SOUTHWICK — Over the past year, the town’s Department of Public Works, with the help of outside contractors, has been tracking down what material was used for the water lines going into every home connected to the public water system to determine if lead was used, and there is still work to do.
“There are a lot of unknowns,” Public Works Director Randy Brown said on Oct. 9 about the approximately 1,600 homes in town where it’s not been absolutely ruled out that lead-based lines exist.
“And if it’s unknown, according to the state, it’s assumed to be lead,” Brown said about those 1,600 homes while adding each will be notified in their next water bill about the unknown status of their lines.
Last year, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, following guidelines established by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, issued regulations requiring all municipal water systems with fewer than 10,000 connections to gather information about lead service lines and make it available to the public in a digital format.
To accomplish the inventory, the DEP awarded the town a grant of $216,300 from the state’s Clean Water Trust Board of Trustees.
However, because it’s practically impossible to visually inspect the material used for water lines in those 1,600 homes, the state is allowing towns to create a computer model using the information it already knows about the material used in water services to homes in various areas throughout town.
Extrapolating from those data, the computer model will determine with 95% certainty how many homes might have lead-based water lines, Brown said. But the computer model needs more data to reach that certainty, Brown said.
To get the additional information, Brown said the contractors conducting the inventory need to visually inspect water-service lines in 180 residences.
“We have to put eyeballs on those 180 services,” Brown said during a meeting of the Select Board when requesting the board extend the contract for completing the inventory beyond the Oct. 16 deadline. The board supported his request.
Brown said there are two ways to inspect a water service line: A contractor performing a visual check of the line as it enters a home’s basement, or a vacuum excavation outside the home where the line comes in from the street. Vacuum excavation is a digging method using a vacuum to remove soil from a small-diameter hole to inspect the line.
When the state awarded the town the grant in July 2023, Brown said he wasn’t aware of any lead water lines in town, and there hadn’t been any found, but during the inventory, DPW contractors have discovered 25 lines that used galvanized iron.
Older galvanized iron lines are made using zinc, which has a small percentage of lead content that can leach into water over time.
Just this month, Brown said during the ongoing Bungalow Street renovation project that a brass water-service line was discovered. Lead is added to brass to make it easier to machine.
While homeowners are responsible for replacing their water service lines, Brown said there are state grants available for homeowners to help cover part or all of the expense.
The EPA this month issued final rules giving municipal water systems throughout the country 10 years to identify and replace lead lines.
To fund the effort, the federal agency announced on Oct. 9 that the state had been awarded $53 million in grant using money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to also address PFAS and other contaminants in municipal water systems across the state, according to officials in the governor’s office.
