The water pressure had dropped so low it was impossible to take a shower. And it took a half hour for the toilet to fill up after it was flushed.
Was it a broken filter?
Sandra Grant’s 87-year-old mother had taken to drinking bottled water. So, in August Grant called the Newburgh water department for help. Workers dug up the street in front of the 90-year-old house that her mother has lived in since 1983. Soon, the mystery was solved.
There was a leak in the service line that leads from the curb into the home. Worse, the line was made of lead, which can leach dangerous toxins into drinking water when it corrodes. It would have to go.
But, Grant soon discovered, her mother would be on the hook for the $10,000 cost to replace it. The house sits atop a hill with a large garden out front, not the typical excavation.
Her mother would have to take the money she’d saved for funeral and burial expenses and turn it over to a contractor.
“For a pipe that’s on the road that we don’t own?,” Grant said. “That makes absolutely no sense.”
“You buy your home,” Grant said. “You’re responsible for your maintenance of your garden, your exterior, interior. No one would ever think ‘let’s check to see if we have lead pipes because that’s going to be an unexpected bill somewhere down the road’.”
In Newburgh, a Hudson River city home to century-old homes on wide tree-lined streets, lead water lines are everywhere.
The city estimates some 2,500 of its 5,800 service lines are lead. They’ve spent the last few years ripping them out of the ground.
But what Grant and other homeowners have come to learn is the city will pick up the tab to replace the service line in the street, but the one that extends from curb into the home? That’s on them.
It’s an expense that struggling families, especially those in low-income or disadvantaged communities, can hardly afford.
More:The price of lead
Clean water advocates say the half-the-job approach undercuts the federal government’s multi-billion dollar effort to remove lead from the nation’s drinking water after a crisis in Flint, Michigan highlighted the stark consequences for public health.
What’s the point of removing lead lines in the street if you’re not going to replace the one that runs into the home?
“There’s really no statewide policy governing this issue,” said Rob Hayes, the director of Clean Water for Environmental Advocates NY. “We would like to see a requirement that utilities have to cover the costs for replacing the entire length of the service line because it’s a huge environmental issue.”
Hayes says studies have shown that partial replacements can actually cause a spike in the amount of lead in drinking water.
But in many places, unless cities and towns receive government funding to do the work, the cost typically falls on the homeowner.
States count their lead lines
States across the nation have been forced to confront the issue after the Environmental Protection Agency set a 2024 deadline for municipalities to conduct an inventory of lead lines.
In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law last year that requires water companies to replace all lead lines that run from the street into the home in the next ten years.
In less than three years, Newark, NJ, managed to replace some 23,000 of its lead lines without charging homeowners. The city did it by securing a $120 million bond while state lawmakers passed a bill that allowed the city to spend public money on private property so it could replace the service line that runs from the curb into the home.
The response has been touted by the Biden Administration as the blueprint for how the work should be done. In February, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Newark to highlight the city’s effort.
But in Rhode Island, the issue has ignited a civil rights challenge.
In January, the Childhood Lead Action Project complained to the EPA that the city of Providence’s practice of forcing customers to share the cost of replacing the lead pipes that run from the water main to the water meter violated the civil rights of Black, Latinos and Native American residents.
The same month, an American University study found that wealthier neighborhoods in Washington. D.C. had a far higher rate of full lead line replacements than those with lower household incomes. Between 2009 and 2018, high-income wards in the district had a 73 percent rate of full replacements while for Black residents, the rate was 40 percent.
New York cities and towns have employed a hodgepodge of approaches.
Albany offers homeowners up to $2,000 toward the cost of replacing the line. Syracuse adds the cost of replacement to the tax bill, which can be paid off at seven percent interest over ten years.
Hayes and others say the state needs to develop a policy or risk a challenge like the one in Providence.
“We’re certainly seeing a lot of partial lead service replacements happening that are impacting those communities most harmed communities by lead,” Hayes said. ”We need to stop that immediately. And if our state leaders won’t adopt that proactively through policy, then the courts are always an option to think about.”
In March, the EPA sent a strong signal to states when it allocated some $15 billion in funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), so states could work with water agencies to conduct an inventory and replace their lead service lines (LSLs).
“This BIL requirement helps address a long-standing equity challenge – for some Americans, the cost to replace their portion of LSLs is prohibitively high,” EPA’s assistant administrator Radhika Fox wrote. “Americans unable to replace their portion of the LSL remain disproportionately exposed to lead and its harmful impacts.”
NY waiting on the EPA
While the EPA’s stance was welcome, the agency fell short of mandating full replacements, advocates say.
“Gov. Hochul’s administration can say to a utility if you want to access funds to dig up lead pipes in your community you have to use that funding to cover the whole cost of replacing those pipes,” Hayes from Clean Water for Environmental Advocates NY, added.
The state Department of Health says it’s awaiting further guidance from the EPA.
“NYS DOH realizes that lead service line replacement is an important topic for residential homeowners,” spokesman Benning DeLaMater said. “We are still awaiting guidelines from USEPA on the administration of Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) funds for LSL replacement and its potential applicability to this issue.”
Tom Neltner, the senior director for Safe Chemicals with the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, D.C., says New York needs to catch up to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio; states that have tried to find solutions after seeing spikes in lead in water supplies.
“I don’ really know why it’s not happening in New York,” Neltner said. “The focus has been on lead and drinking water in schools. But lead pipes are the most significant source of contamination.”
Plugging leaks, finding lead
Wayne Vradenburgh’s third-floor office doubles as a museum to Newburgh’s subterranean past.
A bookcase is stocked with lead pipes water department workers have ripped out of the ground in recent years. Two floors down, there’s a pipe with “1887” etched into the side.
A few years ago, workers dug up a cistern made of hand-laid brick that was once filled with water to fight fires. “The city is extremely old,” says Vradenburgh, the superintendent of Newburgh’s water department. “We date back to the 1700s, early 1880s so we find a lot of what I call 'really cool stuff'.”
Vradenburgh was reared in nearby Montgomery and has been with the department 25 years. He started out cutting grass and guesses he’s held nearly every job in the department.
His work in the field told him that the city could cut down on the amount of water it was sending out every year. “I knew the city was leaking like crazy,” Vradenburgh said.
In recent years, his workers have identified some 500 leaks and plugged them all. The city has been able to reduce by 60 percent the amount of water it sends to customers, saving money on chemicals and electricity. It went from pumping out 6.8 million gallons of water a day to around 2.8 million.
More importantly, the work helped Vradenburgh identify where lead lines remain in the city.
He estimates there are about 2,500. To date the city has replaced 125 lead lines.
The first round of replacements was paid for with nearly $550,000 in funding from the state. “And I kept emailing the state saying ‘Can I get more?,” Vradenburgh says.
More:How American Rescue Plan money is being spent in New York
When the money runs out
The next round will be covered by $1 million the city received through the American Rescue Plan Act in March.
But, Vradenburgh says, with an estimated 2,500 lead lines, the $1 million won’t be nearly enough. The final cost could be closer to $25 million.
The city recently purchased a $583,000 hydro-excavator that can dig two-foot-by-two foot holes in the curb outside homes to determine if there’s a lead line leading into the house. Vradenburgh estimates the truck will let him inventory ten houses a day over two years.
To qualify for lead line reimbursem*nt, homeowners need to supply three bids before the water department will approve a contractor.
Sandra Grant took over the process for her mother. (Grant agreed to discuss her mother's experience but requested that she not be identified by name.)
The winning bidder got the work done in a single day, working through an August downpour.
But she considers herself lucky. In May, Vradenburgh sent her mother a check for the $10,000. Her funeral and burial expenses were restored.
Others were less fortunate. Those who had their lines replaced before the government funding came through, typically had to pay the full tab.
Grant’s grateful for the work Vradenburgh and his staff did, helping with the paperwork and guiding her through the process.
But the experience was unsettling.
“It’s a shock,” Grant said. “Pensioners, those on limited incomes, if they’re presented with such an astronomical bill. You’re going to stress them out physically and mentally. My mom’s in her 80s. And to go through all this pressure the anxiety was very wearing on her.”
Thomas C. Zambito covers energy, economic growth and transportation for The USA Today's Network's New York State team. He can be reached at Tzambito@Lohud.com or on Twitter at @TomZambito
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