A federally mandated survey finds a majority of the water lines serving Iowa homes do not contain lead. DNR Drinking Water Program coordinator Heidi Cline says there are still a small amount of lead lines in use.

“Based on the data that we have so far, there are 51,918 lead service lines reported to us, which is just under four percent of the total service lines that were reported on the inventories,” she says. The inventories found 81% of the lines were not lead, almost 14% were undetermined and less than 2% were galvanized lines that need to be replaced.

The survey is part of the federal effort to get rid of lead water pipes following the severe health and other problems caused by lead pipes in Michigan. Cline says a federal lead water pipes ban went into effect in 1988, so most of the homes with lead pipes tend to be older. “And then there could be, you know, local ordinances in place, and communities that banned lead even earlier than that, or just as a standard practice,” Cline says. “For example, in Des Moines, I think most homes built after 1950 don’t have lead service lines.”

Cline says Iowa water systems still need to figure out how many of the undetermined lines are lead.  She says the EPA said this fall that the compliance date to identify all of the unknow pipes is November 1st of 2027, and systems have to find out that information within seven years of the compliance date. Cline says the next step would be getting rid of the lead pipes. “Starting with the compliance date of November 1st of 2027 systems have 10 years to remove all of those lead service lines.”

Cline says many of the lines inside homes are owned by the homeowner, and the federal rules don’t say who should pay for getting the lead out. “It does not specify. It’s basically silent on who is responsible for the cost of this. It says that the system is required to remove any service line under their control,” she says. “But they also gone to say in a situation where you would need to gain access to get control of that line, you have to get, you know, permission from the home homeowner, and if the homeowner refuses a certain number of times, then the system is not responsible for replacing that line.”

Cline says water systems have some funding available to help get rid of lead pipes, but there’s likely to be disagreements about who is going to pay. “Somebody is going to have to pay something to remove these pipes, then it’s kind of a decision that the systems are going to have to make on if they’re going to cover the costs of it, or if they’re going to assess costs back to the homeowner. And you know, obviously, as you can imagine, there, there could be some forthcoming legal challenges with that as well,” Cline says.

Cline says you should have received a notice from your utility about the types of pipes you have and if there needs to be changes made. You can find out more about the survey on the DNR’s website. https://www.iowadnr.gov/Environmental-Protection/Water-Quality/Drinking-Water-Compliance/Lead-Service-Line-Inventories

Cline says the EPA is still compiling information from other states and doesn’t have that available to get a comparison to how Iowa compares to them when it comes to the number of lead service lines.

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