Newark, N.J., has provided a map to solving lead pipe issues

Read more reporting from Jay Tokasz from The Buffalo News and see him demonstrate how to find out if the pipe bringing water into your home is made of lead on the News’ website.

Getting rid of Buffalo’s more than 100 miles of underground water pipes made of lead might be an even bigger dig than the new Buffalo Bills stadium or the Kensington Expressway tunnel project.

But the city of Newark, N.J., has provided a road map for how to get there.

Old lead pipes, buried many decades ago and largely forgotten about, are a ticking time bomb in many cities across the country, with the potential to leach a toxic heavy metal linked to numerous health problems into drinking water. It has already occurred, infamously, in Flint, Mich., and in other communities.

It happened, too, in Newark in 2017, when the city’s corrosion control process faltered, resulting in high levels of lead in household tap water. Newark launched a new corrosion treatment system in response. Then, facing intense pressure from residents and a lawsuit by an international environmental group, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka decided it was time to remove all 23,000 remaining lead service lines in the city.

The city spent $190 million to get it done in a span of less than three years, using a block-by-block strategy in neighborhoods to replace as many as 2,200 lines per month. The final lead pipe was removed in 2022.

“It was like an assembly line, pulling them out, putting them in,” said Kareem Adeem, Newark Water & Sewer Utility director.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to require that all municipal water suppliers replace lead service lines within a span of 10 years, as part of its Proposed Lead and Copper Rule Improvements announced in November. Clean water advocates, citing growing evidence of the costly toll of lead on human health and well-being, are pushing for the removal of lead water lines as soon as possible.

Even at small doses, lead can cause serious health effects in children, including lower IQ levels and learning and behavior problems. In adults, lead exposure is linked to heart disease, high blood pressure and kidney and nervous system problems.

Water utilities have expressed concern about access to privately owned lines, legal issues about using public money on private property, the impact on water rates and lining up enough contractors to do the work.

An estimated 40,000 lead service lines are being used to deliver water into Buffalo homes, although city officials are still in the process of determining an exact count. The projected cost to replace them all with copper is $400 million.

Buffalo Water Board officials, confident that current corrosion control methods were highly effective in keeping lead leaching at bay, had been planning to replace the lead service lines gradually over the next 25 years.

The city in 2021 set aside $10 million of its $331 million in federal pandemic relief aid for lead pipe removals. It has removed about 2,000 lead service lines over the past five years.

Buffalo Water Board Chairman Oluwole A. McFoy said replacing all lead lines in the shortened time span will be “daunting” for a water system that serves more than 250,000 residents, a third of whom live at or below poverty level.

“We have to look at how can we shrink that plan to 10 years and make it affordable for our customers,” McFoy said.

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown was more blunt in his assessment of the EPA timeline, labeling it “unrealistic” for older cities, which would face “a major financial burden that could be crippling” without significant help from the federal government.

“The cost to do it all is over $400 million. The city budget is $575 million,” Brown said.

Buffalo certainly will examine how other municipalities across the country, including Newark, are handling their lead pipe issues, he said.

“But it definitely is going to be a burden, without any question. And even with the $190 million that Newark has been able to invest, they’re still burdened,” Brown said.

Newark’s success

Newark, which has about 280,000 residents who rely on city water, showed it can be done at a much quicker pace than 10 years.

“The greatest challenge – outside of funding – is collaboration, political will. With the political will not there, it won’t get done,” Adeem said.

In a 2022 visit to Newark, Vice President Kamala Harris praised the city’s work on lead pipes “as an example and a role model of what cities around our country are capable of doing.”

Newark’s water in 2017 exceeded federal thresholds for lead in nearly a quarter of 129 water samples tested. Newark Education Workers Caucus and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued in federal court in 2018, arguing that the city and the water utility were more focused on denying the problem with lead-contaminated drinking water than fixing it.

Under a 2019 court order, the city agreed to provide better notification to residents, distribute water filters to homes and expand its lead monitoring.

The city received few takers on its offer to replace privately owned lead service lines for $1,000 – a fraction of the total cost, which ranged from $5,000 to $7,000.

So, Newark officials pursued a different approach, securing a $120 million Essex County-backed bond to cover the cost of the replacements and reworking a lease agreement with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to pay the debt service on the bonds. The new financing allowed the city to replace the lines at no cost to property owners.

The Newark City Council then adopted a local ordinance making it mandatory for property owners to sign up for the lead service line replacement program or to opt out and replace the line on their own within 90 days. The new law also gave the city “right of entry” to private property to replace lead lines. With three-quarters of residents in Newark renting their homes, this key provision saved the city from wasting time trying to track down out-of-town landlords.

“They wouldn’t have been able to do anything if they didn’t pass the ordinance they did,” said Amy Goldsmith, New Jersey state director of Clean Water Action, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C. “By having the ordinance, it allowed them to get on properties and do it much more efficiently.”

Instead of a scattered approach, the city focused on whole blocks at a time, arranging bulk pricing with contractors to get better deals, while also providing on-the-job training and apprenticeship work in plumbing for at least 60 city residents who previously had been unemployed.

“They were strategic about it. They would identify neighborhoods that had the biggest problems and go in and map it out and … do it all at once,” said Erik D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an international environmental research and advocacy organization. “It’s just much less expensive and much more efficient to do it that way.”

Olson said Newark officials “took a while” to acknowledge that they had a lead contamination problem, but when they did, the lead line replacement process moved very quickly.

Buffalo would be wise to follow a similar path, starting with an ordinance making lead pipe removals mandatory, Olson said.

A local ordinance such as what was adopted in Newark and some other communities removes any impediments to pipe replacements that utilities often cite, such as access to private property or using public money on private property. It also helps ensure that low-income water customers don’t get passed over because they can’t afford it, Olson said.

Federal dollars available

The federal government is making an unprecedented amount of money available for communities such as Buffalo to tackle their lead pipe problems, including $15 billion through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and $11.7 billion in revolving loan funds set aside for large water infrastructure projects, Olson added.

Buffalo should act quickly to secure a piece of that funding, he said.

There is a key difference in the two cities that could slow Buffalo’s efforts. Newark had maintained exceptional records of its lead service lines, allowing the city to determine quickly how many were still in service, where they were and how much it would cost to remove them.

Buffalo, on the other hand, does not have great records of its service lines from many decades ago, and has used a predictive model to arrive at an estimate of 40,000 lead pipes still in service. It is currently in the process of determining more precisely how many lead lines exist and where they are.

Other key changes in the EPA’s Proposed Lead and Copper Rule Improvements include lowering the federal threshold of lead concentration allowed in public drinking water from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion, and to require more stringent monitoring procedures for testing for lead in tap water.

The proposed new monitoring protocols would require water systems to collect a first liter water sample and a fifth liter sample at sites with lead service lines. The sample with the higher level of lead would then be used to determine whether it falls within the federal guideline.

Current water testing requires that water systems sample only the first liter.

By capturing water that has been sitting in lead service lines, the new sampling method likely will reveal high levels of lead in many more systems, Olson said.

Buffalo’s most recent annual water testing of 140 properties found lead at levels above 5 parts per billion in seven homes and between 1 and 5 parts per billion in 58 homes.

Buffalo Water’s policy since 2016 is to intervene with filters and ultimately service line replacement when a property exceeds 5 parts per billion.

Lead’s impact on health costs

As costly as removal of old lead pipes will be – estimated at $60 billion for water systems across the country – some research indicates it would be far more expensive to do nothing.

A 2023 study by Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health researchers found that more stringent EPA lead rules would result in annual health benefits of $9 billion, through reduced medical problems caused by lead exposure, including cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline in adults and nervous system damage in children.

“When they start talking about the costs of removing the lead lines, let’s talk about the costs on society when you have a child that cannot function in an average setting in school and then needs these specialized services to be able to function. And then the costs on society when these folks are not able to land a job and be a part of the labor force,” said Stephanie J. Simeon, executive director of Heart of the City Neighborhoods, a Buffalo nonprofit organization dedicated to affordable housing, home rehabilitation and lead hazard reduction.

Simeon said she anticipates pushback on the EPA’s proposals from lobbyists, as well as water utilities looking to extend the 10-year window for service line replacements.

Written comments on the proposals must have been submitted by Feb. 5 to the EPA, which expects to finalize the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements in October.

But no matter what happens with the EPA’s rule improvements, the City of Buffalo must increase its efforts to eradicate lead, especially in the city’s neediest neighborhoods, she said.

Buffalo Water has replaced at no cost to property owners nearly 2,000 leaking or burst lead water lines since 2019 under its Replace Old Lead Lines (ROLL) program. But the program relies on homeowners testing for lead in their homes and asking for the line to be replaced, said Simeon.

That is simply not enough, given the amount of lead pipes still in use, Simeon said.

“It’s usually reactive,” she said. “We need to be proactive.”