Kathryn Pilgrim already ripped out the pipes she suspected were lead in her century-old Victorian home in Dunkirk, New York, and installed a kitchen filter built to strip heavy metals from her tap water. But she still has no idea what material connects her front yard to the city's water main, and she is far from alone: roughly 6,300 water systems serving 3.8 million Americans have not submitted the federally required inventory of lead service lines still in use.
Pilgrim's predicament is emblematic of a nationwide gap that the Associated Press detailed in a report published Thursday, as reported by KXAN Austin. Pilgrim, a special education teacher and colon cancer survivor who has fostered teenagers, told the outlet she suspects there may be substances in her water that are not good. Dunkirk's own inventory of water lines is now nearly two years behind schedule, according to the same report, and the city sits in a state where lead contamination has been documented block by block: 28% of service lines in nearby Fredonia are made of lead, and 45% of lines in Buffalo are lead, per the AP's reporting.
The stakes behind these missing inventories are not abstract. The Environmental Protection Agency has identified lead service lines as the most significant source of lead entering drinking water, and the EPA estimates roughly 4 million homes and businesses nationwide remain connected via lead pipes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains there is no safe blood lead level in children, having lowered its blood lead reference value in October 2021 from 5.0 to 3.5 micrograms per deciliter to better flag kids at risk of irreversible cognitive harm, according to the CDC. Lead exposure can cause stunted child development, lower IQ scores, and increased adult blood pressure, and the metal was banned from U.S. plumbing under the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1986 after being favored for generations because it resisted corrosion.
A Federal Clock Nobody Can Stop
The EPA's 2024 Lead and Copper Rule Improvements set a 10-year countdown requiring most drinking water providers to replace 10% of their lead lines annually starting in 2027, and the rule also sets an action level of 10 parts per billion — a threshold designed to force earlier intervention, according to the Federal Register. The rule is intended to produce health benefits by reducing lead exposure.
Under EPA regulations, utilities that submitted initial inventories must publicly update their service line lists annually by November 16, with full baseline replacement plans and new tap sampling protocols due by November 1, 2027. But the AP analysis found the EPA has cited more than 1,300 public water systems for missing the original October 2024 inventory deadline, and about three-quarters of EPA drinking-water enforcement orders since Donald Trump returned to office have been related to missing inventories. The EPA has said it turns to enforcement only after assistance efforts fail, and the Trump administration has defended the 10-year replacement deadline enacted under Joe Biden.
Small Systems, Big Blind Spots
About 3,500 water systems nationwide have reported unknown service-line materials, and roughly one in five service lines nationwide have unknown materials altogether. That gap matters because unidentified lines still count toward a system's annual replacement targets, according to Erica Galante-Johnson, who noted that more unknown lines simply require a utility to replace more lines each year. Incomplete historical records have made it especially difficult for utilities to finish their inventories, and 84% of water systems with missing inventories serve fewer than 500 people.
That staffing crunch is not unique to small towns. Industry staffing analysis from 2026 found roughly a third of U.S. drinking water and wastewater operators are expected to reach retirement age by 2028, while about 85% of public water utilities operate with three or fewer employees, according to the EPA. Rob Hayes has questioned how systems lacking basic inventories will find the resources, manpower and intergovernmental coordination needed to actually replace pipes, while also noting that removing lead from drinking water is universally popular — a rare point of consensus in an otherwise contentious infrastructure fight. Joshua Klainberg called leaving residents uninformed by failing to submit an inventory unforgivable.
Chicago's Massive, Manual Search
No city illustrates the scale of the problem like Chicago, which has more lead lines than any other city in the country and still needs to replace about 393,000 lead service lines. Chicago crews are identifying service-line materials the hard way, digging up pipes block by block, and Patrick Schwer has said the city is examining every available record and millions of work orders to pin down what's buried underground. Chicago still does not know the material of close to one in 10 of its service lines, and the city advises residents with unknown lines to assume they are lead if their building predates 1986.
Illinois carries the heaviest lead pipe burden in the country, with state health records showing roughly 667,275 confirmed lead service lines and more than 1 million additional pipes of unknown material or galvanized steel, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Hoodline has previously reported on Skokie raising water rates 15% as part of a broad $26 million package covering water, sewer, lead-line, equipment, and flood-control expenses, and on Skokie's plan to replace more than 11,000 lead pipes, as well as on Cicero's $200 million effort to replace 13,000 lead service connections, both driven by the same state mandate banning partial lead pipe replacements.
Money Is Flowing, But the Clock Is Too
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a major funding source for lead-pipe identification and replacement. Previously allocated lead-project funding will continue flowing to communities even as dedicated federal funding for lead projects enters its final year. A lead service-line replacement typically costs between $8,000 and $15,000 per connection.
Some utilities are turning to technology to speed up the search before money runs dry. San Antonio has a $4.5 million contract involving technology originally developed for military land-mine searches, as Hoodline detailed in its report on the ex-military mine hunter. States themselves are also part of the broader effort to compile lead-pipe inventory numbers.
Early-childhood lead exposure can have lasting effects, underscoring why inventory delays are more than paperwork. For residents like Pilgrim, without an inventory, the water-line records that help identify potential sources of lead exposure simply do not exist yet, leaving her to lean on the same advice health officials give households everywhere: run the tap, use a filter, and cook only with cold water. Water systems without inventories, meanwhile, will fall further behind as national efforts shift squarely toward physical replacement, with lead pipes typically swapped out for copper or plastic.
