Get the lead out: Baltimore urges city residents to test material of drinking water lines

Approximately 9 million lead pipes carry drinking water across the country, according to estimates from the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Under a newly proposed rule, cities and other jurisdictions will be required to replace all service lines made out of the hazardous material within 10 years — but first, they have to find where they are.

That’s where you come in.

Baltimore is among the cities asking homeowners to test their own pipes for lead and complete an online survey with their results, as it races to complete a required inventory of its pipes.

The test only requires a few household items — a key, a magnet and a penny — and it will help the city identify hundreds of thousands of uncategorized pipes.

So far, the city doesn’t have records indicating any of its service lines are made of lead, according to a joint city and county website advertising the self-testing initiative. The most common known pipe materials are copper and galvanized iron.

But it doesn’t know the material for many of the city’s service lines, largely because the city didn’t install them.

According to Jennifer Combs, a spokesperson for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works, the material used for 229,616 of the service lines running to individual homes, businesses and industrial properties, plus 45,796 service lines under city control, which may run under streets and sidewalks, is unknown.

The unknowns extend into Baltimore County, which also receives drinking water from the city system.

While the 10-year timeline for replacement may seem ambitious, in materials accompanying the announcement, the EPA said it’s achievable. Cities like Newark, New Jersey; Benton Harbor, Michigan; and Green Bay, Wisconsin replaced their lead service lines in less than 10 years, according to an EPA fact sheet.

The stakes are high. Research has shown there is no safe level of lead that can be found in a person’s blood, and remaining lead pipes are disproportionately concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and those with residents who are mostly people of color, according to the EPA.

Lead is a neurotoxin — a substance that alters the structure or function of the nervous system. Even very low levels of exposure can harm a child’s intelligence, ability to pay attention and academic achievement.

And while symptoms of acute lead poisoning are easier to spot, the effects of mild exposure can arise years later, potentially shaping the trajectory of a child’s life, researchers said.

“That’s one of the biggest issues with lead,” said Aisha Dickerson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Even after you get rid of the main source of lead exposure, the damage is done.”

The good news is water utilities like Baltimore’s can alter their drinking water’s alkalinity to keep it from leaching the lead from pipes. But with its newly proposed rule, the EPA would require lead pipes be removed altogether.

“Importantly, we urge residents to not panic. DPW carefully manages the water chemistry to prevent lead pipe corrosion,” read a statement from Jennifer Combs, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Public Works.

‘Starting from zero’?

Take a look at the Baltimore City Department of Public Works online map, and nearly every residence has a gray dot hovering on top — meaning the city does not know what material that home’s pipe is made of.

The lack of information surprised Natalie Exum, a researcher at Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose research focuses on public health and sanitary engineering.

It feels like the city is “starting from zero,” Exum said. And the survey will have to be an “exact, boots-on-the-ground, by-home inventory.” This isn’t a case in which computer models can be used to figure out where lead service lines are located.

“Because you could be fine, and your neighbor could not,” she said.

In late January, the city and county plan to hold public meetings to demonstrate the self-testing procedure and answer questions. The city also plans to meet with community associations about the testing, Combs said, and multilingual instructional videos will soon appear on the lead pipe website.

The city also is placing informational inserts in water bills, and will mail ratepayers informational postcards, Combs said.

To conduct an at-home test, residents must find where their water service line enters their home, which is often in their basement. Then, they must lightly scratch the pipe with a key or a coin, as close to the wall as possible, and note the color that appears on the pipe. If it’s a shiny silver, it’s likely that the pipe is made of lead.

Then, homeowners should apply a magnet to the pipe. If the pipe is made of lead, the magnet will not stick. Residents are asked to take a picture of their pipe and submit their results through an online survey on the Baltimore City and County website.

By next October, Baltimore and utilities across the U.S. are required to present a drinking water pipe inventory to the EPA.

In addition to lead pipes, utilities also will have to identify and replace certain galvanized iron and steel pipes, if they are located downstream of a lead pipe, or were at one time. That’s because those pipes can absorb lead contamination.

Steve Via, the director of federal relations at the American Water Works Association, a nonprofit that represents water professionals and utilities, said he suspects that the October inventories due to the EPA could contain a substantial number of “unknowns” for many cities, due in large part to lacking data on the customer side.

Such unknowns are okay, said Eric Burneson, director of the Standards and Risk Management Division at the EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water. But they won’t be allowed by the time the 10 years runs out.

As utilities conduct their inventories, the key question becomes: “How do you use your records and the information from the customer to [minimize] that number of times that you’ve got to actually go out and dig holes at the street at the property line and disrupt everybody — disrupt the customer’s world — by putting that big truck out there?” Via said.

Making replacement happen

Not all U.S. public utilities must replace every lead service line by 2034 under the EPA’s newly proposed rule, which still needs to complete a public comment process before it becomes official.

Utilities in some cities will get more time, but only if they have a high quantity of lead pipes. If cities have to replace more than 39 service lines for every 1,000 households each year — or more than 10,000 service lines in a year — they might qualify for a deferred deadline.

But the EPA estimates that somewhere between 96% and 99% of utilities in the country won’t be eligible for such extensions, Burneson said.

There are some “obvious candidates” that likely would qualify, Burneson said, including Chicago, Cleveland and New York City.

Baltimore is still reviewing the EPA rule to determine its next steps, Combs said.

And a mandate to root out lead pipes is one thing. Having the funding is another.

The EPA is giving Baltimore $43 million of federal infrastructure funding to support the cost of completing the survey and replacing service lines.

It’s likely the expansive project could cost much more. The extra funding could come from other federal funding sources and from the state legislature, Via said. It also could come from the utilities themselves, depending on local rules on the use of ratepayer dollars. But ultimately some of the cost might fall directly onto homeowners who still have lead service lines, he said.

“It is different for every community and it’s not going to be just one of those,” Via said. “It’s probably going to be a mix.”

Dickerson said she wants to be optimistic that it will be possible for Baltimore and other cities to replace all lead pipes by the time the decade is up. But, she said, history has shown that it’s hard to be optimistic about the timeliness of completing such federal mandates.

“So much can happen within 10 years,” she said. “Something else might become a financial priority, and that can get tossed aside.”