Gainesville Regional Utilities is conducting an inventory of its water service lines to ensure none are made of lead following recent rule changes by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Jennifer McElroy, supervising engineer and utility designer for GRU, said GRU sent out 40,000 letters in November following the requirement by federal law to notify any customer with an unknown service line material about the inventory.
McElroy said the utility initially received a lot of calls from customers concerned about what the notification letter GRU sent out meant.
“The terminology that we have to use by law makes it sound a lot scarier, I think, than it is when you can actually walk through it with a customer,” she said.
David Warm, the communications director at GRU, said in a written statement that GRU has not yet begun the field process for testing water service line materials.
He said GRU hopes to begin a pilot program in April, and what it finds during the verification step will determine the utility’s next steps.
Charles White, a Gainesville plumber, said he has gotten calls from customers concerned about their water pipes being made out of lead since they received GRU’s letter. But White said he isn’t concerned. He has been a plumber for almost 30 years, and he’s not worried about finding lead in the city’s drinking water.
“I have not yet come across a house that is still habitable that actually had lead pipes in them in Gainesville, Florida,” said the 47-year-old owner of Gator Leak and Drain, LLC. “In Alachua County, period.”
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Lead and Copper Rule Improvements in November 2023. The federal requirement is for every water system to inventory both public and private service lines to ensure there are no lead pipes, and to remove any lead service lines within the next 10 years.
Exposure to even small amounts of lead can cause serious health problems, according to the Mayo Clinic. Lead poisoning can occur if it builds up in a person’s body, and children are especially vulnerable.
Lead pipes can release lead particles into tap water, according to the Mayo Clinic.
McElroy said GRU has never seen a lead service line in its service area before.
“I’m hopeful that we don’t find any, but we won’t know for sure until we actually go and do the verification,” she said.
If GRU were to find a lead service line on the public side of the water service line, the utility would be responsible for replacing it immediately. If GRU finds a lead service line on the private side, McElroy said GRU would work with the customer and try to help them get funding to replace it.
Customers can see the status of their water service line material by checking their address on the publicly available inventory.
Some water service lines are made of galvanized pipes, and those can have lead particles attached to its surface if water from a lead pipe passed through them, according to the EPA.
The updated Lead and Copper rule requires utilities to replace galvanized pipes only if lead has been upstream of it, McElroy said.
The updated rules don’t have new requirements for copper pipes. According to the EPA, copper pipes with lead solder made or installed before 1986 contained high lead levels. McElroy said GRU tests water for copper and lead throughout the distribution system every three years, and “GRU has always been in compliance.”
The rule doesn’t cover the replacement of “goosenecks” connectors, McElroy said, which are used to connect some water service lines to the main water pipe. Most are made of plastic material, but she said it was common to use lead goosenecks in the early 1900s.
“If we’re working in a much older area of town, you’re going to have a higher probability of finding one than if you’re working in a new area of town,” she said about the goosenecks.
McElroy said goosenecks are found roughly once a year.
“Part of this new rule does not cover the replacement of connectors,” she said. “But as a best practice, we always remove them when we find them if they’re lead.”
Kayla Sosnow, the owner of Tree City Properties, said she was shocked when she first read GRU’s notification letter. She said she didn’t know whether it meant there was lead in Gainesville water after reading it because of all the precautions the letter listed about reducing lead in water.
Sosnow said she didn’t want her tenants or herself exposed to lead, so she reached out to GRU for answers.
“I really got down into the nitty-gritty of it,” she said, “and now I feel much more secure in the fact that I don’t have to worry about it.”
Even though Sosnow understands the inventory process, she said the precise language in the letter may lead people to feel they’re in danger, and it was hard to get answers from GRU about what the letter meant.
“I went down such a rabbit hole,” she said. “I mean, I was getting ready to hire my handyman to go out there and dig up the pipes.”
Angela Casteel, 49, a student at the University of Florida majoring in political science, said she’s not concerned about the inventory process at all.
“I think that they’re doing a great job,” she said about GRU.
Casteel said she understood there was an updated lead and copper rule, and lead pipes were used in the past up until a certain point.
She said she doesn’t think the water pipes in her apartment are old enough to worry about.
“I have absolutely no concern that there’s lead in the pipes,” she said.
It wasn’t until 1986 that lead pipes were banned in water systems, according to the EPA.
McElroy said GRU is taking a combined approach to do this large inventory of water service lines.
“We’re going to take a random sample of about 400, and so that will give us a 95% confidence level of what we’re looking at,” McElroy said.
These samples are stratified random samples based on the decade each house was built to ensure a good cross sample.
She said the samples also account for when different plumbing codes were in effect, and when different plumbing devices and different materials were being used.
After GRU determines whether service lines are made of lead or not, it will use predictive modeling, a consultant and software to predict the material of other service lines in the area.
Then, GRU will do verifications to make sure the predictive analysis was accurate.
“We’re hoping that will be well ahead of that 10-year” deadline, McElroy said about the inventory, “but until we really get into it, we won’t know how long it’s going to take.”
White said if a home was built before the late 1980s and it still has the original portable water lines, there could be lead in the solder used in the pipe fittings.
But he said it’s so minimal, it’s not a concern for consumption.
White recommends that anyone concerned about lead in their drinking water should get their water tested before checking the pipes.
He also said people should be careful where they get their water tested.
“The best thing to do is contact the water department, your utilities department and ask them who to send a sample to,” White said. “Or ask them to come out and do a sample test for you.”
He said some stores that provide free water testing don’t give a proper water analysis, and they often try to market products like water purification systems to people who do those tests.
“I’ve found a lot of my clients have kind of gotten snookered,” White said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
