Work on lead services lines improves water quality in Pittsburgh
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — It is a story of a bad situation getting better.
After the water crisis in Flint, Michigan several years ago, KDKA Investigates turned its focus to water quality in Pittsburgh, finding elevated levels of lead. The problem? Lead service lines to thousands of city homes.
Six years later, that situation dramatically changed.
Out of the crisis that was Flint, concerns rose nationally about the levels of lead in the water systems of aging industrial cities, and tests showed those levels in Pittsburgh to be dangerously high — 22 parts per billion — well above the state and federal limits of 15 parts per billion.
"It was fair to call it a point of crisis as an organization," said Will Pickering, director of the Pittsburgh Water & Sewer Authority
Under orders from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the PWSA set about the task of replacing the lead service lines bringing water from trunk lines in the street into thousands of older homes and properties, taking traces of lead along with it. Underground and out of sight, the authority first had to find them.
"PWSA didn't know where the lead lines could be," Pickering said. "There were no records that were usable."
But facing these and other challenges, PWSA crews have been working over the last several years. It's dirty and labor-intensive work, removing the connecting lead lines and replacing them with new copper lines, thus ensuring safe potable water for homes.
"They use a backhoe to essentially just pull the lead line out of the ground and the new copper pipe comes in behind it," said Mora McLaughlin with the PWSA.
KDKA's Andy Sheehan: Where are you now? More than half?
Pickering: More than half.
Since 2016, the PWSA has replaced some 9,500 of an estimated 16,000 public lead service lines and is now within sight of replacing all of the lines by 2026.
The process is not cheap. The authority has spent $100 million replacing lead lines and one-third has come from federal and state dollars.
In the meantime, the authority has added a treatment called orthophosphate, which coats the existing lines, preventing lead contamination. That, combined with the lead line replacements, has reduced lead levels to less than 5 parts per billion. And even though that's well below state and federal limits, the PWSA wants to reduce it even further.
"Even just being halfway there, in conversations we've had with the other utilities, we've got a huge jump on other utilities," Pickering said.
