(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — Over half of Buffalo, New York’s water service lines are estimated to contain lead, but city officials say the work to replace them could last over the next two decades and cost nearly half a billion dollars to complete.

Nearly 40,000 water service lines in Buffalo, over half of the more than 68,000 total water service lines in the city, are projected to contain lead, the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said in a report released last year.

Oluwole “OJ” McFoy, the chairman of the Buffalo Water Board, tells ABC News only 1,700 lines have been replaced so far. McFoy estimates the project could last over the next 20 years and could cost $400 to 500 million.

Buffalo officials last year announced a $10 million federal investment, part of the American Rescue plan, to contribute to accelerating lead pipe replacements and water infrastructure issues in Buffalo.

McFoy told ABC News he believes with that funding they can expect to replace roughly 1,000 more service lines.

The city is also planning to request additional grant funding through the state of New York for an estimated $10 million. McFoy says he “will continue to push forward” with seeking grants to help cover the massive infrastructure project.

“People really look at it from a time standpoint; but we look at it from a public health standpoint, and it starts actually at the treatment facility,” McFoy said.

Following the massacre at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo’s east side on May 14, 2022, at least $1.1 billion in state and federal funds have been designated towards the east side for improvements.

This includes at least $50 million in New York state funding to fight food insecurity and support small businesses, job training programs and assist first-time homeowners and east side homeowners facing foreclosure.

McFoy said the service lines are only part of the problem. The issue also extends inside the properties affected.

While water lines to homes in Buffalo could be either public or private lines, each property owner is responsible for the lines on their property, McFoy explained.

However, McFoy says depending on the amount of lead detected in water pipes, the city may replace some customers’ service lines free of charge.

McFoy said it’s important to make sure property owners are aware of the need to test their lines.

“One of the things that we continue to promote is sampling. We want to make sure we get you in the sampling protocol, so that we know exactly what the levels are,” he said.

He added, “We’ve established a level that is well below the EPA for action. Our action limit is at 5 parts per 1 billion. So in 5 parts per 1 billion, we’re replacing lead to service lines free of charge to those community members.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says there is no safe level of lead in the human body. In children, low levels of exposure were linked to damage to the central and peripheral nervous system, learning disabilities, shorter stature, impaired hearing, and impaired formation and function of blood cells, the CDC says.

Housing nonprofit Heart of the City Neighborhoods says it is working alongside other local teams to locate the impacted lines. Blue Conduit, an analytics company using data science and machine learning to find and help to remove lead pipes from the nation’s water infrastructure systems, including in cities like Flint, Michigan, has also been involved in the ongoing work in Buffalo, company representatives said.

According to some engineering experts like Marc Edwards, a professor of engineering at Virginia Tech who helped reveal the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, industrial cities with homes constructed before the 1980s are often at higher risks for lead paint and lead service lines — in part because lead pipes were legal up until the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended that decade.

“It really wasn’t until the 1980s when folks started requiring the water companies to treat the water in a way to minimize the contaminated water through a process,” he said.

Buffalo has the oldest housing stock in the country, according to the 2019 US Census. Nearly 64% of Buffalo homes were built in 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey.

Stephanie Simeon, a Buffalo resident and the executive director of Heart of the City Neighborhoods, believes that money should be invested into fixing the health and employment issues affecting thousands of Buffalo residents.

“There’s been a plethora of resources, the real story is how have those resources come to the hands and stayed local,” Simeon said.

McFoy said city officials have been meeting with public unions and other “internal vendors” to ensure they’re setting up programs for workforce development amid the reinvestment project.

“A city like Buffalo that has over a 30% poverty rate, we find it very difficult to get things done,” McFoy explained. “That’s why we’re championing programs to ensure we can get funding from the outside coming into the communities like Buffalo.”

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(NEW YORK) — As New York City was bombarded with dangerous air and smoke conditions that turned the skyline orange, some residents and environmental experts questioned if the city’s leader acted quickly enough to warn people about the dangers of the “smoke wave.”

The city’s Office of Emergency Management issued warnings on its social media pages and city alert system starting Tuesday afternoon and Mayor Eric Adams put out a news release about the dangerous air quality around 11:30 p.m.

Some environmentalists said that the late notice was unacceptable given that the city’s environment was already showing poor visibility and unhealthy air earlier in the morning.

“There is supposed to be emergency planning for situations like this,” Rebecca Bratspies, the director of CUNY Law School’s Center for Urban Environmental Justice Reform, told ABC News. “I was expecting the city to read the same news forecasts I had that this was happening Monday and Tuesday. They should have had a plan.”

Adams defended his administration’s approach to alerting New Yorkers about the dangers of the situation during a news conference with reporters Wednesday morning. He contended that there were no late notifications as the city’s agencies, such as the health department and OEM, were going through the rapidly changing information.

“The clouds you see over New York City was a fire thousands of miles away. This is the challenge…and there are going to be more issues like this, and there’s no blueprint or playbook for these types of issues,” he said.

“We’ve done tabletops in this administration. You want to be as prepared as possible, but there is no planning for an incident like this,” Adams added.

Bratspies, who is a board member of the city’s Environmental Justice Advisory Board, countered the mayor’s claim noting that the city has delivered air quality alerts in the past and has access to the latest forecast models.

“Air masses don’t appear all of a sudden. They move slowly and you can predict how bad it will be long before it hits,” she said.

Holly Porter-Morgan, a professor of environmental science at LaGuardia Community College, told ABC News that she too thought the city didn’t do a good job informing the public as soon as there was an indication that the Air Quality Index reached dangerous levels.

Every minute that New Yorkers were exposed to that toxic air, particularly the elderly, immunocompromised and children, does more harm, she said.

“Whenever our air quality index goes above 100 there should be some sort of statement going out,” Porter-Morgan said. “There should be some directive for people, because people don’t know what to do.”

Porter-Morgan said that even though wildfire smoke is new to the northeast, Adams and other leaders in the area can take a look at the environmental policies in West Coast states for guidance.

Alistair Hayden, an assistant professor of practice at the Department of Public and ecosystem health at Cornell University, told ABC News that while local, state and federal governments must enact policies to prepare and protect the public from “smoke waves,” there is still a lot of work to be done to properly make those alerts.

“One thing I have heard from local governments is they don’t know where to get the best air quality data. There are not excellent tools to zoom down and know what exactly is going on in your community,” he said. “The research is just getting to those points now where we can use those tools, but it’s still not where we need it to be.”

Hayden, who worked in California’s Office of Emergency Services, acknowledged informing and alerting the public to environmental disasters or emergencies is complicated, as data changes constantly.

“Warning is always a tricky business because across disasters we’ve seen if you alert too early and it changes people lose trust in the alerts,” he said.

But in the meantime, Hayden said those governments can start to implement plans for these smoke waves and use the playbook for other similar situations.

For example, he said cities could use the cooling center plans, and designate certain buildings where vulnerable people can stay for clean air during the day.

Ultimately, Hayden said that public officials across the country need to take heed of what’s going on in the east coast and start coming up with policies to prevent people from getting hurt by the negative effects of climate change.

“People don’t realize how many people die in a smoke wave. This is a really important piece that we need to include in our policy at all levels,” he said. “I think we need to respond to ‘smoke waves’ with the same type of urgency of other disasters.”

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