This story was originally published by Verite News
This four-month investigation was supported by a Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting grant funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute. It was also produced as a project for the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s National Fellowship Fund and the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism.
Each morning, Katherine Prevost fills her coffee maker with water from her kitchen faucet and presses the button. Until recently, she didn’t know the water may have contained a potent neurotoxin — lead.
She was shocked when a water test provided by Verite News found lead detected in the water coming from the tap.
“Now that means that I can’t do that anymore,” Prevost said. She already drank bottled water, but she relied on tap water for cooking everything from her gumbos and crawfish boils and other daily activities like brushing her teeth.
The New Orleans native moved to her block of Congress Street in the Upper Ninth Ward when she was a teenager. Nearly 60 years later, at 72, she still lives in the same home. Prevost replaced the plumbing inside her house after Hurricane Katrina, but modeling by the Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans showed that the city’s pipes leading to her house likely contain lead.
“We always thought we had good plumbing,” Prevost said. “But because the pipes on the street side is not fixed, that means that regardless of what we do, we’re gonna have lead in our water.”
On Prevost’s block alone, Verite detected lead in all but one of the eight households tested. The Sewerage and Water Board of New Orleans’ inventory showed all of the homes with lead detected likely had lead pipes on the city’s side of the meter.
The toxic metal is common in water across New Orleans, according to previously unpublished city data obtained by Verite News. Between September 2022 and May 2025, about 60% of the households that participated in the S&WB’s first free water testing program had lead in their water. Almost every house with lead also exceeded the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended limit of 1 part per billion.
The S&WB doesn’t know the full extent of lead in the system, but this testing provides the most complete and recent snapshot the city has. More than 1,100 households were tested. The worst test recorded levels of lead 100 times the federal action level. (The program is ongoing, and residents can still request water testing kits.)
The S&WB is one of the oldest water systems on the Gulf Coast, with pipes dating back more than a century, and lead experts point to the city’s corroding lead water lines as a significant public health hazard.
“Lead is rather ubiquitous in our water, it is all around us,” said Adrienne Katner, an LSU professor known for her research on lead and drinking water.
Though the city’s water system complies with federal standards, federal officials concede that those standards don’t protect residents from harmful lead exposure. And lead experts and water advocates worry the city isn’t doing enough to alert residents and protect them from the danger.
Unlike most contaminants, lead in drinking water is regulated at a system level. For water utilities to remain compliant, the Environmental Protection Agency requires 90% of homes tested as part of a small survey to have less lead than the federal action level.
Currently, the action level is 15 parts per billion, but it will be reduced to 10 ppm in 2027 as part of new requirements under the updated Lead and Copper Rule. The updated rule also required all water systems to replace their lead pipes by 2037. The S&WB tests about 100 households for lead every three years. Since 2012, 90% of the homes it tested had 5 to 8 parts per billion of lead or less, according to the S&WB’s annual Consumer Confidence reports.
“ That is really where all of these things fall through the cracks, especially when we think about vulnerable populations,” said Taya Fontenette, who headed the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans’ lead awareness program until recently. She found lead in 88% of the nearly 150 homes she tested in 2024.
No level of lead is safe to consume. Trace amounts can harm brain development in children, especially newborns, and contribute to a wide range of health issues in adults, including high blood pressure, kidney issues and even death from heart disease.
“It cannot be emphasized highly enough that lead affects us all. It affects nearly every organ in the body,” Katner said. “We all need to make every effort to reduce our exposure throughout our entire lifetime.”
Pipe replacement gained even more urgency in 2023, when saltwater moving up the Mississippi River threatened to enter the New Orleans water supply. Saltwater corrodes pipes faster, and the phenomenon will likely happen again as river dredging continues and human-caused climate change affects the potential for droughts.
Because of contract disputes, cost and legislative hurdles, it will likely take years before the remainder of the city’s tens of thousands of lead pipes are replaced. The longer the process takes, lead experts say many New Orleans residents will remain at risk of unsafe, chronic lead exposure through their drinking water.
Earlier this month, the S&WB started accepting new bids for a project management firm for its lead pipe program. Rebecca Johnsey, S&WB’s deputy general superintendent of water programs, said the utility will try to shorten the normal procurement process to award the contract by the end of this year and start construction in late 2027, a one-year delay.
“The reality is, to change out service lines, it’s going to be a very long and very expensive project for us,” Johnsey said. “This is not an overnight fix.”
In the meantime, the utility has started to replace lead lines on a small scale at schools and daycares. Johnsey said the utility also replaces lead lines when they’re found during roadwork projects. As of December, Hayman said the S&WB had replaced lines serving 14 schools and 144 residences in 2025, with three more replacements scheduled at schools. It had also conducted more than 350 service line inspections.
Johnsey said the S&WB’s focused on increasing public awareness so residents can protect themselves despite the utility’s poor history of notifying residents of lead risks.
The state of lead pipes
Nationally, lead pipes are pervasive. Federal estimates suggest there could be 4 million to 9 million lead pipes in use across the country.
In New Orleans, the number of lead pipes remains unknown but the S&WB predicts 50% to 60% of its 150,000 metered service lines will need some portion replaced. The utility based its modeling on existing lead line records, age of development, water testing and other data.
Lead’s malleability made it attractive to use for waterlines as the city expanded during the early 20th century, said Katner. The material can bend without breaking, an asset when building in the shifting soils of a swamp.