The Environmental Protection Agency has released its long-awaited revision to the regulations that protect children from lead in their water. Bottom line: It’s a mixed bag, with some significant improvements but also some critical omissions that must be addressed.
With all that 2020 and early 2021 have brought us, this rule revision is likely to slip through the cracks, but it shouldn’t. The revision does include a whole host of long-overdue improvements, including mandating testing in school water supplies and adjusting the testing process itself to be more realistic about how we pour a glass of water in our homes. This is good news, and bravo to the scientists and staff at the EPA.
But what isn’t included in the revisions is the situation that caused tens of thousands of Flint, Michigan, children to get poisoned by lead in their drinking water. And Washington, D.C., children before that, and Newark, N.J., children now. I am talking about lead service lines in the water supply systems of nearly all of the older areas of cities around the country, and in Indiana.
