drinking

An ambitious plan by the Biden Administration to replace all lead service pipes in the United States faces a number of hurdles, a US official charged with helping oversee the sweeping project said on Thursday.

“One of the biggest barriers to getting this work done is the lack of knowledge of where the lead service lines currently are, and how many we have in the United States,” said Karen Dettmer, managing director for infrastructure implementation at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Water.

States need inventories of where lead service lines currently exist to replace them, but that information could be lacking or completely missing for many communities, Dettmer said.