Important breaks and leaking pipes reveal a nation in danger
C-: Grade assessed by the American Society of Civil Engineers in its 2021 “report card” on U.S. drinking water infrastructure.
2.2 million: Variety of miles of underground pipes that make up U.S. drinking water infrastructure.
Every 2 minutes: Frequency of water predominant breaks in the USA.
9,000: The variety of swimming pools that might be filled every day with the 6 billion gallons of treated water lost to leakage and breaks in U.S. water systems.
9%: Federal share of total capital spending on drinking water infrastructure in 2017, down from 63 percent in 1977. Two-thirds of public spending for capital investment in water infrastructure because the Nineteen Eighties has been made by state and native governments.
$655 billion: The spending, in line with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, that will likely be essential to keep up, upgrade or replace aging and deteriorating water and wastewater infrastructure across the USA over the following 20 years.
Get the lead out
There aren’t any federal laws requiring testing of drinking water for the presence of lead in schools that receive water from public water systems, though these systems are regulated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. There was little oversight of water safety in schools across the country until Recent York State first began to require testing for lead at school drinking water in 2016. The shockingly high levels of lead discovered in some N.Y. schools then highlighted a national problem.
Exposure to guide can lead to significant health problems. Children are particularly in danger because their growing bodies absorb more lead than adults. Negative health effects include anemia, kidney and brain damage, in addition to learning disabilities and decreased growth.
0: Parts per billion of lead that is taken into account “secure” in drinking water. After previously recommending motion when 20 ppb of lead were discovered in drinking water, the E.P.A. stopped offering a selected motion limit in 2018. Growing medical consensus is that no amount of lead in drinking water is secure.
50 million: Number of kids who use drinking water every day at U.S. public schools.
41: Percent of U.S. public school districts that didn’t test drinking water at their schools; 16 percent more “didn’t know” a technique or one other.
37: Percent of the college districts that tested students’ drinking water that discovered “elevated lead.”
43: Percent of Head Start centers that had not tested for lead in 2019; 31 percent of the centers, which serve 900,000 infants and pre-school children, didn’t know in the event that they had tested in any respect.
Read: Mississippi’s water crisis is a component of a bigger story: systemic racism and government neglect
Sources: U.S. Government Accountability Office, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, American Society of Civil Engineers.
