Drinking Water & Lead Service Lines
In my last post, I championed drinking water and encouraged us to be grateful for the resource. Forty million of us in the Great Lakes region get our drinking water from the lakes. The resource is not available without challenges though.
Service lines are pipes carrying water into buildings from public water main lines. Given that they are underground, many people likely don’t think much about their service lines. Out of sight – out of mind.
However, if you live or work in an area with older infrastructure, it’s important to know a few things about lead and the issue of lead service lines. Unfortunately, this is especially true if you live in the Great Lakes region. The region is home to 7 of the 10 states with the greatest number of lead service lines still in use. Illinois is at the top of the list with Ohio second.
Lead exposure can cause a serious and frightening list of heath issues: developmental delays, learning difficulties, behavioral issues, kidney damage, high blood pressure, and reproductive health challenges among them. Public water utilities test drinking water consistently for lead levels to ensure it is safe. However, this does not mean that it’s lead-free and doesn’t fully account for the water passage through private pipes and lines. Many pipes, even older ones, have a corrosion treatment, but it can wear down over time, allowing lead to leach into the water.
Lead service line replacement has two huge challenges. The first is record-keeping and mapping. Cleveland Water, for example, last used lead when installing pipes in 1953. Pipes installed earlier than that could contain lead. Many have been installed since then, and some have been replaced. Some pipes are public domain and some are private. Record-keeping over these 70 years is simply not accurate.
The other challenge is also quite clear but not visible. With the pipes lying underground, there is an expensive and time consuming task of digging to reach and assess them. and in some cases replace them. I learned that there are some newer “trenchless” methods for replacing or installing new pipes, but sometimes for a variety of reasons, digging is still required.
Cleveland Water is the 10th largest public water system in the country. It has recently launched an ambitious lead service line replacement project. This project is intended to bring the area under Cleveland Water service in compliance with 2021 federal statues. There are mid to larger cities that have taken this on – Cincinnati, Denver, Newark and Madison, Wisconsin among them.
The utility is using funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for this initiative. Use of the funds requires prioritizing disadvantaged communities first. Not surprisingly, the 13 of 78 communities in Cleveland Water’s service area that meet criteria for disadvantaged have approximately 80 percent of the system’s lead service lines.
They are currently developing an inventory of service lines, trying to accurately map them. We received a survey in the fall asking us as homeowners whether we knew the status of our water line and asking us to use a QR code to respond. It happens that we could respond to the question, but that easily could not have been the case as well. Within a few years of moving into our house, we an issue that caused us to have the sewer lines into our house assessed. We had to replace them due to deterioration and when the company came to do it, they found that the water line was old. They recommended replacing it with copper while we had the ground dug up. This made sense, but it was not cheap; the cost of the project would be a huge barrier for many people living in our region.
If you live in the Great Lakes region in an older home or older community, there are a few things that you can personally do to further protect yourself: (1) confirm your water line’s composition; (2) test your water; (3) install water filters certified to remove lead; (4) run your water for at least a minute before using it for drinking or cooking; and (5) for drinking and cooking, always use cold water (heat it up if needed).
If lead service lines are not likely an issue for you personally, you can still advocate for the issue regionally and support policy and funding for pipe replacement. No one wants a crisis like the Flint, Michigan one a decade ago that still has repercussions today.
