Lead’s Unending Legacy: A Proposal for a New Testing Standard for Drinking Water

In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan switched its source of drinking water from the city of Detroit’s supply to the Flint River. In March of 2016, after two years of complaints of poor taste and smell, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among other groups, successfully won a lawsuit requiring Flint to provide bottled water for residents without proper filters and to replace lead pipes providing water to its residents (Denchack 2018). While Flint’s lead levels are now far below the EPA’s recommended concentration, the same cannot be said for every city in the nation (Robertson 2020). As recently as 2015, over 18 million Americans were given water that violated the Safe Drinking Water Act’s (SDWA) Lead and Copper Rule (LCR) standard of 15 parts per billion concentration of lead. In addition, underenforcement is also a major issue: in 2015, only 11% of violators had formal action taken against them by either the EPA or the state in which the violation took place (Faherty 2020). Finally, underreporting also plays a part in preventing replacement. The EPA’s own SDWA tracking system for violators did not include Flint during the time of the crisis—if Flint was not being tracked, what other cities are in violation of which the EPA is unaware (Faherty 2020)?

The harms of lead in drinking water are well documented. In adults, it can cause damage to the urinary, reproductive, and cardiovascular systems. In children, lead can cause delayed growth, slowed or inhibited brain function, auditory failures, and coma or death at large levels (EPA 2021). And in pregnant people, it can also damage the growth of a fetus and potentially induce premature birth (EPA 2021). In the United States, this health damage occurs disproportionately along racial lines. A study from the National Resources Defence Council found that racial and ethnic minorities had higher levels of lead violations in their water and lower levels of enforcement to solve the issue (Faherty 2020). Non-compliance with the SDWA tracked heavily with both higher levels of racial minorities within the population, as well as lower income levels in studied areas.

While the SDWA establishes a standard by which the EPA determines adequately low lead levels, there is no level of lead for humans to drink safely (Mulvihill 2021). However, policymakers must still establish standards by which agencies can judge drinking water as adequate for consumption. Therefore, some measurement of the lead level in drinking water should still be established. When the LCR was passed in 1991, its lead standard of 15 ppb was based entirely on the feasibility of replacement, rather than the health damages that level of lead might cause. For that reason, the EPA should change the LCR’s action level requirement to at most 10 ppb, as the World Health Organization recommends (Sarver 2019). In addition, the EPA should make an assessment of technology standards in combination with the health impacts of lead to determine a concentration rule that would be appropriate in the modern era. As technology for anti-corrosion has advanced and will continue to advance, the lead levels in water will be increasingly more feasible to lower, and the EPA’s rule should reflect that (Sarver 2019).

In addition, to prevent lack of enforcement and compliance, the EPA should establish new testing standards to ensure that all violations are caught and resolved. In Flint, for example, officials would flush taps before taking samples, artificially lowering the chance that lead levels would go over the federal standard. Local officials and companies also have high levels of flexibility in how often, when, and where they test water for compliance (Hughes 2020). To address this, the EPA should set a national standard that includes a higher level of testing, wider spread of testing location, and stricter requirements for how testing should occur. Taking both of these actions is essential to replace aging, poisonous lead infrastructure in marginalized communities and prevent health damages for years to come.