Baltimore urges residents to test water lines

City needs to know where lead pipes are so it can replace them

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.

And that’s where you come in.

Baltimore is among the cities asking homeowners, businesses and other water customers 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 requires only 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 that 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.

Between Baltimore and Baltimore County — which also uses the city’s drinking water — 78% of all service lines — more than 186,000 in the city and 155,000 in the county —are an unknown material, according to figures shared by Jennifer Combs, a spokesperson for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works. Of the unknown pipes, about 93% are on the customer side, and bring water to individual homes, businesses, churches and other properties. The remainder are on the utility side, which may run under streets and sidewalks.

While the 10-year timeline for identification and 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 to be removed altogether.

“Importantly, we urge residents to not panic. DPW carefully manages the water chemistry to prevent lead pipe corrosion,” Combs said in a statement.

‘Starting from zero’?

Take a look at the Baltimore City Department of Public Works online map, and nearly every residence and many businesses have 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, bootson-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, water customers 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 OK, 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.