The 最新杏吧原创 region鈥檚 largest water utility is asking customers to help inventory thousands of service lines made of unknown materials, in an effort to rid its system of potentially dangerous lead pipes.
Missouri American Water Co. has sent emails or letters to approximately 200,000 residential customers in 最新杏吧原创 County and St. Charles County, offering help in identifying at their homes and offering to replace them, with no direct charge to property owners.
鈥淗elp us turn those unknowns into knowns,鈥 said Christopher Parrish, an engineering manager for Missouri American, who oversees its replacement of lead service lines 鈥 and the hunt for where they are.
The letters stoking the crowdsourced mapping campaign are new this year, although the company has already spent the better part of a decade replacing lead lines that run between water mains and individual homes.
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The move joins similar, ongoing surveys from other water utilities, including the City of 最新杏吧原创鈥 Water Division.
Parrish emphasized that water from the Missouri American is safe to drink, and that it is treated with safeguards including a 鈥渃orrosion inhibitor,鈥 intended for lead pipes. (Galvanized pipes also tend to coincide with the presence of lead, he said.)
Still, lead is toxic and especially poses risks to the developing brains and nervous systems of children, with potentially permanent impacts.
And loads of the material remains part of local water systems, because of its widespread use in older homes.
While the precise location of lead pipes within the Missouri American system is uncertain, the scale is known to be significant. Missouri American shared its messaging campaign with more than half of its 390,000 customers in the area, and says that the vast majority of recipients have service lines made of unknown material.
Only a relatively small percentage of 鈥渦nknown鈥 pipes 鈥 about 5% to 10% 鈥 usually end up being identified as lead or galvanized material that calls for removal, Parrish said.
Simply based on development trends and the number of homes built before 1930, Parrish estimates that Missouri American鈥檚 replacement efforts will eventually cover around 27,000 houses in the region.
Out of that estimated total, he said the company has already removed about a third of the problematic pipes, and identified roughly another third of the pipes that will require removal but are still in the ground. The current mapping effort aims to locate those remaining service lines that will need to be replaced.
A key part of the process, he said, is for Missouri American to send workers into homes, to visually check on and identify service line material.
鈥淚t tells us the whole story,鈥 said Parrish.
Homeowners also have the option to identify their pipes on their own, guided by information available on the utility鈥檚 website, for instance.
Once identified, the utility will replace lead or galvanized service lines at no direct cost to the customer 鈥 even though the lines are the homeowner鈥檚 property and would ordinarily cost them about $3,000 to $4,000 to switch out, Parrish said.
From existing data 鈥 and just from sheer development trends and the ages of homes 鈥 Missouri American already knows a variety of local hot spots for lead service lines, which are illustrated with an interactive map on the company鈥檚 website.
In 最新杏吧原创 County, for instance, inner-ring suburbs that are generally older 鈥 including University City, Webster Groves and unincorporated places like Lemay 鈥 tend to have some of the highest known concentrations of lead service lines.
In 2021, Missouri American established a goal of purging lead from its water systems by 2030 鈥 a mark that Parrish said goes 鈥渁bove and beyond鈥 a deadline around 2037 that鈥檚 targeted by emerging regulations.
The push to eradicate lead from the water system extends far beyond Missouri American鈥檚 service territory. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is spurring utilities to inventory local service lines, nationwide. For instance, 最新杏吧原创鈥 city-owned water system is doing the same work, inviting customers .
Parrish said those inventories must be reported to state officials by October 16, and that some money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has helped support the work. Meanwhile, state utility regulators allow Missouri American to recover the replacement costs from its customer base.
Missouri American replaced about 3,400 lead service lines around the 最新杏吧原创 area last year, and is on pace to swap out about 4,000 of them this year, Parrish said. That鈥檚 a faster rate of progress than the company had achieved or aimed for back in 2019, for example, when the utility reported to state officials that it was falling short of its target of 3,000 replacements annually.
The utility wants to improve levels of responses from customers, however, reporting that only 2% to 5% of them have answered its recent correspondence about service lines, so far.
鈥溾橶e鈥檙e really looking to see, 鈥楬ow do we increase that?鈥欌 said Parrish. 鈥淐ustomer engagement is probably the most critical part of this.鈥
Despite lead pipes being banned from use in the 1980s the presence of lead in drinking water remains a dangerous threat for many across the country.
