St. Louis water is famously drinkable straight from the tap – but thousands of city residents may have questions about that practice, after receiving notice that the pipes bringing water into their homes may contain lead.
The notices come from the city's Water Division. The purpose is to urge compliance with a new Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring lead pipes be replaced within 10 years.
The first step of compliance is getting an accurate count of exactly how many lead service lines run through the city and where they are. The letters and the online survey include information about how to identify if a pipe is lead and then report that information to the Water Division.
Director of Public Utilities and Water Commissioner Niraj Patel said a more up-to-date count is needed because the city only owns the water mains, and the service lines running from the mains into a home or building belong to the property owner.
“So we don't have the most up-to-date information on them if the customer has replaced it or a previous owner has replaced it,” said Patel.
He said the private ownership of these pipes makes it unclear how the city will proceed.
“[The regulation] doesn't exactly tackle the issue of ownership and how to go about getting access or control for doing these replacements for the parts that are not owned by the water systems,” Patel said. “We need to develop a replacement plan and then figure out how we're going to go about, you know, achieving replacing these lines.”
Each service line is estimated to cost between $8,000 and $10,000 to repair, so Patel said this step will help the city to determine a final cost for compliance. Though the EPA announced Missouri will receive $40.5 million in new Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to support the effort to remove lead pipes, in addition to federal funding already sent to the state for this work, Patel said it’s not going to be enough.
“It will be a huge challenge and lift for us,” he said. “We're seeking additional federal funding on this. We've received a little bit, but it's nowhere near how much we would need to, properly meet this regulation without greatly impacting the customer base.”
The water company has experienced a deluge of customers inquiring about what to do after determining their home service lines are indeed lead. The city also provides water testing, though he said there's a backlog of requests for that.
“We are getting an extremely high volume of requests of that nature, so it may take some time to get the results back,” Patel said.
He reinforces the tips shared on the mailer for how to reduce lead consumption, which include cold water through the tap for a minute or two any time the line has gone unused for a couple of hours. But he said that even in the regular worst-case scenario testing of water quality in properties with known lead service lines, the amounts of lead are far below what would be considered cause for concern.
“Our compliance testing to monitor for the potential for lead contamination shows that we have very, very low levels of lead in the water,” Patel said.
He said tests are conducted regularly in homes with known lead service lines, without taking any precautionary measures such as flushing the tap.
“In that worst-case scenario, even then, you know, we find our results are very low. A lot of them are just not detectable levels. The ones that are detectable are below the action level of 15 parts per billion,” he said. “We’ve still been around one or two parts per billion, whereas, we wouldn't have to take the next step or report an exceedance until 15 parts per billion.”
Despite the chance the incoming Donald Trump administration could make changes to the federal rule, Patel said the department is moving forward.
“We're proceeding as we have been, and we're certainly watching – this is a regulation that could fall within a time frame of a review, and they could make changes again, but they may not. So we're moving forward as if we're going to have to address this.”
The city has three years to start the process of actually replacing the identified lead pipes, but Patel said quick responses from those who’ve received notices will help the entire process flow more smoothly.
Water testing information is available on the city’s website.
