A decade after lead-contaminated water was found in Flint's water system, the legal battle to replace lead water pipes is nearly finished.
Jul 9, 2025
The Flint water crisis began in 2014, after lead-contaminated drinking water was found to be leaching out from aging pipes into homes citywide.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Natural Resources Defense Council, with help from other activists and nonprofits, have released statements on the recent progress, celebrating the milestone.
The statements which they chalk up the crisis to “cost-cutting measures and improper water treatment,” that the state “didn’t require treatment to prevent corrosion,” after a “a state-appointed emergency manager” switched the water supply to the Flint River.
There is no safe level of lead exposure; each nanogram causes harm. In addition to long-known risks, such as damage to children’s brains and certain cancers, there is also significant evidence that exposure to lead is linked to numerous cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and heart attack.
The coalition mobilized the citizenry and filed a lawsuit against Flint and Michigan state officials to secure safe water. The result was a settlement in March 2017, under which a federal court in Detroit ordered Flint to give every resident the opportunity to have their lead pipe replaced at no cost, as well as conduct comprehensive tap water testing, implement a faucet filter distribution and education program, and maintain funding for health programs to help residents deal with the effects of Flint’s tainted water, according to the NRDC.
The coalition then returned to court six times in six years to ensure the city and state kept to the timeline, which was delayed by COVID-19, and other reasons which The Detroit News described as “spotty record-keeping” and “ineffective management.”
On July 1st, the State of Michigan submitted a progress report to a federal court confirming that, more than eight years after the settlement, nearly 11,000 lead pipes were replaced and more than 28,000 properties were restored where the maintenance had taken place.
Of the 4,200 buildings where lead pipes are known to still be in service, their owners have either left the properties vacant, abandoned, or have declined the free replacement under the Safe Water Drinking Act. The coalition has said it will continue to monitor city and state progress on these remaining lines.
“Thanks to the persistence of the people of Flint and our partners, we are finally at the end of the lead pipe replacement project,” said Pastor Allen C. Overton of the Concerned Pastors for Social Action, one of the organizations that sued the city. “While this milestone is not all the justice our community deserves, it is a huge achievement.”
Is the tap water where you live safe to drink as-is, without additional home filtering/treatment? DO you drink it as-is?
It is SAFE, and I don't notice anything off about it; I do drink it as-is
It is SAFE, and I don't notice anything off about it, but I DON'T drink it as-is
It is SAFE, but it tastes/smells/looks off; I still drink it as-is
It is SAFE, but it tastes/smells/looks off; I DON'T drink it as-is
Not sure; I don't notice anything off about it; I still drink it as-is
Not sure; I don't notice anything off about it; I DON'T drink it as-is
Not sure; it tastes/smells/looks off; I still drink it as-is
Not sure; it tastes/smells/looks off; I DON'T drink it as-is
NOT safe, but it looks/smells/tastes fine; I still drink it as-is
NOT safe, but it looks/smells/tastes fine; I DON'T drink it as-is
NOT safe, and it tastes/smells/looks off; but I still drink it as-is
NOT safe, and it tastes/smells/looks off; I DON'T drink it as-is
Voting ended onFeb 18, 2025
Vote based on your local government's regulations/recommendations. For example, if your tap water meets the legal requirements for safe drinking water but tastes funny so you filter it before drinking, you would select option 4: "It is SAFE, but it tastes/smells/looks off; I DON'T drink it as-is."
Examples of an off taste could include tasting like metal or chlorine; an off look could include visible particulates or a yellow tint.
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A federal judge has sided with two First Nations in Manitoba and one in Ontario that sued the Canadian government over its duty to provide t
A federal judge has sided with two First Nations in Manitoba and one in Ontario that sued the Canadian government over its duty to provide them with safe housing and clean drinking water, in separate rulings delivered Friday.
The federal government has had a duty to ensure Shamattawa First Nation, and other First Nations who opt into the northern Manitoba First Nation's class-action, were provided access to drinking water safe for human use over the claim period, Justice Paul Favel said in a decision.
Shamattawa launched the class-action, which was certified in 2023, on behalf of all First Nations members countrywide whose communities were subject to a drinking water advisory in effect on or after June 20, 2020.
"The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday [October 8, 2024] requiring water utilities to replace all lead pipes within a decade, a move aimed at eliminating a toxic threat that continues to affect tens of thousands of American children each year.
The move, which also tightens the amount of lead allowed in the nation’s drinking water, comes nearly 40 years after Congress determined that lead pipes posed a serious risk to public health and banned them in new construction.
Research has shown that lead, a toxic contaminant that seeps from pipes into the drinking water supply, can cause irreversible developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems among children. In adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lead exposure can cause increased blood pressure, heart disease, decreased kidney function and cancer.
But replacing the lead pipes that deliver water to millions of U.S. homes will cost tens of billions of dollars, and the push to eradicate them only gathered momentum after a water crisis in Flint, Mich., a decade ago exposed the extent to which children remain vulnerable to lead poisoning through tap water...
The groundbreaking regulation, called the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, will establish a national inventory of lead service lines and require that utilities take more aggressive action to remove lead pipes on homeowners’ private property. It also lowers the level of lead contamination that will trigger government enforcement from 15 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb.
The rule also establishes the first-ever national requirement to test for lead in schools that rely on water from public utilities. It mandates thatwater systems screen all elementary and child-care facilities, where those who are the most vulnerable to lead’s effects — young children — are enrolled, and that they offer testing to middle and high schools.
The White House estimates that more than 9 million homes across the country are still supplied by lead pipelines, which are the leading source of lead contamination through drinking water. The EPA has projected that replacing all of them could cost at least $45 billion.
Lead pipes were initially installed in cities decades ago because they were cheaper and more malleable, but the heavy metal can wear down and corrode over time. President Joe Biden has made replacing them one of his top environmental priorities, securing $15 billion to give states over five years through the bipartisan infrastructure law and vowing to rid the country of lead pipes by 2031. The administration has spent $9 billion so far — enough to replace up to 1.7 million lead pipes, the administration said.
On Tuesday, the administration said it was providing an additional $2.6 billion in funding for pipe replacement. Over 367,000 lead pipes have been replaced nationwide since Biden took office, according to White House officials, affecting nearly 1 million people...
Environmental advocates said that former president Donald Trump, who issued much more modest revisions to the lead and copper rule just days before Biden took office, would have a hard time reversing the new standards.
Erik Olson, the senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Safe Drinking Water Act has provisions prohibiting weakening the health protections of existing standards...
Olson added that the rule “represents a major victory for public health” and will protect millions of people “whose health is threatened every time they fill a glass from the kitchen sink contaminated by lead.”
“While the rule is imperfect and we still have more to do, this is by far the biggest step towards eliminating lead in tap water in over three decades,” he said."
the world heath organization announced that we will be out of clean drinking water in a few years…that mean I won’t be able to graduate and live a full life..that means we’re gonna die of thirst and so will the planet
Hi Anon,
Before I say anything else, I want to reassure you that the world is not going to run out of clean drinking water in a few years.
I’m so sorry that this has made you feel like you don’t have a future. That is a really heavy thing to be holding. I promise it isn’t true. Climate change may make the future harder and different compared to what we imagined, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t live a full, meaningful life in that future.
I tried to find the original source of this “running out of water” claim, and as far as I can tell it traces back to an unsourced tweet. I can’t find any reports, articles, etc. published by the World Health Organization making a claim anything like this.
The UN’s Water Global Analysis and Assessment of Sanitation and Drinking-Water (GLAAS) did publish a report in partnership with WHO and UNICEF outlining how climate risks may exacerbate barriers to achieving global access to safe drinking water and sanitation systems. Which I think may be where this claim originated? But it does not say anything about running out of clean water.
The other source I think could be another report from UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, this one called Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, which declared that we are entering an “era of water bankruptcy”. Which is definitely not good, and I’ll get into what that actually means more in a little bit, but I do want to be clear that it absolutely did not say or even imply that we are going to run out of clean drinking water in just a few years (or at all).
A more detailed breakdown of what the scary term "water bankruptcy" means is under the cut. Note that this is not my area of expertise, this is based on my own understanding of resource use/management and reading the report above:
It’s not really possible for the world to fully "run out" of clean drinking water—the hydrological cycle is just that, a cycle—so the water just moves through different reservoirs. We have many technological means to turn contaminated water into clean water, from crude water filters to reverse osmosis or distillation which can even turn fully salt water into drinkable freshwater. Water issues are more an issue of efficiency, infrastructure, and overuse than running out.
For a long time, it seems like we could withdraw exponentially increasing quantities of water from natural reservoirs (aquifers, snowpack, wetlands, rivers, etc.) pretty cheaply and with little to no consequence. Then eventually we started to run short or over expend natural water reservoirs in dryer years--see examples of rivers that no longer actually flow all the way to the ocean. This report points to us moving into a stage where we are “overspending” our water sources to the point that they can’t recover and will begin or are beginning to collapse.
The good news, is that there are a lot of ways we can “cut” our water budget. We can restrict the entirely unnecessary water uses like huge swathes of manicured grass and massive AI data centers. We can use gray water for things we were previously using freshwater for. We can make industry and agriculture more water efficient—there are a lot of very smart folks working on this right now. We can build better sanitation and water management infrastructure in regions that lack it. We can also prioritize restoring and protecting wetlands, forests, aquifers, etc. to safeguard our existing water supply from further damage.
Of course none of this is good, and it will impact the lives of many people in tangible ways. The communities bearing the brunt of the impact will be those in the Global South, where many climate change impacts are worse and there are fewer infrastructural resources to address these issues. That is both an unfathomable injustice and something the global community has a moral duty to do everything we can to mitigate.
Some parts of this crisis were probably always going to happen with the way many wealthy countries have been treating water as an infinite trivial resource—probably even without climate change making droughts worse. Our water use per person has significantly increased and the number of people has significantly increased.
I have lived my entire life in places where drought and water use have already been pain points for a long time. It's pretty normal at certain times a year to be asked to conserve household water, restrict watering lawns, and avoid anything that could cause a spark outside due to fire danger. How to make do with less water is something I've already spent a lot of time thinking about.
Stricter water restrictions are likely going to be a reality for more and more of the world. I think we are likely headed down a path where future generations will be horrified that many societies used to pee and poop into perfectly clean water. While this won't be pleasant for those of us used to water being so thoughtlessly available, there is no reason that we won't have enough water for everyone to meet their basic needs if we treat clean water like the precious resource it actually is.
I hope this helped ease your anxiety at least a little bit, Anon. Doomer tweets and headlines are understandably really scary, but I promise none of this is any reason why you shouldn't be able to graduate and live a full, meaningful life. <3
Charges dismissed against Trinidad water protestors as city hall closes
David Sentendrey
Thu, May 21, 2026 at 7:17 PM MST
A Henderson County grand jury declined to indict Jennifer Combs, and a municipal judge dismissed charges against YouTube journalist Winston Noles following their controversial arrests in Trinidad.
Combs was originally charged with a felony for a Facebook post about alleged water-related hospitalizations, while Noles was arrested for disorderly conduct during a live-streamed protest against her arrest.
The city's water issues remain under investigation by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, but city officials have closed Trinidad City Hall until next Tuesday for unknown reasons.
TRINIDAD, Texas - A grand jury has now declined to indict a woman arrested over a Facebook post about water concerns in the City of Trinidad.
