When Ellen Tuzzolo and her partner bought a historic home in Providence, Rhode Island, they were excited to move into a neighborhood heralded for its rich cultural diversity. “This is where we wanted to raise our family,” Tuzzolo says. 

But shortly after they moved into their 100-year-old home, a routine doctor’s appointment revealed that their toddler daughter had elevated levels of lead in her blood.  

When Providence Water sent the couple a notice alerting them that their water service lines were made of lead — three years after they moved in — testing revealed that their daughter’s lead exposure was, in fact, coming from their tap water. “We were aware that lead could be an issue in paint, but the previous owner told us he had done remediation work,” Tuzzolo says. “Lead being in our water didn’t even occur to us.”  

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How did this happen?  

Lead is a potent neurotoxin that can damage a child’s developing brain and cause learning and behavior problems.  

Yet when many American cities were built, lead was cheap and easy to work with, making it the preferred choice for public water service lines as indoor plumbing became the norm in fast-growing cities.  

New lead service lines were banned across the U.S. in 1986. But roughly 9 million lead service lines remain, and the task of replacing these old lines falls on local water utilities.  

Protecting health, one pipe at a time  

In Providence, the local utility, Providence Water, started replacing its remaining lead service lines in 2007 by focusing on the publicly owned side of the lines. That meant that utility workers would only replace lead pipes on private property if the owner would pay for it — at a cost of about $4,500.  

That price tag was out of reach for many, including Tuzzolo, which led to a spate of harmful “partial replacements” in which utility crews only replaced the public side of the pipe, a method that can result in a spike in lead levels in the water.   

“A partial replacement disturbs the lead and creates more of a hazard in the water than if the pipe had not been replaced at all,” explains DeeAnn Guo of the Childhood Lead Action Project, which has been organizing against partial replacements.  

At an impasse with Providence Water, the Childhood Lead Action Project teamed up with Environmental Defense Fund and the National Center for Healthy Housing. Together, the organizations filed a first-of-its-kind civil rights complaint with the EPA against Providence Water in 2022.  

“The civil rights complaint pointed out that requiring a person to pay for a full replacement, and only doing a partial if they couldn’t, was not only dangerous — it was discriminatory against people who were unable to pay, often families of color,” Guo says.