120Water Releases Tools to Help Utilities Find Lead Pipes

How many lead water pipes are there in the US? Nobody knows – but we’re about to get a pretty good idea.

The federal government is currently in the process of revising the 30-year-old lead-copper rule, which will dramatically expand responsibility for water utilities across the country. One of the revisions will be the first time utilities have to inventory all of their lead pipes. You have until 2024 to do so.

A startup, 120Water, is now taking the opportunity to offer this assistive technology to help.

“Certainly less than 5 percent of the market has taken a proactive approach to identifying their service lines,” said Megan Glover, CEO and co-founder of the company. “Some of the more progressive [utilities]Perhaps at a time when the pipe went down, paper coupons or cards would be kept that they kept in… filing cabinets. “

When lead from pipes gets into water, it can cause a myriad of health problems for users, including premature birth, anemia and decreased kidney function.

Currently, Glover said, most water utilities are approaching lead pipes, if they find out they exist as part of their normal job, they take them out. But since the Flint, Michigan water crisis began in 2014, the nation has been looking for ways to replace those pipes more seriously. And as part of a massive infrastructure spending proposal, President Biden is calling for a full replacement to get started in earnest.

“It’s a little herculean in some ways, especially for those water systems that may not have lead but still need to prove it doesn’t,” Glover said. “I think that’s why you see the administration’s focus on this infrastructure plan and funding, because there just needs to be so many jobs and funding resources to actually identify these materials.”

The company recently added new lead service line inventory capabilities to its software and expanded the existing capabilities to run test programs. In anticipation of the need to communicate results with customers, the company also developed new features to display data from water testing programs on publicly accessible dashboards.

The rules also expand utility companies’ responsibility to include pipes in homes and schools, which means they will have to work more with customers to test the material that makes up those pipes.

The idea behind the software’s new features is to help utilities separate them so they can better distinguish between and map different types of lead pipes – and thus improve their ability to report to the federal government and the pipes eventually remove.

“It’s not good enough just to submit an Excel spreadsheet that says ‘I have no lead’,” she said. “You actually need to collect certain data to prove or disprove the presence of lead in this service line.”

While the regulatory revisions aren’t technically in place – the Biden administration has frozen and reviewed many new regulations – Glover said the bottom line was the same. At some point in 2024, utilities need to have a full inventory of leading service lines. She believes they are particularly focused on the Midwestern and Eastern states, as well as water systems built before the 1960s.

“We can estimate that there can be more than 10 million based on age and some of their informal studies, but nobody really knows until we start making these inventories,” she said.

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