Old lead pipes connect thousands of Long Island homes to drinking water. Finding and removing them is costly.

More than 11,000 houses in Nassau County and a handful in Suffolk draw their drinking water through old lead service lines, and at least 100,000 more have pipes whose material is unknown but could also be lead, according to state data analyzed by Newsday.

Federal regulations established by the Environmental Protection Agency require every water supplier in the country to document which properties in its system have lead service lines — the pipe that connects the water main in the street to each house or apartment building — and to replace them by 2037.

The challenges now are to identify where the unknown toxic metal pipes remain buried, since they were installed decades or in some cases more than 100 years ago, and figure out who will pay to remove them. The work is too expensive for many homeowners to afford on their own, state funds are scarce, and although the federal government pledged billions for lead replacement projects, none of that funding has yet been awarded to Long Island water districts.

Nevertheless, some lead pipes have been removed already, sometimes dozens at a time with state funding, sometimes one by one, as residents decide to take on the work themselves. On Tuesday, workers hired by a homeowner arrived on a quiet Garden City street lined with Tudors and Colonials and, with a small excavator, dug a pair of trenches. They pulled out the old lead service line and unwound a coil of shiny new copper piping to put in its place.

High risks even at low lead levels

Lead exposure can lead to kidney disease, damage to the immune system and reproductive organs, anemia and high blood pressure, according to the World Health Organization. It is also a neurotoxin to which young children are especially vulnerable because their bodies are still developing. "Even relatively low levels of exposure can cause serious and irreversible neurological damage," the WHO warned in a recent report. It has been linked in children to lower IQs, learning delays and behavioral changes, including anti-social behavior.

Drinking water can be one source of exposure, as lead can leach into the water that sits in horizontal supply pipes, especially if older pipes are beginning to corrode. Older water mains were usually clay or cast iron, not lead.

American buildings were commonly plumbed with lead beginning in the 1880s, in spite of known hazards, and the material was heavily promoted by the lead industry from the early 20th century through the 1970s, according to an article in the American Journal of Public Health. Some municipalities — including New York City — even mandated the use of lead for certain pipes, according to Joshua Klainberg, senior vice president at the New York League of Conservation Voters Education Fund.

After World War II, fewer new houses were outfitted with lead, and in 1986, both the federal government and New York State banned new lead pipes.

But lead service lines remain in millions of older buildings across the country — there are about 494,000 of them in New York State, according to EPA estimates. The agency’s review of peer-reviewed research found that Black, Indigenous and other people of color and low-income populations are at higher risk of lead exposure because they're more likely to live in older housing.

In 1991, a federal regulation required water suppliers to test a sample of customers’ tap water and to take action if lead levels exceeded 15 parts per billion (ppb) at more than 10% of sampled taps. Suppliers could add anti-corrosion chemicals that reduce lead leaching, and some lead lines were removed. But at levels below 15 ppb, the lead lines could stay.

That still left a lot of lead service lines in place.

In 2021, the EPA required all water districts to report an inventory of service lines in the wake of lead exposure crises in Flint, Michigan, and other cities. The agency tightened the rule last year, lowering the action level to 10 ppb and requiring all lead lines to be identified and replaced by 2037. Galvanized pipes — steel pipes coated with zinc — also must be replaced if they were ever "downstream" of lead pipes, since water can pick up contamination as it flows first through the lead line.

The cost across the nation would run in the billions of dollars, but the EPA said at the time the new rule is expected to prevent close to a million low birth weights, 200,000 lost IQ points in children, 2,600 cases of ADHD and 1,500 premature deaths from heart disease in the United States every year. Those public health benefits also would lower health care costs and improve school attendance.

The EPA also requires that water suppliers send annual notices to all households served by a lead service line; where the material is not known, suppliers must let them know their line might be lead.

Public health advocates have urged that as these mandated replacements get underway, priority should go to disadvantaged communities. "There are communities where there's already documented cases of elevated blood lead levels," Klainberg said. "So when you're planning your replacement, start there."

Tens of thousands of 'unknown' pipes

There are about 800,000 to 900,000 total service lines in Suffolk and Nassau counties, according to state records.

Suffolk water suppliers reported just 11 lead lines, five galvanized pipes that also have to be replaced and about 6,100 service lines made of unknown material, according to data reported to the state Department of Health.

The great majority of known lead pipes on Long Island are in Nassau, where the Island’s prewar properties are concentrated. There are also large gaps in Nassau’s inventory. Nassau tallied 11,215 lead service lines, 1,881 galvanized pipes in need of replacement and more than 107,000 unknowns.

The Garden City Water District, for example, reported 1,237 lead service lines in its system, but more than 3,800 service lines are listed as unknown. Freeport reported 19 lead pipes and 9,507 unknown.

"If a service line is unknown, that probably means it was from an older property," because utilities are less likely to have records on older buildings, said Robert Hayes, senior director of clean water at Environmental Advocates New York, which is based in Albany. "So it's very likely that a substantial chunk of those unknown service lines may turn out to be lead," Hayes said.

Suppliers must update their inventory every year until all lines can be accounted for — definitively marked as lead, not lead or galvanized.

Tracking down these mystery pipes will be a daunting task, especially because ownership of many service lines on Long Island is shared: The water utility is responsible for the portion that runs from the water main to the curb; from the curb to the house, it’s the responsibility of the property owner.

Utilities can look into their records of installations and repairs, but often there are no records for pipes that were installed or replaced decades ago, especially for the part that’s privately owned. Some suppliers have sent out customer surveys, asking customers to check their own pipes. (The state Department of Health has made a video that explains what to look for.) And when water suppliers go out on a service call, they’ll make a note of the supply line while they’re at it, said James Neri, a spokesperson for the Long Island Water Conference.

"We're constantly working on that," said Mark Quinton, superintendent of water for Freeport, "trying to identify where the lead service lines are."

Stan Carey, superintendent of water for Garden City, said his district went through old building records to see what type of service lines were originally used, and also offers free lead tests and home inspections to clear up the unknowns in its inventory. "We continue to update our map on a daily basis as the information becomes available to us," he said.

Some water districts send staff door to door for on-site inspections.

"As you can imagine, the limitation of manpower and access created some challenges," Neri said.

"It's private property," said Frank Mancini, superintendent of the Riverhead Water District. "We're not allowed to go on the property and start digging anything up" — and they don’t have automatic authority to look in the basement.

A bill that failed in the State Legislature — the Find Lead Pipes Faster Act — would have given water suppliers the right to enter a property to inspect pipes, as they do to read water meters.

Thousands for homeowners, billions for state

The cost of replacing a service line can vary considerably, Hayes said, depending on the length of the pipe and other factors.

In one local example, the Town of North Hempstead swapped out 81 lead service lines a few years ago with a state grant, at a cost of roughly $510,000, or $6,300 for each property, according to Kevin Higgins, a spokesperson for the town supervisor. The American Water Works Association, which represents water providers and is suing the EPA to stop the new rules, has estimated the cost at around $10,000 per service line.

To replace all the lead pipes in New York, the cost could be around $3.5 billion, according to the EPA’s estimates. Federal and state funding already earmarked for lead replacement fall well short of the full cost of this enormous project.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in 2021 under President Joe Biden, earmarked $15 billion to identify and replace the country’s roughly 9 million lead pipes; 49% of those funds must be given to disadvantaged communities.

More than $344 million has been awarded to New York communities since 2023, based on factors such income and risk, but none of the 14 Long Island water districts that applied in the first three rounds have won funds, state DOH records show. "What we have seen every year," Hayes said, is "demand wildly outpacing the availability of funding."

In May, the Trump administration proposed eliminating a program that has helped states fund drinking water infrastructure projects, including lead pipe replacement, for the past 30 years. "We certainly don't expect any additional federal funding to be coming down for lead pipe placements anytime soon," Hayes said.

The EPA said in a statement to Newsday: "The agency is committed to ensuring that all Americans can rely on clean and safe water — including by reducing exposure to lead in drinking water" and that it "looks forward to providing updates on next steps regarding ... implementation and funding in the coming weeks."

Public health experts celebrated last year when, for the first time, the federal government directed that lead pipes everywhere would be removed. But without public funding, many homeowners and renters are left to remove pipes if they can afford it — or if not, take whatever precautions they can.

In August, the Trump administration said it would not seek to reverse the rule or its 2037 deadline but would consider ways to "support practical implementation flexibilities." Advocates said it was unclear what that meant, but worried it could mean loopholes and delays.

Klainberg said after so many decades of harm from lead pipes, more delays would be unconscionable. "All these pipes need to come out," he said. "Why should anyone live another day with it?"

Newsday's Arielle Martinez contributed to this story.