1018
Biden announces proposal to replace all lead water service lines in US within 10 years
(abcnews.go.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
1018 points (99.0% liked)
News
23267 readers
2996 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's likely records of most currently used infrastructure. At least enough that the amount you have to go spelunking for would be negligible.
These are service lines, as in assuming all the mains are already lead-free, these are the feeds onto each house. Many of them owned by the homeowner, not the utility. An estimated 9 million of which are lead.
When’s the last time leaded pipes were allowed? Surely at least half a century ago. I find it hard to believe there are good records that old, for every house, many of which lines are not even owned by the utility.
I’m picturing something much more exhaustive, like:
I have no way of knowing what records the water utility has but my house is almost 80 years old and the town’s property records are awfully spotty. And I’m in one of the newer houses in my town - my search included some back to 1890
Edit: 1986. Leaded pipes were allowed that recently, wtf. ( and Florida is number one in leaded pipes remaining: that explains a lot)
I think they were banned that year but basically nobody installed them after the late 70s.
But yeah some places are dabbling with machine learning or algorithmic data set collection. Most are just using what historic records they have and doing shovel tests for the rest.
You don't need to do that though. Unless there are records otherwise you can just assume it is lead because they all are. Bring in a underground crew to the neighborhood and they can go house to house replacing service lines. Transporting equipment to one house for this is often more expensive than the work itself, but since they are doing an entire neighborhood they can do 10 houses in a day and the cost isn't too much. Just dig the pipe into wherever, then go inside and hook it up.
Of course many houses have lead pipes as well. That is a lot more money. I'm working on getting the lead out of my house (copper pipes, but old enough to assume they have lead solder), but there are a lot of pipes in the walls that I don't really have an easy way to get at without a major remodel. (I have a RO drinking water system to every sink so the lead pipes are mostly used for hand washing not drinking)
I think service water line replacement takes longer than a day. Probably a half a day to dig the trench and expose the utilities - and hopefully they aren't under a driveway or a roadway, and then do the connection. Repave afterward.
The other issue is a lot of houses have lead pipes and lead solder in the copper piping, so they may still have life contamination after replacement of the water lines.
I just has natural gas installed, the outside work was a couple hours, but a crew that did a neighborhood could do a lot of things in parallel
And within the home, there's a lot of local, federally-funded programs where your water department will come out and test to see if you have lead pipes, and either help or completely cover the replacement costs.