In general, drinking water doesn’t contain any lead as it leaves the treatment plant. But corrosive water passing through a lead pipe can pick up lead contamination. Lead water mains have been eradicated in the U.S. It became illegal to use lead in new plumbing in 1986, but some older lead service lines are still running between water mains and buildings.
In 2021, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated its 1991 Lead and Copper Rule, requiring water utilities to take stock of their service lines to root out the lead.
As of Oct. 16, water systems are federally required to make the results of their service line lead search publicly available.
In Oklahoma City, they’re posted as an interactive map, with little blue check marks for lead-free lines and red exclamation points for lead ones. Gray ellipses mark service lines that haven’t been assessed yet.
Each building has two symbols. One is for the public service line, which runs from the water main to the meter. That segment is the utility’s responsibility. The second symbol is for the private service line, which is the building owner’s responsibility. It runs between the meter and the building plumbing.
Leigh Ann Kitsmiler is the regulatory compliance manager for the OKC Utilities Department. She said the city has been scouring records and digging holes to figure out what people’s lines are made of. So far, the utilities department hasn’t found much lead in the city’s quarter-million service lines.
“We've only found 173 lead ones on our side, which is 0.07% of our total lines,” Kitsmiller said. “We've found zero so far on the customer side.”
But the customer side has a lot of those gray ellipses. Kitsmiller encouraged residents to submit any data they have using the city’s self-reporting tool.
“Maybe you bought the house 20 years ago, and when you moved in, you had to replace the pipes yourself,” she said. “Or maybe you have historical records of maybe your dad replacing it, so maybe a home you lived in for a long amount of time.”
Lead lines are most common in buildings built before 1945. But even then, if a lead line has sprung a leak or required any other work, it’s likely been replaced.
“They could have already been replaced by Oklahoma City because they've replaced lead service lines for years and years before this rule even came into effect,” Kitsmiller said. “But there's a big chance that any home that was built before 1945 could potentially have lead as their service line.”
OKC’s results are available online, as are those for water supplies that serve more than 50,000 people. But smaller communities must have the info available too, even if it’s not online.
“It has to be posted somewhere,” Kitsmiller said. “The best thing to do is just to call their water department and see what they have.”
Kitsmiller encouraged OKC utilities customers to visit the city’s page for frequently asked questions.
Under EPA regulations, water systems must develop a plan to replace lead public service lines and publish it by 2027. Last week, the Biden-Harris administration announced $36 million in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funds for lead line inventories and replacement projects in Oklahoma.
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