Crowd the Tap: Empowering Communities to Examine Their Lead Exposure

Lead water pipes have been a fixture of modern civilization for more than two thousand years. Ancient Romans channeled water into homes and bathhouses through lead piping. In fact, the Latin word for lead, plumbum, is where we get the English word “plumbing.” Yet we have also long recognized that lead can have a serious impact on our health. Vitrivius, who lived during the first century BCE, wrote at length about the physical harm caused by lead exposure, concluding that “water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.” Two millennia later, we are still working to to follow that advice. Despite an initiative in the 1950s to replace lead pipes with copper, a 1986 ban on installing new lead pipes, and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommendations that there is no safe level of exposure to lead, many homes in the US still get their water from lead pipes. How many, exactly? We don’t know the answer. But thanks to a new EPA-funded citizen science project called “Crowd the Tap,” people all over the US are being empowered to understand what kinds of pipes provide their drinking water. Findings from the project might one day lead to new data about disparities in environmental risk. Today, nearly everyone in the developed world gets their water from the millions of miles of piping that make up our public water supply infrastructure. If you are one of the 86% of people in the US without a private well, then this water comes from a lake, stream, or underground aquifer, may be pumped through filters and provided chemical treatments at a water treatment facility, and is then sent through a network of underground pipes until it eventually emerges from your faucet. The pipes that ferry this water around are made out of steel, copper, plastic, or lead. Having lead pipes increases your risk of lead poisoning, because the metal can leach out of these pipes and get into the water before it reaches the faucet. Lead poisoning is a serious medical condition that affects nearly every system in the body and can lead to abdominal pain, irritability, insomnia, memory loss, and even developmental delays and death. While many people with lead pipes never develop lead poisoning, the Crowd the Tap team believes everyone deserves to know whether they might be exposed to lead through their drinking water. Crowd the Tap The goal of Crowd the Tap is to build the first national database of where lead pipes are found. But it is equally important to know where there are no lead pipes, which is why it is critical that the project also collects data about how other types of pipes are distributed across the country. Combined, this data will inform decision-making at every level, ranging from the individual to the local, state, and national levels, prioritizing areas for tap water testing and infrastructure replacement. The project, which is open to anyone in the US, recruits volunteers to test the pipes in their home. Volunteers that join the project download a data sheet on which they record information about their service line (the main pipe bringing water into the home, usually found in a basement or access point in the yard) and their indoor plumbing (the pipes that carry water to the different faucets in a home). Volunteers also receive a kit with illustrated instructions, a penny, and a magnet. The magnet will stick to pipes made of steel and the penny is used to scratch the surface of pipes made of the other three materials. If the penny makes coppery streaks on the pipe that are the same color as the penny, then the pipe is made of copper. If there is no shine when the pipe is scratched, it is made of plastic. And if scratching the pipe leaves silver or gray streaks, it is probably made out of lead.