An offer that could be worth a few thousand dollars is awaiting scores of Pittsburgh water customers this year.
Under a consent order with the state, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority will replace at least 2,100 of its lead service connections through December. When the connection ties into a lead service pipe on the customer’s end, PWSA will offer to replace that second pipe segment — the customer side — at no charge to the property owner, administrators said Friday.
Rough estimates price the private-side work up to several thousand dollars per address, although PWSA should have a more precise average by year’s end, spokesman Will Pickering said. Early replacements should target about 475 suspected lead connections over the next couple months, starting first in Mount Washington and Perry North, he said.
Robert Weimar, the interim executive director, urged people who have received replacement notices to tell PWSA quickly whether they would want an authority contractor to handle any private-side work, too.
“We understand some folks don’t want to do it, and that’s their prerogative. We’re not going to force anybody to do this,” Mr. Weimar said. “But by the same token, we see it as a major benefit to the public health of the city. And we would like people to respond and hopefully respond positively.”
All the work falls under PWSA’s $44 million allocation for its lead-line program in 2018. After lead levels in some homes eclipsed a federal threshold, the state Department of Environmental Protection ordered PWSA in 2016 to replace at least 7 percent of its lead service lines each year.
Replacements must continue until lead test results slip below — and stay below — the threshold, which is a nuanced calculation based on at-risk homes. By Dec. 31, PWSA expects it will have replaced nearly 2,700 lead service connections since 2016.
A service connection ties each building’s indoor pipes to a water main beneath the street. PWSA counts about 71,000 of residential connections system-wide, and DEP expects the authority to inventory them all — and identify all the lead ones — by Dec. 31, 2020. The authority estimates about 18,000 contain the hazardous metal, which is tied to developmental problems and other ailments.
To locate the lead lines, PWSA is relying largely on curb-box inspections. The process sends a camera down the bolted metal box in the sidewalk outside a customer’s home, checking the material or materials of the pipes below. Contractor Michael Baker International is due to inspect about 15,000 connections through the process in 2018.
Customers should receive notifications about the results, which also are available through www.pgh2o.com/CBI. This year’s checks are due to begin in the Perry North and Perry South neighborhoods, with schedules available at www.pgh2o.com/press. Curb-box inspections last year turned up more than 800 lead service lines.
If customers with private-side lead connections aren’t included in PWSA’s work schedule for 2018, they can ask the authority to prioritize the property for line work. As long as the customers’ income is less than 250 percent of the federal poverty level, PWSA would cover their private-side replacement when it removes the public lead line, Mr. Pickering said.
But he said there is only $1.8 million available for that assistance.
For homes with income above that level, he said, PWSA would ask the customer to pay for the private-side replacement if the work is completed this year. He emphasized that obligation would be in effect only if the property doesn’t make the authority’s own work lists for 2018. Affected property owners will be alerted as those lists are finalized.
State lawmakers last year passed a measure enabling PWSA to help cover replacements of customer-owned service lines under certain circumstances. The authority board has yet to decide the scope of future assistance for private-side line work.
“We don’t have enough data right now to determine what would be a fair arrangement, so the idea was that it’d be full cost for this year” for private-side work, Mr. Pickering said,
A planned chemical additive for the water, orthophosphate, is expected to temper lead levels and effectively let PWSA replace lead lines at a slower pace. PWSA has yet to secure state clearance to introduce the treatment.
Adam Smeltz: 412-263-2625, asmeltz@post-gazette.com, @asmeltz.
First Published: March 23, 2018, 10:36 p.m.
