Lead reveals fault lines in environmental racism.
Lead reveals fault lines in environmental racism.
Lead poisoning is one of the biggest environmental and humanitarian injustices facing America, and not enough people are talking about it.
The Biden administration ruled Oct. 8 water utilities would be given 10 more years to replace almost every lead pipe in the country, according to The New York Times.
While the ruling puts American cities on the road to a better future, it covers up a major flaw with the plan.
The new rule doesn’t require utilities to replace the portion of lead lines on private property. This responsibility would fall on the homeowners.
The harsh reality of this is lead lines are disproportionately found in lower income minority communities who can’t afford to shell out $4,500 dollars to replace the lead lines running into their homes and poisoning their water supply.
Kamala Harris is critical of the racial disparity prevalent in this health crisis, yet she hasn’t laid out a clear proposal on how to address these issues.
Around 9.2 million lead pipes make up the national service line infrastructure, according to a report from the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s a heavy concentration of lead pipes in the Rust Belt, with Ohio and Illinois listed as two out of the 50 states with the highest levels of lead service lines.
My hometown of Cleveland has lead-poisoning levels nearly four times the national average, according to News 5 Cleveland. To put this into perspective, Flint, MI in 2016 reported elevated lead levels in children of 7% to 10%, while Cleveland is seeing around 12% to 13% of children with elevated lead levels, with some neighborhoods reaching rates near 25%, according to Case Western Reserve.
If residents in some of America’s largest cities aren’t safe from contaminated drinking water, then who is? This is a national emergency, and will require a president who believes in funding and coordinated action to remove lead pipes.
No amount of lead exposure is safe. High levels of lead exposure can lead to severe brain and nervous system damage, according to the World Health Organization. Children can suffer from a variety of repercussions including lower IQ’s, behavior changes, anemia and cardiovascular disease.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have described the recent ruling as a breakthrough for communities with an aging housing stock and reliance on corroding lead service pipes across America.
The decision shows a commitment to fulfilling promises made by Biden in 2021 about replacing lead service lines after former President Donald Trump’s 2020 updates to the lead and copper rules lowered the replacement rate of known or suspected lead lines per year from 7% to 3%. Biden’s Infrastructure Law also allocates $15 billion to the replacement of lead service lines.
While the Biden-Harris ruling may be historic, it simply isn’t enough to tackle this environmental, racial and class-based injustice. Federal systems need to be put into place requiring cities to reimburse homeowners who replace their lead lines with copper, as seen in Madison, WI.
America owes its people clean water — and the government owes its cities help during this time of need.
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