After examining around 50,000 water service lines, Columbia city officials say they didn’t find lead in the ones they checked, but they couldn’t access about 3,000 of them.
Water service lines connect buildings to the city’s water. Federal regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency require water utilities to report what their service lines are made of by Wednesday, Oct. 16.
The EPA says in children, lead exposure can cause “delays in physical or mental development” and in adults it can cause kidney problems and high blood pressure. The EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level Goal for lead is zero, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say lead pipes and plumbing can increase risk of exposure.
Columbia began the process in the spring of 2023 and submitted its report about a month early. City staff tackled the task, at first.
“It appeared to us pretty quickly in that effort that we weren't going to get it done in the time we wanted to with city staff,” Assistant Director of Utilities Steve Hunt said. “So, we hired a local engineering firm to provide us some additional manpower to get that done.”
The city paid about $240,000 to local firm Crockett Engineering for the job, Hunt said.
The results only include water service lines, which connect buildings to the city’s water. Other internal plumbing is the property owner’s responsibility.
"That's not part of the scope of this program at this time," said City of Columbia Utilities spokesperson Matt Nestor. "It may be something coming down the line from the EPA, but at this point in time, we're just talking about from the water meter to the house."
According to the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Missouri’s lead ban became effective in 1989, but plumbing installed before that may contain lead.
Hunt said he wasn’t surprised at the results of the inventory because many buildings in the city are new and for decades, they’d been replacing lead service lines as they’d find them.
“We knew that we had identified and replaced what we thought was most, if not all, the lead service lines.”
The city used a variety of ways to assess service line materials, including querying existing inventories and historical records. But even after contracting with Crockett Engineering, they couldn’t assess them all.
“We have several multi-family units where the meters are in the building,” Hunt said. “It's hard to determine some meters, they're kind of deep, or they were full of full debris, and we just couldn't get them cleaned out well enough to easily see the material.”
The city has reached out to those customers and is asking them to fill out a survey about their service line, which can also be found online. If someone wants to check if they were one of the 3,000, they can call the Utilities Department, Hunt said.
Earlier this month, the EPA announced a new rule requiring water systems to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years. The agency also announced that more than $40.5 million in drinking water infrastructure funding is available for Missouri. Last year, the agency estimated Missouri had more than 200,000 lead service lines.
