Today on CityGuess DC, DC ranks in the top 10 cities for lead pipes.
As environmental reporter Kayla Benjamin will tell you that is not an honor.
But it's also an expensive thing to fix and it's expensive enough that the mayor has cut
it out of her current budget proposal.
Kayla is here to lay out where things stand and what needs to happen next.
Today is Monday, May 22nd.
I'm Michael Schafer and here's what DC is talking about.
All right, so how many DC houses are estimated to have lead pipes?
The most recent estimate from an independent report that the DC Council commissioned is
about 42,000 lead service lines in the district.
And the service line is just a schmancy word for pipe, but it means specifically the line
between the water main and your house.
Gosh, and so how bad is this?
What does it mean?
So DC has a relatively high percentage of houses with lead pipes if you compare it to
other states.
But compared to other cities, I think it's probably about average.
It's not crazily high in terms of the percentage of people who have them, but DC has a history
of serious lead in water issues.
So in 2004, DC water utility changed its formula for treating the water and basically
didn't include something that needed to prevent corrosion in the pipes.
And so for about a year, people were being exposed to extremely high levels of lead.
But once it was uncovered, the Washington Post did this really in-depth expose, they
changed their chemical back to what they needed to prevent that corrosion.
But all those pipes are still in the ground.
And what you'll hear activists say is there's no such thing as a safe lead pipe.
Even when you're treating the water with what you need to treat it with to prevent lead
from constantly in high doses, seeping into the water.
You always have the chance to have a little bit of lead.
And there's two ways that happen.
So the first is that lead can sort of, like, various small amounts can seep into the water,
and even that can be dangerous, especially for young kids or pregnant people.
But the other problem with lead pipes is that something could flake off at any moment.
And if a little piece flakes off and gets into the water, it can cause, like, a high
spike in lead in your water at home.
And I heard one activist describe it as, like, Russian roulette.
Theoretically, you're probably okay, but it could cause this big spike.
And it's just better not to have lead now that we know that it's dangerous.
You've cited activists a couple times.
Is there another point of view of folks who say that maybe it's not as bad?
No.
There really isn't.
Even scientists have basically said we can't identify a level at which lead isn't going
to harm someone's body, especially for young kids.
So within the district, I would assume the places where this is worst are the oldest
parts of town.
Can you give me sort of a map of where these 42,000 are knowing it's sort of a broad brush?
Yeah.
So it's pretty spread out throughout the city.
You're right that it's the oldest homes that have the worst of it.
But one pretty significant problem right now is that the lead pipe inventory isn't great.
So DC Water has a map of where the lead pipes are, but there's a lot of unknowns left on
that map.
And the unknowns are pretty highly concentrated in Ward 7 and 8 in a lot of, like, small
Patras.
So there are basically certain neighborhoods throughout the whole city that are likely
to have lead pipes and that's more true for the older your home is.
But it's also mostly almost exclusively in single family homes or small, like, very small
multifamily buildings because lead is not a great, like, pipe material for big buildings.
All right.
So you're saying basically it's most common in the oldest parts of town, but with an asterisk
that their recordkeeping east of the river has not been great.
So there's some unknown parts of the map.
The DC Council wants to make it mandatory that people change their pipes.
What does that mean?
So there are two bills in the works.
One from Council Member Janice Lewis-George and one from Council Member Brooke Pinto.
And both of them sort of take slightly different approaches, but they would mandate getting
all the lead service lines out and they would try to make that free for all residents.
Right now there is basically no money budgeted for that.
There used to be about $10 million in the budget or giving DOE help for replacing it.
That money disappeared.
And I think it's important that citizens know that this is on people's radar, but not the
priority for a lot of policymakers because I'm hearing that there's a lot of federal
money available at the moment.
And if you add local funding to that federal funding, we really have a moment to address
this problem, but it has to be done kind of right now.
And so it really is a moment where if people say, hey, I really want to prioritize this,
this matters to me and are talking to their local leaders, that might make a real difference.
So in my house, I've got, you know, there's pipes that go up to the kitchen and the bathroom
and so on, and then down to, you know, go out of the house.
And then there's another pipe that will take all the stuff out of the house to meet the
main line.
Is the stuff like literally behind my walls, is that liable to be led or are we just talking
about the thing that connects my house to the main line?
So the inside plumbing in your house could be led, but we're only talking about replacing
the lead service lines because government and water utilities can't even start to think
about replacing indoor plumbing.
So how do people feel about this mandate that they change their pipes?
So it depends on who you ask, but for the most part, the people who are paying attention
to the problem of lead service lines say that this is the only way we're actually going
to get all the lead service lines out of DC homes.
The main reason that the lead pipe replacement mandate was thought about is partly because
in Newark, New Jersey, they had a lead pipe scare and people successfully sued the city
and then Newark proceeded to get all of their lead pipes almost like 90 some percent out
within three years.
And DC has been promising that they were going to remove their lead service lines for
ages, but it hasn't actually happened partly because there hasn't been a successful lawsuit
and requirement from the federal government that DC actually do it.
So a mandate would mean that instead of DC water having to get homeowners individual
permission to remove the lead service line, they would be able to just do a whole block
at a time.
Right now, DC water told me that even when they're doing free replacements, they still
have about a 20 percent non compliance rate.
So people say like, no, I don't want you inside my home.
I don't want you to pull stuff out of my yard.
It's been described to me as a lack of trust sometimes between residents and DC water.
But if people are not allowing DC water to come in and take out their pipes, it means
that if they're going to get 100 percent of the pipes out, which is what they're aiming
to do by 2030, they have to go back and return to the same streets and repave.
So people are saying to them, like, Oh, you're going to dig up my plants and my garden and
I've worked so hard on it and blah, blah, blah.
Exactly.
Let's say I wanted to do it from my house and I was going to put the bill to get my
service line replaced.
How much does it cost?
It depends on the soil and the size of your yard potentially, but I think it's in like
the thousands, but I would say it's more mostly comparable to replacing like a boiler.
It's a big expense, but not something that most like upper middle class people can afford
to do that.
And the problem there is that then when people are required to replace their own pipes, it
just increases the inequity because there are people that can pretty without too much
Ajita afford to do this, but there's a lot of people who like wouldn't even think about
being able to.
So at first you said, okay, we had this thing in 2004 and I thought, well, that's almost
20 years ago, but then you tell me there's a lot of unknowns even on the map of where
the lead pipes are, which just makes me wonder has this city, the government of the District
of Columbia been a credible guardian of the system's safety?
From my point of view, no, it seems to me like the city has not made it clear to DC
water that this is a priority and DC water has repeatedly said like set deadlines.
I think the first one was they said they were going to get it out like 10 years after the
scare and then there was another one in 2008, I think they said they were going to have it
done by 2016, but they keep just missing their deadlines.
And most recently they've said, oh, without more funding, we're not going to be able to
hit the 2030 deadline either.
Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, but so like Newark, New Jersey, right?
Not known as like a citadel of municipal innovation.
You said they got it all done in three years.
Why is it so glacial in DC?
I think it's mostly because it hasn't been prioritized.
It's an expensive thing to do.
Like the independent report put the low end of the estimate at $480 million.
Like that's not a small amount of money, but this is now going on almost 20 years and
we still haven't actually truly solved the problem.
And we don't have enough data, it seems to know whether in addition to it just being
dangerous and scary, it is also a matter of economic and racial inequality because they
literally don't know where all the stuff is.
Yes, but it is an equity problem because people who have less access to really good nutrition,
fresh fruits and vegetables, people who have less access to primary care, physician are
going to be more susceptible to the problems associated with lead in terms of neurological
issues that start from a young age.
So it's the kind of thing that even if it were to be evenly spread across the city, it's
still going to hit our low income residents, the hardest.
So let me bring us down to the grassroots, perhaps literally, level to the individual
house.
But who owns the pipe under your backyard?
Once again, it depends on who you ask.
DC Water says that this is private property and therefore they can't pay for private side
pipes using their own money.
So legally, you own the pipe from your home to the curb and DC Water owns the pipe from
the curb to the water main.
And how can I figure out if my particular pipe, either the one under the yard or under the
sidewalk between the house and the main or the ones like in the walls, how can I figure
out if they are led or not?
Is there an easy way to tell?
So the first step in figuring it out is if you Google DC Water Pipe Materials map, you
can find their map.
And like I said before, there are a decent number of unknowns on it, but it's a good
place to start.
It will tell you what your pipe is made out of according to DC Water.
If it's unknown or if you don't trust what they say on the map, which is fair, then there
are ways to get it tested either professionally, like you can have a service come out or DC
Water offers some testing, but I'm not sure exactly how that works.
I haven't heard of anyone successfully using their testing.
But there's nothing you can do just like when you look at a pipe to be able to tell whether
that pipe is led or some other material.
So DC Water does offer lead and water test kits, though those might not actually capture
if there's lead in your water because as we were talking about before, it can kind of
flake off.
And so if there's no lead in your water one day, doesn't necessarily mean there's no
letter in your water another day.
And DC Water also offers a guide for how to look at your pipe and some telltale signs
of whether it might be led.
So some of those that they include are that lead pipes often widen at the base.
So they form a light bulb shape almost at the bottom and you can sort of look at where
your water main on the outside of your house connects to the rest of the pipe.
But in general, it's better to have asked DC Water or someone else to come and make sure
and identify it.
So if you can scratch it with a coin or a key, then that is also a good sign that it might
be led.
All right, so let's say you realize that you do indeed have a lead pipe for the service
line and you don't want to or you can't pay for it.
What can you do?
So the most important thing to do is get a filter.
And really everyone should have a filter.
It's just a good thing to have because you don't know what the pipes in your walls are
made of necessarily.
So you're going to want to look for something that says it's certified by the NSF to meet
standard 53, which is for lead.
And so NSF certified filters will take out lead and will filter it out of your water.
And you can either get the kind that attaches to your tap or the kind that's like in a
Britta filter in some kind of picture.
And then what if I want to replace the pipe and don't have the wherewithal to do that?
Where are sources of public or other funding for that replacement task?
If your house has non-led public side but lead private side, there is some funding available.
If only the private portion is led, the district will pay for 50% or 100% of the private side
costs.
And the reason for that is because after the 2004 crisis, when DC Water first started
replacing lead pipes or lead service lines, they did a whole bunch of replacements that
were only public side and not private side.
And it became clear that that was not actually protecting people very much.
And even possibly there was one study that said it was actually worse because you were
disturbing the pipe without actually getting rid of all the lead.
So essentially they're throwing people a bone a little bit saying, you know, if we did
that, then we'll cover some or all of the cost.
Caleb Benjamin, thank you so much for being here.
Yes, thank you.
Before you go here is some quick news.
A DC police lieutenant has been indicted for allegedly leaking information to the leader
of the Proud Boys.
Shane Lamond, who was the chief of the city police's intelligence unit, allegedly warned
the radical right-wing groups boss of an impending arrest and shared other information about
police efforts to protect the city against post-election violence.
He was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice and three counts of making false
statements.
Also, DC Mayor, Muriel Bowser has named Ashan Benedict, the current executive assistant
chief of police as the interim head of MPD.
She is still searching nationwide for a new permanent police chief.
Robert Conti, who holds the position right now, has resigned to take a position at the
FBI.
His last day will be June 3rd.
Conti is leaving at a key time for the MPD with critical staff shortages and a rise in crime.
We chatted about how his departure will affect public safety.
Be sure to check out the episode in our show notes.
And finally, last year had the lowest crab of population on record, but things are looking
up for the crabs and those who like to eat them.
With a 42% increase over last year, experts say the change could be due to warmer weather
and new harvest limits put in place last summer.
And don't forget, we've got a live, live taping.
June 3rd at Wright proper Brewing Company's Brookland location.
We're talking craft beer with a beer historian at 1pm, so don't miss it.
And that is all for today here on Citycast DC.
If you enjoyed the show, why not subscribe to our Morning News Letter 2?
Check it out at dc.citycast.fm.
We'll be back tomorrow morning with more news from Around the City.
Bye.
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