DC Water has a plan to replace all lead service lines by 2030, but may not meet that goal without a legal mandate.

Officials will take action when drinking water contains more than 1 part-per-billion of lead instead of at 15 PPB.

If property owners want to replace contaminated pipes inside their homes, DC Water will pay to replace the side that goes to the street.

D.C. Water has officially released its 2010 Drinking Water Quality Report, “the most comprehensive drinking water resource delivered to District residents each year.” So how’s our water?

The presence of lead in the District’s water pipes has been an issue in the city for years. But a report written by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reaffirms that lead in Washington’s water remains a very real and wide-spread problem. As reported in the Washington Post, the new CDC report states that 15,000 homes in the District who get their water from pipes which were partially removed in 2006 might be drinking water with “dangerous” levels of lead.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is incredibly concerned about the amount of lead in our reusable grocery bags — so much so, he is calling for an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Consumer Product Safety Commission into whether the bags pose a danger.

You knew something like this was only a matter of time. The Post reports that a D.C. man who is the father of developmentally disabled twin boys has filed a class action lawsuit against D.C. WASA. In court papers, John Parkhurst says his two sons, now 8, were toddlers between 2001 and 2004, the years when elevated lead levels were eventually documented in the city’s drinking water. Parkhurst alleges that the lead left his…

Photo by lorigoldberg District residents are understandably disturbed by yesterday’s lead revelations in the Washington Post, and the D.C. Council has gone ahead and scheduled a hearing to address environmental and health concerns. The Committee on Government Operations and the Environment hearing is set for February 10 at 11 a.m. at the John A. Wilson Building, Room 412. Committee chair Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) will hold the hearing jointly with Jim Graham (D-Ward 1),…

Photo by philliefan99 So the big, big, big story on the front page of this morning’s Washington Post was by Carol Leonnig, who obtained a copy of a forthcoming study that shows that hundreds of District children had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood during the WASA lead crisis earlier this decade. The study, based on a detailed analysis of thousands of children’s blood tests from 2000 to 2003, contradicts the public…

The D.C. Water and Sewer Authority sent us the following statement in reaction to this post we ran earlier this week, about how their practice of partial lead pipe replacement appears to have caused very large spikes in the tap water lead levels of hundreds of District homes. To refresh your memory, the Washington Post reported last weekend on a set of test results from 2006 that show major lead level spikes in the tap…