Decade-long project to target lead pipes in Port

The Port Washington Common Council on Tuesday agreed to spend $122,000 to take the first steps to eliminate lead water service lines in the city.

The decision to hire CDM Smith and City Water to conduct an inventory of lead pipes leading from the city’s water mains to houses and create a plan to replace those pipes in the next 10 years was recommended by the Board of Public Works last week.

The two firms will create an inventory of lead and galvanized steel service lines by the Oct. 16 deadline set by the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Natural Resources and then formulate a plan to replace the pipes by December.

Creating the inventory is a daunting task, officials said, since they don’t have any idea how many of the roughly 5,500 service pipes in the city are made of lead or galvanized steel, which contains lead.

“We’re up against time and sheer numbers,” Water Supt. Dan Fisher said.

But, he said, working with CDM Smith and City Water, “We can pretty much knock this out in a few months.”

While last year the city estimated there could be about 880 houses with lead pipes, that was a guess, Tom Nennig, president of City Water, said.

“It’s never been verified,” Nennig said. “Nobody really knows what the number is.”

This isn’t the first time the city has worked to replace lead water pipes. In 2022, after receiving a grant from the DNR, the city paid to replace 35 service pipes, Fisher said.

And through the years the city has replaced water services when it has rebuilt streets, something that puts it ahead of many other communities when it comes to lead pipe replacement.

“I think Port’s really ahead of the game,” Fisher said. “We’ve been replacing a mile a year for the last 20 years.”

One way to determine the materials used in service lines is to visually check them when replacing water meters. Fisher noted the city has been replacing meters in areas where it suspects there may be lead lines.

“We’ve found a few,” he said. “It’s working.”

But since the pandemic, officials said, the city has not installed many of these newer meters.

Aldermen on Tuesday stressed that the inventory and plan will require cooperation from homeowners as pipes are tested.

“We need cooperation from our citizens to identify the materials making up those pipes,” Ald. Dan Benning said, noting that those conducting the inventory may be required to do in-home inspections of the pipes.

They may also be asked to help with water testing, Matt Bednarski of CDM Smith added.

Lead in pipes is a concern because it can leach into the water, which is then ingested by people. Even low levels of exposure  have been linked to damage to the central and peripheral nervous system, learning disabilities, shorter stature, impaired hearing and impaired formation and function of blood cells.

To minimize any leaching of lead into the water, Port adds a polyphosphate blend to its water that helps retard corrosion and prevent the release of lead, Fisher said.

To determine how many lead pipes there are in Port, CDM Smith and City Water will comb through the city’s records — everything from previous material evaluations to construction and plumbing permits and inspection records — to see if they reflect the materials used in the service lines.

“That’s going to be a lot of the work, going through the records,” Nennig said. “A big part of this is just going to be finding out (how many pipes there are). We need to tell the DNR what the materials are and how we identified them.”

City Engineer Roger Strohm said older records often will list the types of pipes used, but more modern records don’t necessarily contain this information.

However, Nennig noted, the use of lead pipes was outlawed in 1986, so the city knows houses built after that don’t have these services.

And as the city has rebuilt streets in recent years, he said, officials have notified homeowners when they have seen lead pipes.

If the city doesn’t know if a pipe is lead, Nennig said, it is presumed to contain the material, adding the city should consider ways to check.

City Engineer Roger Strohm said that there are a number of ways to determine if pipes are lead that the city could employ. One way, he said, would be to dig a small hole to the pipe, then scratch it to check the materials used.

Homeowners who have lead service lines must be notified of this fact within 30 days, Nennig said.

The inventory is expected to be completed by the end of March, according to the city, and then CDM Smith and City Water would create a lead service line replacement plan, work that is expected to begin next month and take until the end of August.

“They (CDM Smith) are the experts in putting together these plans,” Nennig said. “They’ve been through this before. They’ve got this down to a science.”

Both the public and private portions of the service lines — the public portion lies between the main and the curb stop and the private between the curb stop, which is generally the property line, and the house — must be included in the replacement plan, Nennig said.

How to pay for the replacement of these pipes is a big question, he added.

The city is responsible for replacing the public portion of the lines and homeowners the private portion, although Nennig said it’s expected that the DNR may have low-interest loans available for communities.

These loans could then, in turn, be lent to property owners to replace the private portion, he said.

“Some communities partly fund (the replacement), others make the homeowners pay 100%,” Nennig said, while still others provide four or five-year loans for the work.

Strohm noted that the cost per residence in 2022 was around $3,500.

“If there’s a way to mitigate those costs, we should do it,” Jason Wittek, chairman of the Board of Public Works, said.

How to pay for the replacement pipes will be addressed in the future, Nennig said.