There are still a couple community meetings coming up: http://ift.tt/2jdzHbb
I went to the Lawrenceville one, where I learned the following.
1) Anyone can have lead in their water, unless your house was built extremely recently. Lead pipes were never used for "mains", the pipes that run under streets and are publicly owned. But service lines, the branches that run to houses, were often built of lead ~100 years ago and prior. Lead service lines became less common in the 20s, and even less common in the 50s, and were finally made illegal in 1978. But solders including lead continued to be used for several years following.
Most houses in Pittsburgh have had some type of water line update at some point, but records are very shoddy. PWSA is attempting to find out who has lead service lines, but this is a very slow, costly, and unpredictable process. PWSA tests the water at the filtration plant 300 times a week and there is never any detectable lead in it. All lead is coming from the service lines that connect the mains to people's homes. Consequently....
2) Everyone should test their water, even if you have done so in the past. Mother Jones and some local media outlets have done big stories about how Veolia, a company contracted to manage the PWSA a couple years ago, changed the mix of chemicals that PWSA uses to "coat" the inside of pipes and minimize lead leeching. Veolia has now been fired and is being sued. The mix may have cuased some coatings to not work as well, allowing more lead to leech from the inside of pipes into the water. However, the testing standards for water were also updated in the past few years, so this could have been a confounding factor. Due to the ongling lawsuit, PWSA cannot comment too much on Veolia.
PWSA will provide a free test kit, although it may take a long time to complete the process. You can also get a cheap test kit from a hardware store or the internet. Make sure to follow the directions closely. The interim PWSA director claimed at the meeting that initial problems with their tests were largely due to pickup and delivery, which has now been contracted out. But there's clearly more to the story.
My personal advice is to get the PWSA kit and go through the process, even though it will take a while, because 1) it's free and 2) It's good for PWSA to have that data. But at the same time, obtain and perform your own test so you have timely results. And a good scientist always gathers more than one data point.
3) Service lines are 2-piece: the part next to the main is owned by PWSA and the one next to a home is owned by the homeowner. Any combination of these two pieces, and the joint connecting them, may be made out of lead. Any combination of the pieces and the joint may need to be replaced. PWSA is replacing their pieces when they know they contain lead, but as described in (1), they don't know where all of these are. They've been replacing about 300-500 a year (or about 20k in the last 50 years), and with 88,000 households in Pittsburgh, it will take many years to replace them all.
If you decide to replace your own service line, contact PWSA and they might replace their portion at the same time. Right now it is ILLEGAL for PWSA to replace your half of the SL, even if they had the money (and they don't). You can try to find out what your service line is made out of with a scratch or magnet test: http://ift.tt/2jpuDxE and http://ift.tt/2jdpuf8 Replacing a line typically costs $100-125 per foot, but could cost as much as $20,000 if it runs under your house and you have a thick poured concrete basement floor, as one unfortunate person at the meeting shared.
4) Since lead is from service lines or pipes inside houses, you can "flush your lines" by running water until you're getting "fresh" water from the main that has not been sitting around in your service line. This water should be free of lead. Depending on the diameter and length of your service line, it will probably be 15seconds to 2 minutes. But you can also just draw water after a large consumption activity like taking a shower or running the washing machine. Note that if you draw water after taking a shower, you should still flush for a few seconds to clear the water from the pipes inside your house, even though the shower flushed the water inside your service line. You could save this water in a filter or pitcher for later if you're concerned about the increased water bills from flushing your lines.
You can also use a filter to remove most of the lead from your water. Make sure to buy a National Safety Foundation approved filter. As you probably know, always draw cold water for drinking and cooking. And boiling doesn't remove lead.
LINKS http://ift.tt/2cVQcSq http://ift.tt/2jdEsl5 http://ift.tt/2jpWQo3 http://ift.tt/2jdsBDv http://ift.tt/1O1bD0F
Submitted January 12, 2017 at 07:37PM by LeadWaterBear http://ift.tt/2jpQyoG
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