Lead, a silvery blue metal, has been used by humans since the time of the Romans due to its abundance and easy malleability. The Romans, and later Americans, adopted the practice of using lead to carry water. Although some researchers believe even the Romans understood the consequences of lead poisoning, it wasn’t until 1977 before the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the use of lead in products such as paint in the United States.
Although lead has been banned or removed from many substances, lead pipes carrying drinking water to households remain across America, including some in Longmont.
“There are cities that were built in an era when a predominant amount of lead was used. They have a pretty good idea where that lead is and they know that they can go target that and remove a good amount of it in a potable water distribution system. Some of them even have the specifications from the era in which they were built that tell them that that was the material used. Then there is everyone else,” said Bob Allen director of operations for the city of Longmont Public Works and Natural Resources department.
According to Allen, most cities across the country, including Longmont, don’t always know where lead pipes are located within the city.
“In Longmont, there are around 50 homes that we are aware of, but we generally don’t know where the lead is in use or has been used,” Allen said.
Historically, lead pipes have not been used by municipalities to carry water to residents. However, “developers used lead pipes to get water in the homes,” Allen said. “That’s why the city doesn’t know where most of the lead is because most of it was used by the developer to tap into the city’s mainline … and oftentimes all the way into the home.”
For Longmont to locate all the lead pipe that remains in the city, it would need to pothole — dig up areas around known pipes to observe the materials used and determine if they are lead.
“Unless Longmont gets a backhoe and starts digging around everyone’s lawn, we don’t really know. With that said, we could speculate on the era under which lead was used and we could start looking and target the homes that we think might have it,” Allen said.
Even if Longmont found all the lead pipe junctures throughout the city, some developers used lead pipes in homes, as was industry standard before 1951. As late as the 1980s, some developers continued to use lead solder when fusing copper pipe, Allen said.
In 1974, Congress passed legislation known as the Safe Drinking Water Act to protect public health by regulating the nation’s drinking water supply. The act created “ health-based standards for drinking water to protect against both naturally-occurring and man-made contaminants that may be found in drinking water,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA. In 1986 and 1996 the act was amended adding further protections to water sources.
In 1991, the Lead and Copper Rule was established by the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act to further control lead and copper in drinking water.
“The treatment technique for the rule requires systems to monitor drinking water at customer taps. If lead concentrations exceed an action level of 15 ppb (parts per billion) or copper concentrations exceed an action level of 1.3 ppm (parts per million) in more than 10% of customer taps sampled, the system must undertake a number of additional actions to control corrosion,” according to the EPA.
According to Allen, Longmont has an aggressive sampling program that keeps tabs on the lead and copper levels within city limits. To his knowledge, the city has never exceeded the thresholds established by the EPA.
Nearby Devner Water — a utility that serves over 1.5 million people in Denver and the surrounding area — encountered a year where lead concentrations exceeded EPA guidelines in 2012.
“There are a lot of unknowns as to what led to that (meeting the limit) because we didn’t see that trigger before and we haven’t seen that trigger since, however, it did trigger us to start evalulating what more we can do to help on the treatment side,” said Travis Thompson, communcations manager for Denver Water.
Since many utilities are unaware of where most lead pipes exist within the city, they treat the water system to prevent pipe corosion but increasing the alkalinity of the water.
Longmont is one of many which usessoda ash to contain lead and copper to keep it from mixing with resident’s drinking water, even when it runs through lead and copper piping, Allen said.
Denver Water, too, uses chemicals to prevent lead from leaching into residents’ drinking water. After exceeding the EPA guidelines, the utility considered adding additional orthophosphate, a common chemical used in water treatment. However, due to the environmental impacts it would have downstream, Denver Water decided reach out to the community instead and created its Lead Reduction Program to remove all the lead services lines throughout the community.
The Lead Reduction program began with an inventory that determined that Denver Water’s service area had an estimated 64,000 to 84,000 lead service lines. In total, the program will cost $580 million that will be spread out over 15 years.
Although Longmont has ways of preventing lead from entering the drinking water, Allen says it is still always good to remove things that are hazardous. However, that too comes with risks.
According to Allen, when lead pipes are removed it can release lead in particulate form, meaning some lead is released into the drinking water. The city of Longmont alerts local homeowners when such pipes are removed. For the next six months, these households are required to filter their water for lead.
“If we go and begin removing all the lead out there, it is going to be a significant inconvenience to households that have it because now we have actually broken that envelope that had lead in it and it could potentially get entrained in the system,” Allen said.
Denver Water customers, who have been idenitified as having lead service lines feeding their homes, are also required to filter their water. In an effort to keep residents safe, Devner Water has sent out 100,000 water pitchers designed to filter lead. The utility also sends out replacement filters, Thompson said.
“It is not a simple strategy to do what Denver Water is doing. Longmont does not currently have plans to do that. What we do in Longmont is that when we find it, we want to remove it,” Allen said. “Eventually we will get most of it out, over many years as we do maintenance on our distribution system.”
The city of Longmont works with homeowners, often cost-sharing, to remove lead piping outside the home as it is found throughout the city.
Although the city removes lead pipes as they find it, the exception could be if the pipes are within the walls of a resident’s home, which are the responsibility of the homeowner. “If there was lead where the developer tapped into the mainline, there is a chance there is some within the home as well,” Allen said.
It is unknown to Allen whether or not programs exist to assist homeowners with replacing pipes within the home. A thourough internet search yielded that some communities across America have some programs available, but none in the Colorado area were found.
The cost of replumbing, or repiping, a two bath, 1,500 sqf home can range from $4,000 to $10,000, according to articles321.com.
Although it may be cost prohibative for some to repipe their home, the methods used by municpalities help contain lead and prevent it from entering the drinking water, according to Allen.
“There is no safe amount of lead … However, systems are generally safe, without removing the lead,” Allen said.
