Do you have lead pipes under your home? SAWS wants to know

The San Antonio Water System is checking for lead pipes in its more than 600,000 water service lines — and asking residents for help identifying potential problem areas.

To comply with the new federal regulations, SAWS must find out how many of its utilities contain lead or copper and complete an inventory by Oct. 16. A service line is a pipe that connects a water line to the interior plumbing of a building at home or business.

Lead and copper can cause serious health problems if too much enters your body through drinking water or other sources. The Environmental Protection Agency created new rules, first issued in 2021 and updated in 2022, to reduce lead contamination in drinking water following the lead water disaster in Flint, Michigan.

Earlier this month, the public water utility's board of trustees approved allocating an additional $9.7 million to the effort after initially approving a $2.6 million contract with a third party in 2022. SAWS is now entering what is known as phase two of this investigation, which includes creating and maintaining a system-wide inventory.

Phase two will last until 2027. SAWS officials said the utility plans to make the inventory available to the public starting in October, indicating whether a utility line is lead, galvanized, lead-free or “unknown.” A galvanized pipe is a type of steel pipe that is coated with a layer of zinc to protect against corrosion and rust, but can accumulate toxins if it is downstream from lead or copper.

Because SAWS expects hundreds of thousands of pipes to be listed as unknown, the focus of the second phase will be on determining the composition of as many of them as possible, said Monty McGuffin, water quality manager at SAWS.

“The EPA, followed by [the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] said, “Hold the phone – we want people to help reduce the amount of unknowns in inventory because that's the biggest problem most major utilities are struggling with,” McGuffin said. “Their smaller utilities only have 500 to 1,000 connections – it's easy for them… But for larger ones like us, it's going to be a big hassle.”

Residents with “at risk” or unknown service lines will receive a letter in the mail and/or email informing them of what their service line consists of. A large percentage of them will be unknown, McGuffin said. SAWS will need residents' help to clarify some of the unknowns, he added.

“We want people to get involved,” he said. “If you know what the infrastructure looks like in your home, we will have a portal where you can fill that out and submit that because there are a lot of residents who have lived in their homes for decades and they know when they have the plumbing exchanged in the yard.”

Residents can either explain to SAWS themselves what their service pipe is made of, or they can submit pictures of their service pipe from their main shut-off valve to get SAWS' help in identifying the pipe structure, said Kirstin Eller, SAWS drinking water quality supervisor.

The utility will use some of the additional funding approved by its board to allow its contractor to take advantage of the time SAWS spends replacing old water meters with its new smart meters, McGuffin said, adding that SAWS has only one lead pipe Utility line found at its location side of the system at this time which has already been replaced.

“This will be a major cost savings for the company and our ratepayer,” McGuffin said. Additional funds go toward public relations and public relations.

According to Eller, about 230,000 of these lines are made of lead-free materials. While SAWS owns the lines from the power grid to the meters, the sections between the meters and the homes or businesses are the responsibility of the property owners. Eller said there are about 150,000 lines with unknown materials on both sides of the meter and another 235,000 lines where the materials are known on the SAWS side but not on the customer side.

According to SAWS, Texas homes built after 1989 are unlikely to have lead pipes. Lead is typically found in pipes installed before 1986, when Congress banned its use in public water systems. SAWS has until 2037 to remove all lead and copper pipes from its system, McGuffin noted.

Phase two will also include surveying some potholes – digging small holes in areas around the city to provide a direct view of the pipelines – and continuing monitoring at meter installation sites. The utility also plans to use some existing non-evasive technologies that will be able to scan from above to help detect certain metals underground, McGuffin said.

In phase three, drinking water samples will be taken from local schools and daycare centers starting in 2026, Eller said. The TCEQ has an internal program for Texas schools and some day care centers that allows them to also do self-testing and logging, potentially relieving SAWS of some of that work, Eller added.

“This is a fully funded program, so it costs the schools nothing,” she said. “If you find a problem, [the TCEQ] will actually work with the school to provide filters if needed.

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