By Patricia Houser
For Nature’s Sake
Patricia Houser
Residents and business owners in Milford and Orange will notice a few discrete digging projects in certain neighborhoods over the next several months – small ditches near the curb that will be excavated and, on the same day, refilled by contractors working for the water company, all to get a glimpse at what the below-ground pipes are made of.
It’s part of a federal campaign to lower the risk of human exposure to lead in public water supplies with local inventories/digging, mandated by the US Environmental Protection Agency and carried out in our area by the Regional Water Authority. The campaign is aimed at locating and eventually replacing our remaining water pipes made from lead.
Like other public water suppliers around the nation, the RWA is working toward an EPA deadline of Oct. 16 for completing their initial inventory and sharing those results with the public. By late October, according to RWA spokesperson Kevin Watsey, an online map of our towns, showing the composition of water service lines going to each address, will be available on the RWA website. For those interested in seeing examples of such maps for other places, two cities that have finished their preliminary inventories ahead of the deadline and have their interactive maps online are Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Lead does not belong in drinking water, in any amount, according to public health experts. Children especially should not be exposed to lead from any source. But the Flint, Michigan water crisis, which began 10 years ago, reminded Americans of the particular risks from older lead pipes still present in places throughout the country – beneath the ground and out of sight.
The EPA estimates that there are 146,574 lead service lines still in use across the state of Connecticut, comprising 1.6 percent of all our in-state water pipes. That may be less alarming than statistics from the state of Florida, where more than one million lead service lines in use comprise nearly 13 percent of the total. Still, whether in Florida or Illinois (where 11 percent of service lines are made from lead) or Connecticut, each of those leaded water lines presents ongoing danger of exposure for entire households, schools or businesses where people spend much of their day.
Though the water company sends safe water through large non-leaded mains that run down the middle of our streets, the pipes branching off to connect those mains to our homes – so-called service lines with diameters of two inches or less – can be made from lead, which is fraught. Some have likened it to drinking clean water through a lead straw.
For more details consider the following questions and answers:
1.True/False: The installation of lead pipes and lead solder to connect copper pipes were banned in the US in 1986.
- Which of the following cities has replaced all its lead service lines?
a) Newark, New Jersey
b) Lansing, Michigan
c) Madison, Wisconsin
d) All of the above - True/False: The EPA estimates that drinking water can make up 20 percent or more of a person’s total exposure to lead.
- Even low levels of lead exposure in children, according to the CDC, can cause
a) Behavior and learning problems
b) Lower IQ and hyperactivity
c) Slowed growth
d) Hearing problems
e) Anemia
f) All of the above - The cost of removing lead pipes from public water systems across the US will be close to $50 billion, but the savings to government from the health benefits will be _______dollars.
a) $20 billion
b) Also $50 billion
c) Hundreds of billions - True/False: High school water supplies must be sampled at least once every year for lead.
Answers:
- True. Medical experts were warning of the health risks from lead exposure in the first decades of the 20th century, and many places around the US stopped installing lead pipes in the 1930s and 40s. However, that triggered a major campaign by the Lead Industries Association and others to obscure those dangers – even to the extent of delaying major federal action to limit the use of lead for decades. For a short summary of that history, see the Guardian’s September 2022 online article titled, “Profiting from Poison.”
- d. All of the above
- True. An EPA website adds, “Infants who consume mostly mixed formula can receive 40 percent to 60 percent of their exposure to lead from drinking water.”
- f. Among the effects of lead poisoning on adults are reproductive difficulties for both men and women, problems with memory and concentration and high blood pressure.
- c. A recent study by the Harvard Chan School of Public Health confirms that the benefits from the absence of lead pipes will yield hundreds of billions of dollars in government savings in health costs. That includes people who will be free of certain cardiac or kidney or other problems, and thus not filing medical claims because they will not have been exposed to lead in water.
- False. There is no federal requirement for testing for lead in water at secondary schools today.
Even well water, it should be noted, can be contaminated with lead when it travels through lead or galvanized pipes or copper pipes with lead solder. Public health officials say private well owners should, at some point, test their water for lead, with different timetables for testing depending on the presence of an expectant mother or small child in the home.
Explanations for well owners can be found at the state Department of Public Health webpage titled “Educational Materials on Testing Recommendations for Private Wells and Semipublic Wells.”
Meanwhile, as the Regional Water Authority carries out its program of mapping service lines, Watsey notes that the RWA offers significant advance warning of any digging adjacent to a particular property as well as explanations at every step of their findings. Their website also invites input from the property owner on what they might know about parts of the service line within their buildings with an option to follow step-by-step instructions online for identifying the composition of the pipes in their building. A helpful resource is RWA’s webpage titled, “Lead and Drinking Water.”
Patricia Houser, PhD, AICP, shares her exploration of local and regional environmental issues in this column as a member of the nonpartisan Milford Environmental Concerns Coalition.