President Joe Biden announced Thursday $3 billion toward identifying and replacing the nation’s unsafe lead pipes, a long-sought move to improve public health and clean drinking water that will be paid for by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Biden unveiled the new funding in North Carolina, a battleground state Democrats have lost to Donald Trump in the past two presidential elections but are feeling more bullish toward due to an abortion measure on the state’s ballot this November.
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The Environmental Protection Agency will invest $3 billion in the lead pipe effort annually through 2026, Administrator Michael Regan told reporters. He said that nearly 50% of the funding will go to disadvantaged communities – and a fact sheet from the Biden administration noted that “lead exposure disproportionately affects communities of color and low-income families.”
Nope, they’re actually still pretty common across the industrialized world. It’s not just a US thing.
We recognized the potential for harm decades ago, but for the most part it’s not a critical issue due to some minutiae of how lead pipes work in practice.
Incidents like Flint made it clear that the consequences of messing up that minutiae are big enough that we really, really shouldn’t be relying on them.
So this isn’t billions of dollars in emergency response, it’s billions of dollars in preventative maintenance, which is even better. 😊