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An Ohio community was uninformed for months that unsafe levels of lead had been found in the drinking water supply.
Columbus City Utilities has said it does not anticipate finding many lead pipes supplying water to homes in Columbus as officials begin efforts to comply with new rules from federal regulators on a neurotoxin that is particularly dangerous for children and pregnant women.
Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized new rules requiring drinking water systems across the country to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years and lowered the threshold at which utilities must take action to reduce exposure should they detect the substance in drinking water.
Lead is a naturally occurring metal associated with several negative health effects, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People can be exposed to lead by ingesting contaminated food or water, eating lead paint chips or breathing in lead dust.
Lead in drinking water primarily comes from materials and components associated with service lines and home plumbing, according to Columbus City Utilities’ most recent water quality report.
There are no safe levels of lead in the blood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even low levels of lead in blood are associated with developmental delays, difficulty learning, and behavioral issues. The effects of lead poisoning can be permanent and disabling.
Columbus City Utilities Director Roger Kelso said the utility has three years under the new rules to conduct an inventory of the pipes making up its service lines and come up with “a plan of how we’re going to deal with things that we find in the inventory.” After that, the utility has a decade to reach full compliance with the new rules.
Kelso estimated that Columbus City Utilities has roughly 20,000 service lines.
“It doesn’t appear right at the moment that we have lead service (lines) in town,” Kelso said. “We’ve got a few things called lead goosenecks, which are kind of a section of pipe that just turns down to go from the meter to the service line. Those will be removed, but it’s not like its the whole service (line), nor is it like we’ve got lead utility mains or things of that nature.”
Lead pipes are more likely to be found in homes built before 1986, when Congress banned the use of lead in new plumbing, according to the EPA.
While Congress banned the use of lead in new plumbing that year, it did not require existing lead plumbing to be removed. The federal government estimates that up to 9 million homes and businesses across the country are still connected to water mains through lead pipes installed before 1986.
It is currently unclear how many homes and businesses in Bartholomew County have lead pipes. An estimated 47% of occupied housing units in the county were built before 1980, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
Kelso said the utility will not need to dig up every service line in the city to check for lead pipes to comply with the new rules. Instead, the inventory will be conducted based on statistical analysis and checking a subsample of lines installed before the federal ban.
“(The inventory) is based on statistics and … when certain things were built and when things weren’t,” Kelso said. “Lead has been verboten for (around) 40 years … and so you don’t really expect to see it in that kind of piping where we’ve added new subdivisions (since then). …We’ll go out and visually inspect a certain percentage (of service lines) based on statistical processes and the history of the area that we’re doing this in.”
“The older sections in town are where I would expect to have lead issues — if there were issues,” Kelso added later.
Currently, it is hard to say how much it will cost Columbus City Utilities to comply with the new rules, officials said removing and replacing lead goosenecks “could be fairly expensive.”
“Because of the number of them that could be required to be replaced — we won’t know that until we complete our inventory — it could be fairly expensive,” Kelso said. “Now, I would expect that over time there will be some (government financial) assistance. …It’s not just totally on our shoulders.”
The Biden administration said last week that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 provides over $26 billion for the replacement of lead service lines across the country.
The entire Congressional delegation representing Columbus — Rep. Greg Pence and Sens. Mike Braun and Todd Young — voted against the legislation providing the funding to replace lead pipes, according to Congressional voting records.
Besides the inventory and removal of lead pipes, the new EPA rules require water systems to ensure that lead concentrations do not exceed an “action level” of 10 parts per billion, down from 15 parts per billion under the current standard, The Associated Press reported.
If high lead levels are found, water systems must inform the public about ways to protect their health, including the use of water filters, and take action to reduce lead exposure.
Local officials said they do not anticipate having issues to meet the new limit on lead in drinking water. Lead was detected in Columbus’ drinking water last year but at levels far below the new limit, according to Columbus City Utilities’ most recent water quality report.
The report states that lead was detected at less than 0.0010 parts per million, which would be less than 1 part per billion, or about 10 times lower than the new limit.
Columbus City Utilities currently meets all federal and state drinking water quality standards, the report states.
“(Lead) is not really an issue with us,” Kelso said.
