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Cedar Rapids begins identifying lead pipes.CEDAR RAPIDS — The city of Cedar Rapids started systematically reviewing water service lines this past week to identify those made of lead or galvanized iron.Workers with Dave Schmitt Construction are going house-to-house in select neighborhoods to pothole, or expose and identify, water lines.To expose the pipes, workers blast a home’s water main with a pressurized hose and suck up the resulting sludge with a large vacuum.Then, they dangle a magnet attached to a rope into the hole.Water pipes are made of lead, galvanized steel or copper.If the magnet sticks to a pipe, it’s galvanized steel.If it doesn’t stick and the pipe is an orange or bronze color, it’s copper.But if the magnet doesn’t stick and the pipe is gray, it’s made of lead and will need to be replaced.The Gazette spoke with Roy Hesemann, the city’s utilities director, to learn more about what the project entails, how long it will last and how residents will know if they have a lead pipe.Q: Why is the city potholing in neighborhoods around town?A: There’s 55,000 service lines within Cedar Rapids that serve our customers, and of that 55,000, there’s about 8,500 that we don’t know the material on, we just couldn’t find records for.That’s what this effort is about.Q: What’s the procedure for investigating all of these unidentified water lines?A: We want to do it not as a piecemeal project, but as an organized neighborhood-type project.In Cedar Rapids, there’s 11 census tracts that qualify as lower income, classified as disadvantaged, so that’s where our focus is going to be initially, They vary in size from 130 potential service lines up to 730 on the biggest one, so what we did to try to prioritize those was look at the density of the service lines, like this area is dense with potential lead, potential galvanized (steel) that requires replacement.Q: Why would galvanized iron pipes need to be replaced?A: Not only are we looking at lead service lines, but also galvanized, or downstream of lead at one point, because those have been shown to be susceptible to lead risk as well.Typically, what you’ll see is lead on the city side, and then galvanized downstream of that.The galvanized that is or was downstream of lead is just as important to get those pipes out of the ground to limit the risk of lead exposure.Q: What happens when workers identify a lead pipe at someone’s home?A: If we identify a lead line, we’ll distribute a pitcher filter right away, and that’s the indication.That’s when they know that they have a lead service line.[Potholing is] considered a disturbance.It increases the potential for lead exposure.So, just out of caution, we distribute the filters just to make sure customers aren’t susceptible to potential lead exposure.It’s recommended that you continue to use the filter for six months.These Brita filters come with the six-month filter.Q: Is it dangerous to use water in a Cedar Rapids home that has a lead water line?A: We’ve been treating for lead lines for decades now, and what that involves is, we add a chemical called zinc orthophosphate at the water plants.It’s a food-grade chemical, and it’s very small doses, but what that chemical does is provides a protective barrier between the lead and the water, so it inhibits the leaching of that lead into the water.Our water is considered safe.We meet the Safe Drinking Water Act requirements.… These pitcher filters are just another precautionary manner to reduce risk.Q: Is what’s happening in Cedar Rapids comparable to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan?A: No, it’s not at all like that.Their story is different because they had a change in source water supply and … they weren’t doing the proper things to make sure their water was treated properly.That’s not the case here.The risk is extremely low.Q: Where does the money for this project come from?Will residents have to pay to replace their own pipes?A: The funding comes through what’s called the State Revolving Fund Loan Program, which is administered by the Iowa DNR, along with the Iowa Finance Authority.… We submitted an application for that funding for this project.The SRF is actually a loan, so that’s something we have to pay back.This Phase 1 project we estimate is about $6 million, and that was our ask for the first round of funding for this program.Up to 49% of that SRF funding is in the form of a forgivable loan.That’s only for disadvantaged areas within the city.In Cedar Rapids there’s 11 census tracts that qualify as lower income, classified as disadvantaged, so that’s where our focus is going to be initially, and the idea is to use that forgivable portion of the loan to apply to the homeowner side.So the intent is to replace their side of the service line at no cost to the property.In Cedar Rapids we have split ownership of the service lines.With the split ownership, we can’t force replacement on the property owner side, so we’re really encouraging cooperation and participation.Let’s say property owner opts out — there’s nothing we can do about it at this point.We have to make repeated efforts to encourage them to participate, and when ownership changes, we have to start over.The other piece of this puzzle is … we’re not allowed to do partial replacements except when we’re replacing the water main.Because a partial replacement can cause a disturbance, can increase the risk of lead exposure.Q: If some of the loan is non-forgivable, how is the city going to pay it back?A: It’d be through water rates, revenue from our water rates.Q: What’s the timeline for identifying and replacing the city’s lead water lines?A: The [EPA] requirement is that every water utility has to know what every service line is in their system.So we started going through that effort five years ago, to start pulling together all our records and documenting what we knew and what we didn’t know.By the end of 2037 we have to have identified all of the service lines, whether they’re lead, galvanized, copper.We intend to be done sooner than that, but it’s a pretty big effort.We also have to be able to fit it into the city’s budget, our capital improvement program.So we have to plan ahead, budget, and then implement the projects.The replacement part of that we expect to take two to three years in [the first project area] alone.It’s a big effort.