United States: On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced $5.8 billion in funds available nationwide to all states and possession to fix an aging series of trout ponds that has kept many Americans underwater for so many years.
The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Michael Regan, and Vice President Kamala Harris will be in Pittsburgh on Tuesday to promote President Biden’s initiatives to step up the safety of the water systems and furnish a more working water infrastructure.
About the Pittsburgh project
Projects that are underway in Pittsburgh comprise only a few among the many such activities funded through the recent bipartisan 2021 legislation that allotted 50 billion dollars to the repair of water infrastructure across the country, as CNN Health reported.
Harris in a press release said, “President Biden and I believe that every person in our country should have a right to clean water no matter where they live or how much money they make,” as reported by CNN Health.
He added further, “With this investment, we are continuing our urgent work to remove every lead pipe in the country and ensure that every American has access to safe and reliable drinking water.”
However, the federal government will not choose firms that will receive the investments announced on Tuesday.
Instead, it will channel the money to states, territories, and tribes via the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund programs.
About the US water system
This allows most Americans to have indoor plumbing and pretty safe drinking water. Nonetheless, the infrastructure has been with poor marks by society for decades.
Moreover, the crisis because of climate has additionally stressed the system, adversely affecting the quality of water because of salty water infusion and therefore presence of a higher quantity of sediments and pollutants, as reported by CNN Health.
It further lowers the amount of water that is even available.
The assessment of drinking water by experts
The Civil Engineering Society gave the country’s drinking water infrastructure the lowest grade possible when it assessed the situation in 2021. In 2017, it was a letter “D” and that was an improvement from that.
According to CNN Health reports, in 2021, the society rated the wastewater system even worse, which is D+; the wastewater system was rated even worse in 2021 with a D +, which is an even worse rating; however, stormwater got a D.
The water infrastructure problems that are facing the country are basically the results of under-investment according to EPA.
The problem faced by the local government in improving the water supply
Most of the time, local governments simply cannot rescue themselves without financial aid from the state or federal government.
Often, when they try to change, residents face water quality problems like the one in Flint, Michigan in 2016, where environmental scientists found the resident’s blood lead levels to be high as a result of corroded pipes from a new drinking water source.
Lead in water is harmful to health – Experts
In accordance with the statement of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no quantities of lead are safe. Exposure to such levels of radiation, mostly for children, can cause brain damage and deter the progress of the nervous system which leads to stunted growth and cognitive issues.
The Flint water crisis became a global news story, however, its residents were not the only ones who were exposed to harmful levels of lead due to their drinking water.
Despite this, a survey by the environmental charity National Resources Defense Council revealed that 56 percent of people in the US drank water from systems that tested positive for lead in the period between 2018 and 2020, CNN Health reported.
What was the Biden administration’s goal?
By the year 2021, Biden had announced a timeline of ten years for all the lead service lines in the nation to be replaced under him.
The sum on Tuesday will be allocated to clean drinking water, upgrading wastewater and sanitation, getting rid of contaminants, and replacing lead pipes.
For years the lead levels at Pittsburgh Water exceeded the sensitivity threshold of a critical federal standard but the officials have been working on cleaning it now.
The Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority, since 2016, has replaced over 11,000 public lead service lines and almost 8,000 private ones. This puts the department halfway toward its plan of removing all lead service lines by 2026.
The increasing speed of its work has been energized by the money given from EPA’s first Aquarius Award in 2022, and this work has been a success, as CNN Health reported.
Lead levels in drinking water have plummeted immensely in the era of service line replacement; with the addition of orthophosphate, a food-grade chemical that prevents pipes from breaking down, to the water.
Current testing showed that the lead level is 3.58 parts per billion (ppb) which is much below the state and federal action level and also the lowest level recorded for the city according to Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority this month.
Health challenges for American drinking water – PFAS chemicals
Over $1 billion from the latest round of federal funds will also help municipalities clean up another big health challenge in Americans’ drinking water: a group of synthetic chemicals commonly known as per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances, or PFAS, chemicals that human beings have gotten to know by now as dangerous.
PFAS are a group of persistent industrial chemicals that stay in the environment and the human body. Studies have shown that these diseases are linked to exposure such as cancer, obesity, thyroid problems, high cholesterol, fertility issues, liver damage, and hormone suppression as stated by the EPA, as CNN Health reported.
In June 2022, the EPA issued a health advisory about the chemicals that were more toxic to human health than they were initially thought. It warned that they might also be much more dangerous than they were previously thought even at lower levels of thousands of times than believed.
In March, the EPA released the first national drinking water regulation for PFAS.
This month the EPA has proposed that nine PFAS chemicals fall into the category of these nine hazardous. If the change is in the agency’s official record, it will facilitate the government’s handling of PFAS as part of its clean-up program.