The city does not know exactly how many lead service lines still connect its water mains to its houses. It knows the number is somewhere between eleven and eighteen thousand, a range wide enough to represent a genuine engineering failure: nobody kept a complete map of what went into the ground before 1955, when lead pipe was still the standard material for the short run between a street main and a house’s meter.
That uncertainty is the entire premise of the current replacement program, now in its fourth year of a planned ten. Before a crew can dig up a lead line, someone has to confirm it is lead, which in practice means one of three things: a paper record from a building permit older than most of the people reading it, a physical dig-and-inspect at the curb, or, increasingly, a prediction model built from the age and location of the house.
Why the count keeps changing
The utility’s service line inventory, submitted to state regulators last year as required under updated federal rules, initially listed 14,200 confirmed or suspected lead lines. A subsequent round of curb inspections reclassified nearly 900 of those as galvanized steel, a different material with different, though still real, health considerations. Another 1,100 previously listed as unknown were confirmed lead after inspection. The net number has moved, but not by much, and utility staff say that is the expected pattern, not a sign of a program in trouble.
“People want a fixed number because a fixed number feels honest,” said Dana Whitfield, the program’s inventory lead. “What’s honest is telling you the number is a moving estimate until every line in the ground has actually been looked at, and that’s years away.”
The replacement work itself, once a line is confirmed, is comparatively fast: a full-line swap, from main to house, typically takes a crew a single day, and the household is without water for a few hours during the connection. The bottleneck is upstream of the dig. Getting resident consent for the work inside a property line, coordinating with homeowners who are renters and can’t authorize entry, and scheduling around a street’s other utility work, together add weeks to months onto individual jobs that would otherwise take a day.
What the schedule actually depends on
Three things determine whether the program hits its ten-year target:
- Funding continuity. The program draws on a mix of state revolving loan funds and a rate surcharge on residential bills; a gap in either has, in the past two years, meant idle crews.
- Inventory accuracy. Crews dispatched to a confirmed lead address that turns out to be galvanized or copper lose a full day, since the excavation still has to happen to verify material even when the prediction is wrong.
- Resident response time. Consent forms sent by mail have a response rate the utility puts at under forty percent within the first sixty days, which is the single largest source of schedule slip according to internal reporting reviewed for this piece.
Whitfield’s team has started sending inspectors door to door in neighborhoods with low mail response, a slower but more reliable method that a state audit last year recommended expanding. The utility says it can’t yet say whether door-to-door outreach, at current staffing, is compatible with keeping the overall ten-year deadline. A revised timeline, extending the program by two to three years, is expected to go before the city council this winter.
For residents, the practical guidance from the utility hasn’t changed regardless of where their address sits on the list: run the cold tap for several minutes before drinking if the water has sat in the pipe overnight, and use a filter certified to remove lead if a service line’s material is still listed as unknown. The health department has not identified elevated blood lead levels tied specifically to the municipal water system, but officials are careful to note that absence of detected harm is not the same as an all-clear on a pipe that hasn’t yet been dug up and looked at.