1 in 5 New Yorkers may be drinking water from lead pipes, new report says

Newly installed metal drain pipes are fastened to a residential building's basement wall in Brooklyn, August 17, 2017. A new report finds that 40% of water service lines (not pictured) are potentially made of lead pipes.

Lead pipes may carry water to as many as 900,000 New York City homes, more than 60 years after such pipes were banned across the five boroughs, according to a new report by the New York City Coalition to End Lead Poisoning.

By analyzing publicly available data from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, the report found that nearly half of all buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan are served by pipes that are either certainly or potentially made of lead, a dangerous heavy metal that can cause permanent brain damage and other developmental problems in children if consumed. Staten Island’s Port Richmond had the highest proportion among individual neighborhoods.

The pipes need to be replaced for the health of the public, said Joan Matthews, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which contributed to the report. That’s why she and the report’s other authors want the City Council to pass a bill mandating that city agencies replace the lead pipes within the next decade.

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Why lead pipes remain in NYC

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• Lead is a dangerous heavy metal that can cause permanent brain damage in children.
• New York City’s water supply is lead-free, but it can become contaminated in the service lines that lead from water mains to people’s homes. About 40% of city service lines are believed to contain lead.
• You can check the status of your pipes on the Department of Environmental Protection’s Water Connection Information map.
• If your home has a lead or possible lead service line, follow the Department of Environmental Protection’s guidelines for reducing exposure. You can also follow that link to request a free test kit.

New York City treats its water to prevent corrosion, the chemical reaction by which lead flakes off the pipes and into the water supply, according to the Department of Environmental Protection. “While we agree that privately-owned lead service lines should be removed, and are actively working to do that, NYC’s daily water supply is safe,” DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala said via an emailed statement.

But lead levels can still spike depending on the temperature of the water and the time since it was last turned on. Nearly a decade ago, Flint, Michigan experienced a lead crisis after merely switching what water source went through its pipes.

New York City outlawed new installations of lead service lines — the pipes that carry water from central mains to individual buildings — in 1961. But many of the predating lead service lines are still underground, and because so much time has passed, it’s unclear exactly how many remain.

For the new report, the data team for the NYC Coalition to End Lead Poisoning — a group of experts and advocates that’s been campaigning for the cause since the 1980s — studied lead service line records published biannually by the Department of Environmental Protection. The city agency identifies confirmed lead service lines throughout the five boroughs. It also labels a pipe “potential lead” if historical records indicate that at least a portion of the water service line is lead. But it’s hard to know for sure because the pipes were installed so long ago.

The report’s authors classified the number of each service line by neighborhood and joined the counts with population data to estimate how many New Yorkers use the poisonous pipes.

The report found about 40% of citywide service lines include some lead pipe. Those service lines provide water to an estimated 1.8 million people, or more than 20% of the city's population.

“We know what the problem is,” Matthews said. “We know what the solution is. We just need to have the City Council and the [Department of Environmental Protection] to get to it.”

Brooklyn and Manhattan led the city in the estimated proportion of lead service lines, at 46% and 44%, respectively. The Bronx, meanwhile, had the largest chunk of confirmed lead service lines of all the boroughs.

Staten Island had a below-average proportion of lead service lines at the borough level, but its Port Richmond neighborhood, situated on its North Shore, had the largest share by far of lead service lines: an estimated 61% of its pipes are either believed or confirmed to contain lead. East Harlem, Coney Island in Brooklyn and Jamaica in Queens also ranked high on the list of neighborhoods most plagued by lead service lines.

Corporations and public health officials alike have known about the health hazards of lead — in paint and in pipes — for decades, said David Rosner, a professor of history at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In New York City, Rosner explained, the popularization of lead as an ingredient coincided with a construction boom in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“The city was growing right at the moment when the industry was really taking off,” he said. “It has become a ubiquitous poison.”

Rosner noted that Black and Latino New Yorkers are more likely than their white peers to be exposed to lead. Black, Latino and Asian children make up more than 80% of those whose blood lead levels exceeded the health department’s threshold in 2021, according to data collected by the agency. New Yorkers living in poverty are also more likely to suffer from lead poisoning, the data shows.

The NYC Coalition to End Lead Poisoning is calling on the City Council to pass legislation that will lead to the replacement of the toxic pipes over the next 10 years. In particular, they’re urging city officials to take advantage of federal money set aside for the project, including $15 billion made available as part of the White House’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“We desperately need federal and state funding, and this report purposely fails to mention that NYC has been arbitrarily prevented from accessing the full funding available to replace lead service lines,” DEP Commissioner Aggarwala said. His department alleges that it has applied for $58 million this fiscal year to replace lead service lines but will receive only $24 million from the state. According to the agency, this allocation is just 23% of all available money despite the DEP's intention to use the funds to help disadvantaged communities.

Last year, the city used a state grant to replace some lead service lines for low-income New Yorkers, and according to the Department of Environmental Protection’s website, the agency has applied for federal funding to expand the program. By the agency’s estimates, it costs about $15,000 to replace a lead-service line — or about $2 billion to replace all lead-service lines in New York City.

“We don’t agree that the city, and ratepayers, should subsidize repairs to all private homes, especially where the homeowner can clearly pay for the repairs,” Aggarwala said. “That’s why our strategy has been to maximize federal dollars to pay for these repairs to private property — we are trying to help homeowners fix their private property while not raising every New Yorker’s water bill.”

Matthews, the attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, pointed to the city of Newark, New Jersey as an example of how the replacement could work. The city swapped out more than 20,000 contaminated service lines in the course of a few years using a combination of federal funding and bonds.

Rosner added another possible source of funding for lead pipe replacement: Suing the corporations that sold the contaminated products in the first place. Lead paint manufacturers agreed to pay the state of California $300 million in 2019 after a similar lawsuit — less than half of what they were originally ordered to fork over, Reuters reported.

“You guys made the mess, you created the mess, you have a responsibility to address the problems that future generations have,” Rosner said of the companies that laid lead pipes. “Right now they haven’t paid a damn penny for the mess they made.”

This story was updated with a comment from DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala.