Getting the lead out of the water supply: How one health expert crunched the numbers and prodded the EPA
It’s known that lead in the water supply has severe health effects, including brain damage in children and heart and liver issues in adults. Now the Environmental Protection Agency has released an ambitious and expensive proposal to replace 100% of the lead pipes in water system service lines across the country over the next 10 years. Ronnie Levin, a former EPA scientist and an environmental health instructor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, deems it “a good move in the right direction that we haven’t seen in a long time.”
It took some improvement to get there, though. The proposal to strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule, issued on Nov. 30, comes after an earlier and weaker version was presented in October 2022. Levin and her colleague Joel Schwartz, also at the Chan School, reviewed the cost-benefit analysis of that earlier proposal, finding that the benefits attributed by the EPA to lead pipe replacement were significantly underestimated. They published their own cost-benefit analysis, which they believe influenced the EPA to revise its proposal.
