The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a major revision of the main rule meant to keep harmful metals out of drinking water for the first time since it was established in 1991.
But many observers are asking why it has taken so lonog, especially in the wake of the lead water crisis in Flint, Mich.
The Lead and Copper Rule requires the amount of lead in drinking water be no more than 15 parts per billion, though there is no safe amount of lead. If 10 percent of the tap samples collected in a community show a level above that amount, then water systems are required to take action to reduce the lead contamination, such as replacing lead pipes, introducing corrosion control and notifying the public.
The last changes to the regulation came in 2007, when enhanced monitoring provisions, treatment protocols, customer awareness measures and lead service line requirements were added.
However, those were seen as minor tweaks instead of the overhaul many called for after Washington, D.C., went through a lead contamination crisis in the early 2000s. The EPA now wants to make “substantive” changes to the rule and “streamline rule requirements,” though it is vague about what that means.
The agency says it wants to improve corrosion control practices to keep lead and copper from leaching into water supplies and to find new actions it can take when corrosion control isn’t effective. An EPA official told Congress last week that replacing lead service lines could be included, as well as developing a household limit for lead levels in drinking water.
The agency held a public meeting about the revision in November 2010. That revision is expected next year — seven years later.
Mae Wu, senior attorney at the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Health Program, said the delay is a mystery to those outside the EPA, but shrinking budgets and staff cuts in the EPA’s Office of Groundwater and Drinking Water could play a role.
“I don’t know exactly what’s going on inside,” she said. “I wouldn’t say it is at all unique for them to slowly get moving on things we have been asking for.”
Wu said the EPA knows water utilities are able to “game the system,” and the revision process will bolster the rule against those practices.
She said a memo issued earlier this year by the agency hopefully would put an end to the most frequent ways utilities cheat, such as running the water through a faucet for a few minutes before taking a sample or taking off aerators on faucets.
The new rule must include more stringent policies for testing in homes and schools and strengthening the EPA’s ability to step in when a state regulator is not doing its job, Wu said.
“We obviously think that’s somewhere where the EPA should exercise a lot more of its authority to take a proactive action, to step in and take over where they see problems happening,” she said.
The EPA, for its part, isn’t rushing to answer questions about the delay in revising the regulation.
An EPA representative declined to make anyone from the agency available for an interview with the Washington Examiner and provided a lengthy, generalized statement about the rule.
The official said the EPA is talking with stakeholders about updating the rule, including recommendations from its National Drinking Water Advisory Council made in December. The council began meeting in 2014 to determine which recommendations to send to the EPA.
“EPA is committed to improving the public health protection provided by the Lead and Copper Rule and is actively considering potential revisions to the rule,” the representative said. “EPA’s primary goal is to improve the effectiveness of the Lead and Copper rule in reducing exposure to lead and copper from drinking water.”
Under questioning from Texas Democrat Rep. Gene Green, Joel Beauvais, the deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Water, told the House Energy and Commerce Committee there’s a “sense of urgency” about revising the rule. However, he would not budge off the plan to propose the rule in 2017.
Beauvais said the recommendations made to the EPA in December came before the Flint crisis exploded, meaning additional measures could be introduced.
“We’re working hard on that, and we’re working as quickly as we can,” he said.
The EPA has been under fire in recent months because the rule failed in Flint.
The EPA requires state regulators to sample water and take action against local water utilities that have high levels of metals in their water. Officials such as EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Beauvais have said the EPA was too deferential to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees who skirted testing requirements and didn’t follow proper procedures for adding corrosion control after the state switched the city’s water source.
While the EPA and Michigan officials knew of the lead contamination for months, neither agency notified the public.
The EPA defends its practices by pointing to the numbers: Of the 68,000 water systems in the United States, 96 percent of them have had no Lead and Copper Rule violations in the last three years.
“Of the 2,441 water systems that had an exceedance in the past three-year monitoring period, 1,837 systems serve fewer than 500 people and 69 systems serve more than 10,000 people,” the EPA representative told the Examiner.
On Flint, McCarthy has defended the agency by saying that the Michigan envrionmental agency didn’t comply with orders fast enough. Once those orders were sent, the state agency lied to the EPA about how it was addressing the problem, McCarthy said.
Still, Marc Edwards, a drinking water expert from Virginia Tech University, said the EPA’s rule is badly out of date and allows states and municipalities to cheat the rule.
He said there’s an “anything goes” attitude on compliance since D.C.’s water-contamination crisis. That Flint, where 100,000 people cannot drink the water because of lead contamination, was always in compliance with the rule shows the regulation’s problems.
“If a landlord were to engage in similar behavior, allowing even a single child to be exposed to lead paint risks without warning, the EPA and [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] would successfully argue for criminal prosecution and incarceration,” Edwards told Congress last month.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Utah Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has held three hearings on the Flint crisis. A regular critic of the EPA, Chaffetz said the biggest fix the government can make is to update the Lead and Copper Rule.
Without that update and stronger enforcement, Chaffetz said the EPA cannot be counted on to take the Lead and Copper Rule seriously.
“They better get their act together at the local level, and they better get their act together at the federal level because the EPA, if you think they’re going to come in and save the day, that just isn’t going to happen,” he said.
