Map Shows States With Most Dangerous Levels of Lead in Pipes

Lead in drinking water remains a serious issue across the United States, and while some states have relatively few reported lead service lines, others have hundreds of thousands of lead service lines for water.
According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s 7th Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment (DWINSA), the state with the highest amount of lead in its service lines — the pipes that connect a water main to the plumbing in a home or a building — is Illinois, followed by Florida and then Ohio, which all have over 400,000 reported lead service lines, and over 800,000 projected lead service lines in their state.
The World Health Organization has called lead one of its “10 chemicals of major public health concern.” This is because lead can cause stomach pain, malnourishment, and brain damage.
These health concerns are particularly dangerous for children as they can absorb five times more lead than adults from an ingested dose. Because of this, children are more vulnerable to experiencing long-term behavioral issues, developmental difficulties, and even comas, convulsions, and death.
The EPA has also stated that although a service line may seem like a minor part of the plumbing process, “there is no level of lead that is considered safe.”
Per the EPA, Illinois has a projected 702,526 lead service lines, and a projected 1,071,355 lead lines. A large amount of lead in Illinois is in Chicago, where 68 percent of young children are affected by lead in the city.
Eric D. Olson, senior strategic director for health at the National Resources Defence Council (NRDC), told Newsweek that one major factor in the prominence of lead pipes is that a lot of water mains in the US were built 100 years ago.
Olson said: “Most people in the US are still living off of the investments of our great grandparents that were made in the late 1800s, early 1900s, when a lot of the water infrastructure was built. And we’ve done very little to upgrade it and update the technology or replace it.”
Olson added that investments are also most needed in poor areas, saying: “What we’ve seen is almost a two-tiered drinking water system in the United States where lower income communities, communities of color and often smaller communities tend to have much higher rates of violations of safety standards, and a lack of adequate government attention to the issue.
“Whereas wealthier communities, and often larger systems that aren’t low income, tend to have much better compliance rates, not uniformly in all ways, but that tends to largely be what happens.”
He added that one of the major issues is that cities with shrinking populations cannot keep up with their infrastructure needs in order to serve their remaining population.
Olson also told Newsweek: “People need to understand that there really are health risks to them if we don’t address this problem. Nobody wants to be drinking from what essentially is a lead straw that’s coming into their house, right, and contaminating their water with lead. Nobody wants to be getting kidney ailments, getting cardiovascular disease, getting cancer as a result of drinking their water.
“We all want water that’s safe and you know, you see the demonstration of that with people voting with their feet by buying bottled water across the country, which is now the number one soft drink in the US.”
Lead in water has been an ongoing policy point for the Biden Administration.
President Joe Biden set a 10-year deadline on October 10 for cities to remove all of their lead pipes, aimed at eliminating lead from America’s water supply.
The new regulation will create a more stringent limit on lead in drinking water by lowering the allowable “action level” from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion.
Additionally, systems under this new rule will have to notify and provide guidance to the public if lead levels exceed this new “action level.”
This came after many other Biden-era measures to counter lead in pipes across the US, including providing an additional $26 million to the EPA specifically for lead removal as part of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act in August 2024.
The EPA’s assistant administrator for water, Bruno Pigott, said in a press release at the time: “The science is clear: There is no safe level of exposure to lead.”
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