(7/13) What was quickly becoming a festering issue for the town of Woodsboro – developing a path forward to address the State mandate to conduct an assessment of all the homes in the town to determine which ones may be connected to the town’s water system by lead pipes – was resolved with little fanfare and little expense, thanks to the town staff jumping onto a recommendation provided by the State’s Office of Environmental Management.
The recommendation was an outgrowth of a meeting between Burgess Heath Barnes, the town staff, and representatives from the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
Barnes said that he turned to the MDE to solicit their advice on how best to accomplish the required inventory of piping to the town’s 460+ homes. If the town followed the methods being unutilized in other local towns, which involved either physically going into homes to check the piping in the house or requesting homeowners to take photos of their water pipes and send them to the town staff for their evaluation, would prove not only time consuming but extremely expensive.
Barnes said that the state was requiring the town to submit over 42 different data points for each of the town’s 460 connections to the water system. "Either way," Barnes said, "this was going to take up a lot of the town staff’s time, not to mention burn up a lot of money and inconvenience a lot of homeowners."
In response to the concerns raised by the staff, MDE recommended a contractor they had confidence in and who developed a reputation for effectively and systemically conducting the inventory. Best of all, "the price was too low to pass up," Barnes said.
"We had been bracing ourselves for a high five figure, if not six figure cost, so when the contractor came in with a cost of $9,500, I immediately got all the Town Council on the phone and got their approval to sign a contract."
The contractor will use a recent EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) approved process that passes a probe down the water connection pipe from its connection to the town water system at the "shut off valve" to the water meter inside the house that will measure the electrical resistance in the water line using a low resistance ohmmeter. The detector is sensitive enough to distinguish between a lead pipe and a copper pipe.
The benefits of using this process, which no other municipality in Frederick County is using, is that no action is required by homeowners, nor is entry required into homes. In addition, no excavation of exterior piping is necessary and there will be no interruption of water supply to the home.
Barnes said that the work on evaluating all the water connections will be completed and the required report documenting the type of pipes used by every property to connect to the town’s water system will be submitted prior to the October 16th deadline. "What happens after that is anyone guess," Barnes said.
"While lead pipes inside a home (after the water meter) is the homeowner’s responsibility, the responsibility of replacement of lead pipes within a connection to the town’s water system has yet to be determined. All we have been told is that if the lead pipe is under 23 in length, more than likely, nothing will have to be done, but if it is over 24 inches …"
Barnes clarified that the State mandate is limited to only inspecting the pipes up to the water meter: "We are not required to inspect all the piping in the house," he said.
Because Maryland banned the use of lead water pipes in 1972, the MDE Lead Pipe Inventory criteria calls for Towns to prioritize the inspection of water pipe connections for homes built before 1972. However, the inventory still requires a certification for all homes, which will require the Town to document that homes built after 1972 were built to the updated code.
Rittelmeyer, who raised the alert on the issue at the March Town Council meeting, said "fortunately, most of the homes in Woodsboro are in developments that were built after 1972 and long after the State had banned the use of lead water pipes; however, almost all of the homes on Main Street, 2nd Street, and Creagerstown Road – the old town portion of the town - were built long before the new codes went into effect, and we have no idea what types of pipes are in use to connect those homes to our water system."
Up until 1952, when the Town built the present (lead free) water distribution system, each house and building in the town was on its own well and septic system. A majority of these homes used lead water pipes to connect the wells to the homes due to their ability to withstand corrosion. When the Town installed its water system, it simply connected to the existing pipes carrying water into the houses, whether they were lead or copper.
Once the inspection process gets underway, the Town must notify the homeowner if they discover their connection to the town’s water system is through lead pipes, with a recommendation to replace the pipes. Replacement, however, will be at the expense of the homeowner.
"Every year hereafter, we must notify the owners of homes with lead pipes, as well as the State. How long that will go on before the State takes actions to require the removal of the pipes and deem who will have to pay for it is anyone’s guess," Barnes said.
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