied my posting and pasted it below:
==================================================================
Marc:
We’ve talked before regarding the addition of Zinc Orthophosphate to our Village water supply. That legislation passed about 2 weeks ago but there are still some residents questioning the safety of this chemical in our water supply. These seem to be their major concerns:
1. There was a reference on the Internet that implied that the process of adding Zinc Orthophosphate will cause lead which becomes coated with phosphate to produce lead phosphate. This is considered a carcinogen on another web site. The concern is that Lead Phosphate particles will detach from the coated pipes in homes and become a hazard. I suspect that these particles are smaller than EPA standards and not a problem, OR Lead Phosphate is not a by-product of adding Zinc Orthophosphate to our drinking water. Filters at the kitchen tap and refrigerators dispensing cool water would help if this is a real problem but that’s as expensive solution and adds to the cost of adding Zinc Orthphosphate. Can you help answer this question for our residents?
2. The Copper Development Association, the marketing arm of the copper industry, is touting BARE copper as a metal to kill certain bacteria faster than other metals especially in hospitals where stainless steel seems to be preferred. A resident raised the question that if we coat our copper pipes, will that reduce the benefits of copper since chlorine may not kill some bacteria like staph infections or MRSA? I believe there are other ways to control bacteria including chlorine. What’s your advice?
3. You were referenced in an interview as calling for filters to prevent the ingestion of lead from plumbing. The title:
Expert on lead points to aging water pipes in U.S….Suggests filters as inexpensive solution
led some residents to believe that you were identifying this technique as the principle solution but I believe you were calling for an immediate solution if no other was available.
By the way, our County Department of Health has stated that filters are not an acceptable solution compared to other solutions since to assure that the filters are properly maintained and replaced, Water Department personnel will need access to everyone’s home. We have some home owners who haven’t let our water department staff in to check/replace water meters in months so it is unlikely they will allow entry for filter maintenance.
Can you elaborate on what you consider the most effective solutions for municipalities and individuals to take to reduce lead in their drinking water giving some indication of where chemicals and filters fit in priority?
Finally, thanks for the email with your tips regarding lead in water supplies, which I passed on to residents and our local newspaper. It was very helpful to all and we owe you a dept of gratitude for you help! Thanks to you, I fully supported the use of Zinc Orthophosphate during our Village debate. In addition, I plan to have our water tested and to purchase a water filter based on the results regardless of which chemicals we select.
Keep up the good work!
Bob