After more than 60 years of service, PVC pipe has developed a well-deserved reputation: it's affordable and durable, delivering clean drinking water to communities all around the world. With this impressive track record in mind, we were perplexed to once again see Colorado Politics (CP) calling for a ban on plastic water pipe in this story published late last month.

Like the outlet's previous coverage, this piece repeated two of the most popular myths about underground PVC pipe, asserting it melts during wildfires, releasing toxins into water supplies and toxic smoke into the air. As we've long maintained—and as the science clearly shows—these assertions are terribly misleading, driven more by ideology than evidence.

Underground pipes protected from wildfires

The first problem with the CP story is easy to grasp: above-ground fires typically can't melt underground water mains. Water mains are buried at depths of 18 inches to five feet across the U.S., often three to four feet to avoid frost, which insulates them from surface heat. Wildfire ground temperatures can reach 200°C-800°C at the surface, but heat penetration diminishes rapidly with depth.

In major wildfires like the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa and the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, no buried PVC transmission or distribution mains were damaged or melted—they remained in service, providing water for firefighting and recovery. Officials from Paradise Irrigation District confirmed PVC pipelines performed reliably, with no heat-related failures. Even the U.S. National Forest Service uses PVC in wildfire-prone areas for its resilience.

Moreover, studies purporting to show PVC melting and toxin release generally rely on contrived lab conditions that do not replicate open-air wildfires. PVC does not leach benzene in open combustion; pyrolysis (air-absent heating) might release traces in labs, but buried pipes avoid such extremes.

Firefighters confront harmful smoke from burning vegetation and structures as benzene and other chemicals are abundantly produced by wildfires themselves, not from PVC pipes. Indeed, one of the studies CP cited made this very point. "Thermal degradation of potable water system plastics has not been experimentally explored," meaning there's no actual evidence that PVC water mains melt during wildfires. The study also pointed out that blaming pipe material for benzene water contamination during the Santa Rosa wildfire—CP's best evidence for a plastic pipe ban—is a mistake:

"Of the 21 service line locations with maximum benzene concentrations ... 8 were copper, 3 were a mix of HDPE and copper, and the remaining 10 were HDPE. The number of samples for each material type were highly unbalanced, and location and other factors likely confounded results, but it is still clear that material alone cannot be used as an indicator for likely contamination [our emphasis]."

Bottom line: the author didn't read his own source carefully enough.

Water contamination: myths and facts

The second claim, that melted plastic pipes caused high benzene levels in Paradise and Santa Rosa's water, is equally flawed. In Paradise, contamination affected nearly 30% of pipes to destroyed homes. The mechanism was depressurization during firefighting, which created negative pressure, sucking in contaminants and wildfire smoke through damaged service lines or openings, regardless of pipe material. CP's source also acknowledged this point: "Depressurization of the distribution network likely transported contaminated water that subsequently contaminated undamaged infrastructure."

Perhaps more importantly, benzene is not selectively released from PVC into a pressurized drinking water pipe when it is heated, because that phenomenon only occurs without the presence of oxygen during controlled pyrolysis. Once again, that is an highly controlled condition and doesn't apply to a wildfire.

Conclusion

Each wildfire is a tragedy, often displacing families from their homes and causing loss of innocent life. We should do everything we can to reduce the risk of these disasters and mitigate their severity when they do occur. But banning PVC water pipe, which has proven its value in spades, does absolutely nothing to mitigate these natural disasters. Colorado Politics cannot grant its op-ed authors unchecked authority to mislead their readers on this very important topic.