Lead water pipes in your home? Lehigh County Authority is developing a plan to replace them in Allentown

The Lehigh County Authority will spend millions in state-provided funds to remove 150 lead service lines in Allentown, with more work planned for the future.

The LCA recently was awarded a $3.4 million grant and $1.6 million in low-interest loans from the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority to fund a pilot project to remove lead service lines in Allentown, including some pipes inside homes. Work is expected to start this year.

Liesel Gross, CEO of the Lehigh County Authority, said the ultimate goal is to eventually replace all lead pipes in service lines across Allentown. This first round of replacement work will cost homeowners nothing.

“We’re starting in the downtown area of Allentown where we know we have some customers that can’t afford to do lead service line replacement,” Gross said.

While there are thousands of service lines in the city with lead piping, Gross said lead-contaminated water is not common in Lehigh County. The replacement work instead is a proactive action ahead of expected changes to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s lead and copper rule.

Gross said the rule was focused on water sampling and corrosion control. But revisions finalized in 2021 will require all utilities to prepare an inventory of where they have lead service lines, and then change their water testing protocols to make sure they’re testing water from homes that have those service lines. She said the authority anticipates the EPA will require the replacement of lead pipes in public and private service lines, so they are trying to get ahead of that.

Allentown isn’t the only municipality in the Lehigh Valley with lead pipes that LCA serves, but the city has the oldest and largest water system in Lehigh County, which is why Gross said it is a priority.

Work on Allentown’s water system began in the 1820s. Even the newest lead lines in Allentown are quite old and would have been placed before the city passed an ordinance in the 1950s banning the use of new lead pipes in the city’s water lines, Gross said.

Gross said despite the age of these pipes, the LCA has good records of where most lead lines are. There are at least 4,700 public lead service lines and 7,700 lead lines on the private side, all of which LCA plans to replace. She added these lead service lines are throughout the city.

It’s not just lead pipes either that need to be replaced. Galvanized steel pipes are also on the list, as lead has a tendency to attach to galvanized metal and if enough lead attaches itself, it can lead to heightened levels of lead in drinking water. All other pipes in the city are copper or PVC, which do not need to be replaced, Gross said. But she added there are about 9,000 service lines where the LCA doesn’t know what material is used.

To solve this records issue, LCA is doing a customer survey and the authority has been trying to get the word out in whatever way it can. The survey and information on how to complete it can be found on LCA’s website. The LCA is also doing its own leg work to take inventory of these mystery lines.

“When we’re in homes doing a water meter replacement or dealing with some other kind of customer service issue, we’ll take an inventory record while we’re there. Or if we’re working on a water main replacement project and we have the street dug open we’ll do inventory while we’re there. There are lots of different ways to get that information. It just takes a little time,” Gross said.

She added the authority is also looking for where funding will come from to remove the thousands of other lines that will still exist once the project is complete. She said the replacement process could take years, possibly decades to complete.

“We’re going to need to figure out where the funding comes from to do the private side. It will be a requirement though of EPA to replace both sides, EPA just doesn’t tell you where the money is going to come from,” Gross said.

Lead is a heavy metal and potent neurotoxic substance, that is especially harmful to young children. But due to positive qualities such as flexibility, malleability and corrosion resistance, lead has been used in water systems going back thousands of years. The English words “plumber” and “plumbing” come from “plumbum,” the Latin word for lead and tin.

The use of lead pipes for new drinking water service systems was outlawed in 1986, but the EPA estimates there are about 9.2 million lead service lines remaining in the U.S. There are about 688,000 lead service lines across Pennsylvania, the fourth highest of any state in the country, according to the EPA.

In the Lehigh Valley and the rest of the U.S., the main cause of lead poisoning comes from ingesting lead dust from old paint, not drinking water. That said, lead in drinking water is a national concern.

In 2017, Butler Area School District in western Pennsylvania was sued by parents after it was revealed students may have been drinking school water with elevated levels of lead and copper for months. More recently, a 2022 study of public data found that most Philadelphia School District schools tested positive for elevated levels of lead in school water systems.

The most high-profile case of Americans drinking lead-tainted drinking water in recent memory was in Flint, Michigan, where lead leached from old pipes, exposing nearly every city resident, almost 100,000 people, to the neurotoxic metal in the mid-2010s.

Unlike the water of the Flint River, the water flowing through service lines in Lehigh County is not very acidic, Gross said. Instead, the Lehigh Valley’s water is hard, meaning there is a lot of dissolved calcium and magnesium. These two metals leave the lightish-colored deposits many Lehigh Valley residents are familiar with. Calcium and magnesium deposits also collect on the insides of pipes, which further reduces the chances of lead leaching or corroding off lead pipes.

But corrosion of lead pipes can still occur, so Allentown residents who have lead service or galvanized steel lines in their homes should be careful and take some steps to protect themselves.

Gross said rinsing out taps by running cold water is one way to ensure that lead isn’t getting into water used for drinking or cooking. Doing this properly involves letting cold water run for three to five minutes any time water has been sitting for more than six hours. A recommended time to do this rinsing is first thing in the morning.

Another protective step is regularly cleaning aerators, the detachable device at the tip of some faucets. For homes with lead pipes, LCA recommends cleaning aerators once a month with a brush and white vinegar and replacing aerators every year.