The Environmental Protection Agency set deadlines for these waterline inspections and Keller officials were able to get them done early.
There is an estimated 9.2 million lead service lines in communities across the U.S., according to the EPA.
The details
According to the news release, the EPA revised its lead and copper rules in 2021 and 2023 to better protect communities from lead exposure through drinking water. The agency banned lead lines in 1988 and the lead and copper rules were established in 1991.
Because of the recent lead and copper rules amendments, water suppliers throughout the country were required to create an inventory of all public and private water lines in their systems.
Keller city officials had to inspect every water line installed in the city since 1988.
Zooming in
Keller public works director Alonzo Liñán said that lead is a toxic metal that can harm people’s health, even at low exposure levels. It can also accumulate in the body over time, he said.
Liñán explained that the city was required to create a comprehensive inventory of all public and private water service lines in Keller.
The city first reviewed all existing documents to identify housing developments completed before the 1988 lead ban. The locations built before that year were then further scrutinized to see if any work had been done on them since 1988 that would have resulted in new lines.
Every other location was visually inspected, which involved digging down to each line to expose the pipe’s material, Liñán said.
Through this process, city officials were able to confirm that all 16,313 water service lines are lead free.
What they’re saying
“Because we were able to document that the city has no lead in our system, we are able to avoid a costly and time-consuming mandatory sampling program required of all the cities that couldn’t show that they were lead free,” Liñán said. “Our efforts will result in hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost avoidance over the next three-to-five years.”
