When Kristen Heibert became pregnant last year, she and partner Derek Martin knew they needed to rid their 106-year-old house in Beechview of the lead likely lurking in the paint.
“I was worried about the baby,” Heibert, 34, said recently.
Heibert recalled a relative had used the Allegheny Lead-Safe Homes Program. The county-run initiative allows qualifying homeowners and renters to have their homes inspected and cleared of lead for free.
She emailed county officials, explaining she was pregnant and living in an old house. Workers discovered lead throughout the home — inside and out — and put the couple up in a hotel for 20 days while they made repairs.
Nearly 50 years after lead paint was banned in the U.S., it remains a major hazard, especially in places like Pittsburgh with its old housing stock.
Heibert and Martin, 37, are among thousands of people throughout the city and Allegheny County — and millions across the country — living in homes where lead still hides in the paint on walls, ceilings and window frames.
The element, toxic when ingested and especially harmful to children, also can be found in older pipes through which drinking water flows.
When lead-based paint chips, peels or cracks, things turn dangerous. Pittsburgh consistently sees more children with elevated levels of lead in the blood than other municipalities in the county, primarily because the city has more older homes, according to the Allegheny County Health Department.
Children in Allegheny County who test positive for elevated blood lead levels are most likely to be exposed through dust and chipping paint, with water contamination the second most common cause, said Michelle Naccarati- Chapkis, executive director of Women for a Healthy Environment and an Allegheny County Council member.
Nearly 70% of the county’s 500,000 homes were built before the 1978 lead-paint ban, said Jenn Saks, program supervisor of the county lead-safe program.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 87% of homes in the U.S. built before 1940 contain lead paint, compared to just under a quarter of those built between 1960 and 1977.
Each renovation or window replacement gradually shrinks the amount of lead in a home. But, Saks noted, it’s a slow process. Her team tests 50 to 60 homes each year and finds lead paint needing remediation in most of them.
Pipe remediation has been a major undertaking, too. In 2024, the EPA estimated that as many as 9 million homes in the U.S. had lead pipes — many in low-income and minority communities.
That year, the Biden administration required drinking water systems across the nation to replace lead pipes within a decade and pledged $2.6 billion to the effort.
Universal testing
Of the 390 homes the county tested through Allegheny Lead-Safe Homes, which launched in 2017, only three or four have come back with no hazards, Saks said.
“Pretty much every home pre-1978 has some lead paint somewhere,” she said.
That year, the federal government banned lead paint after research emerged showing the harmful effects of lead poisoning on children.
Lead is a neurotoxin. At extreme levels, it can lead to disability and deafness.
More commonly, milder lead poisoning is linked to IQ loss, behavioral and attention issues and long-term effects on the brain, circulatory system and skeleton.
“The longer the exposure generally the more serious the effects,” Saks said.
Lead — in any amount — can pose serious health risks, particularly for kids.
“Children are very vulnerable,” Naccarati-Chapkis said. “Their bodies are developing at a much faster rate than adults. They absorb more lead.”
Allegheny County has a universal lead testing policy that requires measuring lead levels twice before children are 2 years old.
Testing of thousands of children in the county under age 6 has shown a decline in the numbers with lead in their blood that exceeded certain levels.
In 2023, just under 2% had problematic levels of lead in their blood. That’s down from 2.6% in 2017.
From highs to lows
Jason Good peered into a 4-foot-deep rectangular hole cut into a sidewalk in the Hill District, pointing to the lead water line that was about to be replaced.
Good, a civil engineer with Texas-based construction firm AECOM, was leading a team working for Pittsburgh Water, swapping out lead lines with safer copper ones.
On a frigid January day, his crew was digging up pipes that connected homes to the main water lines under Bedford Avenue.
Pittsburgh Water has undertaken an expansive effort to remove lead from drinking water. It already has replaced thousands of lead lines. The utility’s most recent report tallied more than 15,000 public and 11,400 private lead service lines replaced.
There are about 81,000 drinking water accounts in the utility’s portfolio.
Pittsburgh Water is doing the work at no cost to customers, relying on federal and state grant money to pay for new water lines.
“There’s no safe level of lead in drinking water,” Pittsburgh Water CEO Will Pickering told TribLive, donning a reflective vest and hard hat as he watched crews work.
Mayor Corey O’Connor stopped by to hold a quick news conference highlighting lead line replacement.
“Clean water is everything,” the mayor told reporters. “It’s a right.”
Yet clean water isn’t a reality for everyone.
Pickering said the utility hasn’t found any part of the city that is lead-free.
Pittsburgh Water has been prioritizing neighborhoods with large populations of children, acknowledging kids face the highest risks of health problems from lead exposure.
The utility has started replacing lines in 68 of the 73 neighborhoods where it provides drinking water. A project launched in 2022 allowed Pittsburgh Water to replace lead lines in more than 300 homes with elevated lead levels and 19 daycare facilities.
The utility’s ambitious goal is to replace all residential lead lines by the end of next year.
That’s a big jump for a utility that saw its lead rates increase a decade ago. In 2016, TribLive reported that lead levels had been consistently rising over the prior 15 years.
Now, Pittsburgh Water is touting its lowest recorded lead levels.
‘Inexcusable delay’
Lead, a bluish-white metal, has been in use for a long time.
Some scholars have blamed the decline of the Roman empire, in part, on lead that tainted the water supply, though the theory is disputed.
Officials have known for decades that lead is dangerous. It was phased out of gasoline starting in the 1970s. New lead water lines were prohibited the following decade, said John Rumpler, clean water director at Environment America, a federation of environmental advocacy organizations.
“We know when lead comes into contact with water, it corrodes — and, all too often, lead then ends up in the water coming out of our kitchen sink,” he said.
Lead service lines are the greatest source of lead contamination in drinking water, Rumpler said. Lead also finds its way into water when it’s used in interior plumbing.
The fact that water still flows into homes through lead lines reflects an “inexcusable delay in removing this toxic threat to our health,” he said.
“Water utilities should’ve been removing these lead pipes 30-plus years ago,” Rumpler said. “This should’ve been done years ago everywhere, not just in Pittsburgh.”
A 2024 National Resources Defense Council report ranked Pittsburgh Water — formerly known as the Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority — 14th in a list of public water systems with the most lead. Philadelphia Water Department came in 19th. Leading the pack: Chicago, followed by Cleveland and New York City.
For people whose water is still delivered through lead lines, Pittsburgh Water uses orthophosphate, which acts as a protective barrier to ensure lead doesn’t contaminate drinking water. Pickering said the utility began treating its water with the additive in 2020.
“That’s the insurance policy and buffer” until all the lead lines are replaced, he said.
Rumpler said people also should use high-quality water filters that are certified to remove lead. That’s what he does.
He cautioned people to be wary of their water immediately after lead line replacement, too. There can be a “serious but temporary” spike in lead levels for weeks after the lines are removed.
“That’s just because, when you’re digging up a pipe and rattling things around down there, a lot of lead can be shaking loose,” he explained. “It can wind up in your piping and take a while to get flushed out.”
Finding relief
Chris Cservak, 39, is among the thousands of Pittsburghers who have had lead lines replaced. The pipes sending water into his Manchester home were swapped out last summer.
He received a notice in the mail that Pittsburgh Water was offering no-cost upgrades. He called, scheduled a date for crews to complete the work and left the rest to the utility.
“They handled everything from start to finish,” he said. “It was very minimally invasive.”
Cservak said his water was turned off for a couple of hours while crews worked. They dug a hole under his sidewalk to access the line, but crews repaired it for free within a few weeks.
Overall, Cservak said, everything went smoothly, and he was grateful for the peace of mind, knowing his water was safe to drink.
Before Pittsburgh Water’s outreach, Cservak said he wasn’t sure whether his house had a lead line. Assuming it probably did, he used a water filter — though he never learned whether it actually filtered out lead.
“It was something I was aware of but not top of mind,” he said of lead risks.
If Pittsburgh Water hadn’t offered a free replacement, Cservak said he might’ve sought it out himself — depending on the cost. But he’s glad he didn’t have to take that route.
“It’s a general relief, knowing it’s fixed,” he said.
Lead all over
A few days after Heibert and Martin moved back in to their Beechview home, Heibert showed TribLive all of the places where lead had to be removed.
There were two doors, six windows upstairs and two more basement windows. An outside railing tested positive for lead. So did the oxidized green paint on the basement steps and floor.
Crews took out all the lead and replaced doors and windows. Martin said it totaled around $22,000 worth of work.
“Having bought the home with so much to fix up, I’m so grateful,” he said.
Before the lead was removed, he had been afraid of cracking open the century-old windows in the living room, wary of lead paint peeling off and falling into their living space, where it might be gobbled up by their cat, Boo, or swallowed by their 6-week-old daughter, Rya.
Now, Martin said, as he watched his cat gaze out the new glass, he feels confident his home is safe.
“We bought this house because we wanted to start a family. It was such a weight off,” Heibert said of the lead remediation. “It’s something we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.”