Decades after officials banned lead in gasoline for new cars and stopped the sale of lead paint — huge steps toward eliminating lead exposure to the public — there are still an estimated 500,000 U.S. children with levels of lead in their blood that are considered high, and experts say lead in drinking water is one important reason.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to further reduce lead levels in drinking water and tighten a rule that failed to prevent drinking water crises in cities like Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey. Although the specifics aren’t public, the agency says it will propose requiring that utilities actively replace harmful lead pipes.

President Joe Biden has already called for eliminating the country’s estimated 9.2 million lead pipes, lines that connect water mains under the street to homes and businesses and are responsible for most of the lead that gets into drinking water.

But it’s costly to send out workers to dig up the pipe, lay new ones and replant damaged landscaping. In many cities, homeowners are expected to pay to deal with the pipe on their property.

“Across the population, this has huge effects,” said Ronnie Levin, a former EPA researcher who now teaches at Harvard University’s school of public health.

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Kids are especially sensitive to lead exposure and high doses significantly reduce intelligence, impair coordination and disrupt a student’s ability to focus and learn. Behavior can deteriorate. Federal officials say there is no safe level of lead for children — even small amounts can reduce IQ scores.

The updated rules will arrive as the federal government attacks lead on several fronts, with announcements about the dangers in aviation fuel and proposed stricter limits on dust from lead-based paint in older homes and child-care facilities.

Some officials remain more focused on the danger from sources like paint dust, but attention to the danger in water grew after Flint.

Decades of work have drastically reduced childhood blood lead levels in the U.S., but many kids are still being exposed to the toxic metal “and the expectation is that a fair amount of that is from lead in water,” said Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a Boston-based pediatrician who this year became the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s environmental health programs.

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Bernstein said he is hopeful “that as we remove lead pipes, we’re going to see the numbers continue to fall. And that will be really wonderful.”

Lead is a nightmare to regulate because unlike other water contaminants it enters drinking water through pipes and plumbing fixtures after the water has already come out of the treatment plant. It also can vary widely – a family consuming dangerous amounts of lead may live next door to a house with no lead at all.

Levin was part of a contingent known as the “lead mafia.” The group pushed for strong lead regulations, arguing that many people would benefit, so even small health improvements were worthwhile.

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Others at EPA believed Levin’s analysis exaggerated the benefits of new regulations and some CDC officials argued that focusing on drinking water would take away from the fight against lead paint, according to a book about the science at EPA by Mark Powell.

But finally in 1991, EPA completed its lead rule.

“It was a tough fight within EPA,” Levin remembered.

The agency did not force utilities to eliminate lead in drinking water, but instead required them to test for lead in homes and add anti-corrosive chemicals.

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The EPA set an action level of 15 parts of lead per billion parts water, but allowed 10% of samples to be above that threshold. Utilities that tested above that could be forced to replace their pipes.

The rules have significantly reduced lead in drinking water, contributing to the nation’s 95% decline in young children’s blood lead levels over roughly the last half-century.

The CDC’s Bernstein said, “Our own lead program at CDC lost funding before Flint, as if we had finished the lead problem in this country.” But Flint brought renewed attention to the problem, and new investment in lead poisoning prevention, he said.

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Other crises erupted in 2016 in Newark, New Jersey, and in 2018 in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Joe Cotruvo, a former director of the Drinking Water Standards Division at EPA, said the existing regulations do work, they just aren’t properly enforced.

Others disagree. Current rules do a bad job of monitoring for lead and cities haven’t done enough to push lead levels as far down as possible, said Michael Schock, a recently retired EPA chemist who worked on lead for decades.

“The public health implication is that there was a lot of lead exposures that would have been somewhat preventable” if utilities had been forced to do more, Schock said. Too many people at EPA still don’t want to significantly tighten standards, Schock said.

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Take the crisis that unfolded in Newark. Because it had a history of low lead levels, only small numbers of tests were required every three years. Officials would have been more likely to catch rising lead levels sooner if they had sampled more sites, more often, according to a 2022 journal article.

The crises in Newark and in Benton Harbor eventually received a more energetic official response. Lead pipes in both cities were rapidly removed and lead levels dropped.

Levin said removing pipes now and beginning to address lead-leaching plumbing in homes will cost money.

“But, you know, we’ve been diddling around for 30 years.”

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday significantly weakened a landmark water pollution law by ruling that an Idaho couple’s property does not include wetlands that are subject to federal oversight by law.

The ruling, in which all judges agreed on the outcome but differed on the legal reasoning, concluded that Mike and Chantell Sackett’s land does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act of 1972 and therefore they do not qualify for federal approval need to build property on it.

The decision ends a year-long battle between the Sacketts and the federal government and is a victory for conservative groups and business interests opposed to full application of the Water Pollution Act.

President Joe Biden criticized the decision, saying it “turns on its head the legal framework that has protected American waters for decades.” The ruling “contradicts the science that affirms the critical role of wetlands in protecting our nation’s streams, rivers and lakes from chemicals and pollutants,” he said in a statement.

Damien Schiff, the Sacketts’ attorney, said the decision “resets the scope of the Clean Water Act to its original and reasonable limits.” The decision represents a “profound victory for property rights and the constitutional separation of powers,” he added.

The ruling is another example of the court’s conservative judges pushing ahead with a ruling that limits the sweeping powers of federal agencies, a common theme in recent years.

Coming to its broader legal conclusion, the court ruled 5-4 in an opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito that the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction extended only to wetlands that were “indistinguishable” from larger bodies of water because they would have a “continuous surface” connection.”

The wetlands on the Sacketts’ property are “distinguishable from any potentially covered body of water,” he wrote.

The ruling will ease some burdens on landowners, including big business interests, Alito said, as the law “can be sweeping to criminalize everyday activities like earth moving.”

The impact will be felt across the country, as environmental groups say millions of acres of wetlands will no longer fall under federal jurisdiction. Unless states tighten their own environmental laws, property owners will have considerable freedom to fill in wetlands without having to go through the previously required state permitting process.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three Liberal Justices in rejecting the new majority test.

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“By limiting the scope of the Wetlands Act to only contiguous wetlands, the Court’s new review means that some long-regulated contiguous wetlands are no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant implications for water quality and flood control across the country United States will have,” he wrote.

The court’s new approach could jeopardize both the ability to regulate the Mississippi levee system and effectively monitor the Chesapeake Bay, Kavanaugh said. Levees separating wetlands from the Mississippi mean those wetlands could be outside of federal oversight and wetlands vital to the Chesapeake Bay could be filled in without state permits, he said.

In a separate statement, Liberal Justice Elena Kagan targeted the majority to rewrite a law passed by Congress. She compared the ruling to the court’s decision last year to limit the scope of the Clean Air Act as part of efforts to tackle climate change.

“The vice is the same in both cases: the appointment of the court as the national decision-maker in environmental policy,” she said.

In this case, the Sacketts returned to the Supreme Court for the second time after the judges ruled in their favor in a previous case in 2012. Both cases involve the same underlying dispute: their desire to build a property on their property in Priest Lake, Idaho, portions of which have been designated a protected wetland area by the EPA, meaning the land is subject to federal jurisdiction and A permit is required to build on it.

Chantell and Mike Sackett.Lawrence Hurley/E&E News

The litigation focused on whether the Sacketts could challenge an EPA compliance order in court after they filled the affected area with gravel and sand without a permit. The dispute, which began in 2007, continued over whether the land was even a wetland.

The Sacketts returned to the Supreme Court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, ruled in favor of the federal government in August 2021 that the area was in fact a wetland.

The law defining a wetland – which is crucial for property developers and other business interests – has long been unclear and was not resolved when the Supreme Court ruled a previous case on the issue. In 2006, four judges said the Clean Water Act covers wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to a waterway, but there was no clear majority. Judge Anthony Kennedy, who cast the fifth vote in that 5-4 ruling, presented his own test, saying the statute provides jurisdiction over wetlands with a “significant connection” to a waterway.

Successive presidential administrations have attempted to bring clarity to the law, with Democrats generally favoring greater federal power and Republicans, supported by business interests, saying the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction should be limited.

In Thursday’s ruling, the court rejected the significance nexus test and appeared to adopt the approach of the four-judge block in the 2006 case.

Sam Sankar, a lawyer for environmental group Earthjustice, said up to 90 million hectares of formerly protected wetlands could now be at risk.

Because liberal-leaning states are likely to enact new laws to protect wetlands, “the impacts on the ground will be most severe in states that are most polluter-friendly and least concerned about environmental protection,” he added.

While environmental activists were depressed, the business community rejoiced at a decision that will be a boon to companies across multiple industries, including energy and construction.

“The Supreme Court has given long-overdue relief to businesses and landowners across our country,” said Marty Durbin, a senior official at the US Chamber of Commerce.

The Biden administration finalized its own rule in December, largely reverting to the interpretation that existed prior to the actions of the Obama and Trump administrations, although the new rule already faced its own legal challenges. Because of the Supreme Court ruling, the EPA must now go back to the drawing board.

Lawrence Hurley reports on the Supreme Court for NBC News Digital.

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