The Biden administration has announced a proposal to “strengthen its Lead and Copper Rule that would require water systems to replace lead service lines within 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on Thursday.
According to the White House, more than 9.2 million American households connect to water through lead pipes and lead service lines and, due to “decades of inequitable infrastructure development and underinvestment,” many Americans are at risk of lead exposure.
“There is no safe level of exposure to lead, particularly for children, and eliminating lead exposure from the air, water, and homes is a crucial component of the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic commitment to advancing environmental justice,” the Biden administration said.
You don’t need to do that though. Unless there are records otherwise you can just assume it is lead because they all are. Bring in a underground crew to the neighborhood and they can go house to house replacing service lines. Transporting equipment to one house for this is often more expensive than the work itself, but since they are doing an entire neighborhood they can do 10 houses in a day and the cost isn’t too much. Just dig the pipe into wherever, then go inside and hook it up.
Of course many houses have lead pipes as well. That is a lot more money. I’m working on getting the lead out of my house (copper pipes, but old enough to assume they have lead solder), but there are a lot of pipes in the walls that I don’t really have an easy way to get at without a major remodel. (I have a RO drinking water system to every sink so the lead pipes are mostly used for hand washing not drinking)
I think service water line replacement takes longer than a day. Probably a half a day to dig the trench and expose the utilities - and hopefully they aren’t under a driveway or a roadway, and then do the connection. Repave afterward.
The other issue is a lot of houses have lead pipes and lead solder in the copper piping, so they may still have life contamination after replacement of the water lines.
I just has natural gas installed, the outside work was a couple hours, but a crew that did a neighborhood could do a lot of things in parallel