Most of the lead water lines served by the Cleveland Division of Water are connected to homes and businesses in the city or its inner-ring suburbs.Cleveland Water

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Cities across the country are looking to replace their lead water lines, but part of the challenge is figuring out where they are.

The only way to identify many lead water lines, which are generally buried several feet in the ground, is to excavate them and do a visual check.

But that costs money. In Cleveland, it’s an estimated $700 per connection, according to Alex Margevicius, commissioner of the Cleveland Division of Water. And to do that for every water line used by the city’s water department and suspected of being lead would cost tens of millions of dollars.

That’s a big reason why the Cleveland Division of Water and several other utilities in Ohio are teaming up with the nonprofit Cleveland Water Alliance to spur the development of technology that could identify lead lines without breaking ground.

The alliance, which promotes research and innovation related to water, has issued a challenge to innovators to come up with a solution and Cleveland’s water department has constructed a pipe farm on city property in Parma Heights that will serve as a test bed for research.

The mini-distribution system has a water main with several connecting pipes made of copper, galvanized steel and lead, said Ebie Holst, director of clusters and innovation at the alliance. The pipes are then covered with a variety of materials such as dirt, gravel and concrete to replicate real-life conditions.

The hope is that qualifying innovators will test their technology at the pipe farm to see if it can accurately detect one line from another.

The Cleveland Division of Water, which is the 10th largest water department in the country, and five other utilities - investor-owned Aqua Ohio and municipal water departments from Cincinnati, Akron, Conneaut and Sandusky – are expected to select promising technologies that could then qualify for cash prizes from the Cleveland Water Alliance.

Lead was once a popular material used to construct water lines, Margevicius said, because it’s malleable and doesn’t corrode easily, but now ridding the country of lead water lines has become a priority as more has been learned about how exposure to lead can be harmful to adults, children and fetuses.

The federal bipartisan infrastructure law allocates $15 billion to help identify and replace lead service lines, and while replacing the lines has yet to be mandated, it’s believed that could happen fairly soon, Margevicius said.

It has been estimated that there are 6 million to 10 million lead water lines in the country serving between 15 to 22 million people, said Jonathan Cuppett, research program manager with the Water Research Foundation. And at an estimated replacement cost of $4,500 per line, that comes to more than $45 billion.

Cleveland water department serves about 440,000 connections in and around Cuyahoga County and at least 260,000 of those lines are believed to be made from something other than lead because of either their size – lead would have made the lines too heavy – or they were put in place after 1954, which is when records indicate lead lines were no longer installed by Cleveland.

That leaves a possible 180,000 connections, most of them residential, that are potentially made of lead, although the Cleveland Division of Water estimates maybe 60,000 of those lines have already been replaced with something other than lead.

But without the ability to know the difference, eyeballing is the only way to know for sure.

“We have to treat all 180,000 as possibly lead unless we can prove otherwise,” Margevicius said, which means if all were excavated at $700 each, the cost for that process alone would exceed $125 million.

Most of the lead lines used by the Cleveland water department are in Cleveland and the inner-ring suburbs. Also, most of the lead is likely to be found in the city-owned portion of the line, which extends from beneath the road to the curb-stop where it then connects to the customer’s portion of the line.

The utility has significantly mitigated any risk by treating its water with orthophosphate, a chemical that coats the inside of pipes and plumbing and prevents lead from leaching into the water. But the goal remains to eliminate all risk by removing the pipes altogether.

A pipe farm designed to test for the presence of underground lead water lines sits beneath this patch of ground owned by the Cleveland Division of Water in Parma Heights.Cleveland Division of Water

The Cleveland Water Alliance kicked off its innovation challenge last year but ran into logistical problems related to COVID-19 that prevented any testing from being done, Holst said. Also, some of the innovators interested in participating had only conceptual ideas and no prototypes ready to test

The alliance reassessed its challenge this year and now hopes to help innovators take their ideas from concept to actual test-ready technology, perhaps by offering financial grants, while also casting a wider net to see who else might want to enter the competition, Holst said.

The utilities working with the alliance set certain parameters that must be incorporated into the technology. For example, it can’t require entry into somebody’s home or cause the disturbance of the lead in the pipes.

The Water Research Foundation, which is supported by investor-owned and municipal water departments around the country, is funding a similar research project, Cuppett said, and will use the Cleveland pipe farm as its proving ground as well as homes in some of the communities it’s collaborating with.

Water line connections are buried several feet below the ground. To know if they are made of lead often means excavating the lines and doing a visual check.Cleveland Division of Water

One of the technologies that could result in a solution uses acoustics. They are already used to detect leaks, Holst said, and one of the companies that has shown interest believes that it would work to detect lead pipes under the assumption “that each type of metal will have a different sound.”

Another possible technology would record stress waves by placing a sensor in the ground and tapping on the water line at the meter or at the curb stop, which is where the city owned portion of a water line connects to the customer’s portion of the line, Cuppett said.

The Water Research Foundation has already looked into using “electrical resistance” technology but found it unsuitable. The idea was to identify line materials by how much they resist an electric current passing through them.

“It showed promise when we did it in the lab as well as in the field,” Cuppett said, but ultimately it proved problematic because of challenges with making a good connection.

By all accounts, finding a solution that prevents the need to excavate water lines would be a major breakthrough, a “game changer” as Margevicius said, but he is also aware of the challenge that it entails.

“This is not an easy problem to solve otherwise somebody would have solved it,” Margevicius said.

Most water lines are made of lead, copper or galvanized steel.Cleveland Division of Water

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