205How can I Reduce Lead in Drinking Water at Home?
Flush your pipes before drinking, and only use cold water for consumption. The more time water
has been sitting in your home's pipes, the more lead it may contain. Anytime the water in a particular
faucet has not been used for six hours or longer, "flush" your cold-water pipes by running the water
until it becomes as cold as it will get.
This could take as little as five to thirty seconds if there has been recent heavy water use such as
showering or toilet flushing. Otherwise, it could take two minutes or longer. Your water utility will
inform you if longer flushing times are needed to respond to local conditions.
Use only water from the cold-water tap for drinking, cooking, and especially for making baby
formula. Hot water is likely to contain higher levels of lead. The two actions recommended above
are very important to the health of your family. They will probably be effective in reducing lead
levels because most of the lead in household water usually comes from the plumbing in your house,
not from the local water supply.
Should I be concerned about Lead in Drinking water in my child's school or child care
facility?
Children spend a significant part of their days at school or in a child care facility. The faucets that
provide water used for consumption, including drinking, cooking lunch, and preparing juice and
infant formula, should be tested.
How do I learn more about my Drinking Water?
EPA strongly encourages people to learn more about their drinking water, and to support local
efforts to protect and upgrade the supply of safe drinking water. Your water bill or telephone book’s
government listings are a good starting point for local information.
Contact your water utility. EPA requires all community water systems to prepare and deliver an
annual consumer confidence report (CCR) (sometimes called a water quality report) for their
customers by July 1 of each year. If your water provider is not a community water system, or if you
have a private water supply, request a copy from a nearby community water system.
Lead
Lead is a chemical element in the carbon group with symbol Pb (from Latin: plumbum) and atomic
number 82. Lead is a soft, malleable poor metal. It is also counted as one of the heavy metals.
Metallic lead has a bluish-white color after being freshly cut, but it soon tarnishes to a dull grayish
color when exposed to air. Lead has a shiny chrome-silver luster when it is melted into a liquid.
Lead is used in building construction, lead-acid batteries, bullets and shot, weights, as part of
solders, pewters, fusible alloys, and as a radiation shield. Lead has the highest atomic number of
all of the stable elements, although the next higher element, bismuth, has a half-life that is so long
(much longer than the age of the universe) that it can be considered stable. Its four stable isotopes
have 82 protons, a magic number in the nuclear shell model of atomic nuclei.
Lead, at certain contact degrees, is a poisonous substance to animals, including humans. It
damages the nervous system and causes brain disorders. Excessive lead also causes blood
disorders in mammals. Like the element mercury, another heavy metal, lead is a neurotoxin that
accumulates both in soft tissues and the bones. Lead poisoning has been documented from ancient
Rome, ancient Greece, and ancient China.