City garnering good response on line survey

 Weiser’s water department officials are reporting a high response to a survey included with city customers’ September bills.

 Based on upgrades to the 1991 federal EPA Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), every community water system in cities across the U.S. is currently gathering similar information from water customers in a national effort to control lead and copper in drinking water. 

 The rule, which was finalized earlier this month, requires drinking water systems across the country to identify and replace lead pipes within 10 years.

 At this point, the survey is simply asking customers to identify the material makeup of service lines through which city water flows into their homes. According to the water department, drinking water is presently provided to approximately 5,630 people through 2,401 service connections.

 “We have to know what the service line from the main to the meter, and the meter to the house for every single water meter in town,” Water Department Superintendent Bill Taylor told the Weiser City Council during the Tuesday, Oct. 15, monthly meeting. “We just want to give you a heads up in case you get questions from the public.”

 “We’ve got a couple of issues in Weiser, the good and bad,” the department’s lead operator Mike Shepherd said. “One, we have a lot of infrastructure that’s over 100 years old, so that does present the possibility that somewhere in the last century there could be lead (lines). In the 25-plus years Bill has been with the water department and the 18 I’ve been with it, we’ve never found any lead service lines.”

 Shepherd said Weiser’s water isn’t prone to having issues with lead.

 “But, we still have to do this,” he said. “The good news is that we sent out a survey, which many of you probably saw with your bill, and we’ve had a phenomenal response from the public on that. However, unless we know what’s on both sides, our side, as well as the customer’s side, we have to mark it as unknown.”

 Shepherd said they have received hundreds of the surveys back.

 “Technically, we have 1,285 people/services we have to notify,” Shepherd added. “Now, that sounds a lot worse than it is. Out of that 1,285, only 733 are ones we actually don’t know. And, 533 of those, we know what’s on the city side and we’ve managed to get the customer’s side down to 22 and that’s a small number because we were able to take the surveys and were able to take those numbers and knock them off of the 1,126 that we do know. 

 “So, that helped us a lot,” he said. We’re going to be working on this for probably the next decade, at least. Every year we’re going to have to send this letter out, to the people we have not resolved this with. So, we don’t expect it to take that long, but it could.  And there’s some monitoring that we’re going to have to do as per this.”

 Taylor said the water department has been testing drinking water for lead and copper since the rule was implemented in 1991.

 “We have not had any detectable amounts with any of our sampling, so we don’t believe it’s an issue. It’s just something we have to address,” Taylor said.

 “And because of the federal rule, those 20 samples every three years turn into 80 samples every year for the next three years,” Shepherd added. “We did have to bump up some numbers in our budget to account for this. 

 These samples are $40 apiece, and instead of doing them once every three years, we have to do them twice a year now, until we get to a point where we can document, once again, that we don’t have a problem.”

 He said the testing records going back to 1991 have never shown any exceedings in lead or copper levels. 

 “Occasionally, there’ll be a little detected here and there, but that’s because of lead solder in a pipe, or an antique fixture, but nothing of any consequence we’ve ever seen,” Shepherd said.

 Councilor Larry Hogg asked if the city could save some money if customers comply with the department’s request, as well as time and effort on the part of the department’s staff.

 “Immensely,” Shepherd answered. “This is stuff we’re going to have to do. We’re trying to get as much of it done via paperwork, and community input as possible, but then we’re going to have to resort to digging. Hopefully we don’t have to do that for a couple of years, but if we don’t get definitive answers on this, that will be the next step.”

 Hogg said he could see that completing and returning the survey is one way he, as a citizen, can help keep the price of water as low as possible. 

 “This isn’t like an onerous deal,” Hogg said. “It’s not like it’s going to take me three weeks to fill out the form you want.”

 “We’ll even put that on the website and in the letter,” Shepherd smiled. “If you just want to shoot us an email with your name, address, and what the line is, that’s all we need. That way we can just document it.  Once we send these out we do have to certify with the state we have sent them, but that’s just another form we have to send to our compliance officer.”