Lead Pipe Tally Coming in 2025 as Systems Struggle to Count (1)

A national tally of the drinking water systems that met an October deadline to count their lead service lines will not be available until spring as some small water utilities face challenges completing their inventories.

States have until March 31 to report their lead service line inventory data to the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA spokeswoman Dominique Joseph said. Local water systems had until Oct. 16 to complete an initial inventory of their lead drinking water pipes and submit the count to the states.

“EPA is currently working with state drinking water programs to ensure that water systems submit their inventories,” Joseph said.

The deadlines were set under a Trump administration rule for lead pipe replacement. That rule was rescinded last month when the Biden administration finalized a revised rule, known as the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements (LCRI), which requires almost all lead service lines to be replaced by 2037. The new rule includes the Trump-era inventory deadlines.

Avoiding lead poisoning from drinking water is among the Biden administration’s top environmental priorities. The EPA considers no level of lead exposure safe, but it’s especially harmful to children because it damages brain development early in life.

The rule required all drinking water systems nationwide to submit initial inventories, including a count of pipes made of unknown material.

It will take states months to sort through their inventory submissions, said Erica Walker, national Lead and Copper Rule Practice Leader at the consulting firm Arcadis.

“Many state agencies have less than one full-time employee overseeing Lead and Copper Rule Compliance for thousands of utilities and each inventory is its own puzzle,” Walker said in an email.

Most water systems likely submitted their inventories on time, even though there were technical glitches with submissions in some states, said Steve Via, director of federal relations for the American Water Works Association.

“I’ve been hearing good things,” Via said, adding that water systems now need to be thinking about how to line up their resources to meet future LCRI deadlines.

The rule gives water systems three years to begin replacing 10% of their lead service lines annually. The LCRI could face challenges in the courts, Congress, and from a future presidential administration.

A Small Town Struggle

The EPA allowed the inventories to include numbers of pipes made of “unknown” material and gave water systems three years to investigate those service lines and begin replacing them.

The inventories are expected to be an accurate accounting of all the nation’s water pipes, but not an immediately accurate picture of the number of pipes made of lead, said Alan Roberson, executive director of the Association of State Drinking Water Administrators.

“I don’t think we’ll know for a while just how many communities are in compliance with the inventories,” said Brent Fewell, a lawyer who served as principal deputy assistant EPA administrator in the Office of Water during the George W. Bush administration.

Rural and disadvantaged communities have struggled to complete their inventories, he said.

“The states and EPA will soon recognize this and will be faced with providing more educational outreach and technical assistance support to communities,” he said. “These are the very same communities struggling to provide affordable access to clean water due to the skyrocketing costs for basic water and wastewater services.”

Small water systems in Texas had trouble finding documentation that would have helped them count their lead pipes and faced technical challenges submitting their inventories before the October deadline, said Jason Knobloch, deputy executive director of the Texas Rural Water Association.

Though TRWA offered trainings for small water systems to help them meet the deadline, there was still “lack of knowing where to start,” he said. “It was a large task to ask of utilities.”

Of the more than 4,000 community water systems that are part of the TRWA, just over 1,000 had submitted their lead service line inventories by the deadline, he said, adding that he does not have more recent numbers.

“A lot of systems are still getting it done,” he said Monday.