Eric Suesz
Water utilities have spent the last three years preparing for the requirements of the Revised Lead and Copper Rule, and the first deadline has now passed. By October 16, 2024, all US water utilities should have completed an inventory of their pipes (LCRI) that identifies them by material, identifying which pipes or fittings they believe currently are – or could possibly be – made of lead or have lead components.
Going forward, water systems must maintain a comprehensive inventory of lead service lines, create detailed plans for their replacement, and in many cases publicize the inventory details as a map for customers to view online. They also need to adjust their action and trigger levels, setting an action of 15 parts per billion (ppb) and a new “trigger level” of 10 ppb, necessitating additional monitoring and remediation efforts.
Now that water utilities have collected all their baseline data and have a lateral inventory in place, how will they use this data to ensure the removal of all traces of lead from their systems in the most efficient and cost-effective way?
The EPA also wants water utilities to incorporate this data into ongoing infrastructure projects. How will they do that? Many water utilities have spent the last three years directing their water quality team or farming out the work of collecting lead-line data to sub-contractors, but they probably haven’t yet taken the step of incorporating this valuable data into their yearly CIP plans. They absolutely should. This is an excellent opportunity to get a lot of use out of that data.
EPA embraces digital delivery of predictive modeling
To summarize the situation: All lines must be classified and lead lines replaced within 10 years, and there are two ways to classify mystery lines: Physical verification or statistical methods.
If digging up each line to physically verify lead pipes sounds like a lot of work and very expensive, you’d be right. According to the American Water Works Association, the average cost of fully replacing a single lead service line exceeds a whopping $10,000, contributing to an estimated total cost of over $90 billion for replacing the 9.2 million lead lines estimated to exist nationwide. That’s a lot of pipe!
So it is heartening to see that the EPA has allowed statistical methods and predictive modeling to indicate the likelihood of a line being lead or non-lead with a certain degree of confidence, if only for the purpose of inventory and compliance. This will obviously save utilities a lot of money. This also adds some digital flexibility into the equation and shows how water utilities are evolving in their use of software to solve the difficult problems of asset management. It’s simply impossible to estimate it otherwise.
What gives this mandate teeth is that service lines of unknown status must be treated as presumed lead until proven otherwise. This dramatically underscores the importance of dealing with accurate data, but also of making your pipe inventory a “living document” that your teams can update regularly over time. However, you should avoid making it an actual Excel document that everyone shares on the same server. To succeed at large-scale pipe replacement, it is essential to rely on a single source of truth, which means tossing out the idea of relying on single document version control and adopting at the very least a proper database. But, of course, the best option is a tool suited specifically for asset management.
How Info360 Asset customers can use their LCRI data
If you’re not familiar with it, our next-generation Info360 Asset software is often used for evaluating the condition and reliability of water distribution systems, sanitary sewer or stormwater assets, and of course for generating alternative risk and rehabilitation scenarios. It’s also increasingly being used for its VAPAR CCTV machine learning integration.
But you can also use Info360 Asset to help you ‘Get the Lead Out’ by putting all that data in the cloud as a single source of truth so that anyone on your team – or even third-party consultants – can access, update, and collaborate by using a tool that everyone already has at their disposal: a browser that relies on encrypted data.
When determining risk, our Info360 Asset customers can use their LCRI data to rank all the details of their risk analysis in very granular ways to understand both Likelihood and Consequence of Failure. Which lead pipes are connected to water mains? Which ones are near schools and hospitals? You can fine-tune your analysis with other variables, too, like past work history or Social Vulnerability Index data – whatever data makes the most sense for your system.
If you’re an Info360 Asset customer, consider this as well: You can now go even further in your work thanks to a recent product update by linking data from your hydraulic modeling team’s modeling simulation data to incorporate flow and capacity details. This can help you create a truly holistic risk analysis.
Making decisions with Info360 Asset
If you’ve spent the last three years gathering all your LCRI data, now it’s time to use that data to prioritize the actual work of replacing every last lead pipe and fitting. And no pressure, but you’re going to need to do it as efficiently and cost-consciously as possible. You’ll also need to be able to justify your decisions.
This is where the Decision Tree functionality can help by turning your lead pipe risk analysis data into a systematic rehabilitation plan that relies on logic and rules that you construct. These decision trees are a flexible tool for persuading others and defending your proposals. They show your math in a straightforward and reasoned way. Plus, you can easily edit your work and generate lots of alternate proposals.
Here’s a few other tips for using Info360 Asset with your lead-pipe data:
- Take advantage of the Esri integration. For example, if all or some of your lead surveying data came from working with water quality contractors via ArcGIS Online, you can set up a two-way connection that pulls data directly into your Info360 Asset analysis. You can also push it back to ArcGIS Online later, whenever you need to.
- Want to share your analysis? You can use the permissions options to grant your lead contractors inspection-only access and your stakeholders view-only access. Instead of telling them, you can show them exactly how your lead pipe analysis ladders up to your organization’s yearly CIP plans.
- Risk and rehab for lead is another example of where connecting your hydraulic modeling data can help you prioritize critical facilities that might have more lead exposure due to higher flows.
The 10-year home stretch
When will all your lead pipes and fittings be removed? That’s been a tough question for water utility owners and operators to answer for a few decades, but we are finally in the home stretch, with utilities poised to remove all traces of lead in the next 10 years. The clock is ticking.
That doesn’t mean that it needs to take you 10 years:
- Keep working with the data to find additional cost savings. Explore alternate ways to speed up your rehab schedules by experimenting with slotting the work into different yearly CIP projects based on location or to line up with the planning of other teams. If you’re already going to be digging up dirt, replacing lead pipes in that area is your easiest win.
- Can you get a better price on materials? That opens up a whole new set of options for re-calculating your yearly CIP plans.
- If more funding grants open up, can you use all of this data to make the case for more money to speed up your lead pipe rehab? Maybe you can begin your argument for more money with Social Vulnerability Index data; you can easily adjust the weighting of these variables in the software.
Remember the EPA’s call for utilities to incorporate lead-pipe data into ongoing infrastructure planning? This is how you do it, by being data driven and collaborating with your CIP planners around asset management data.
Make the most of this (historic!) data
If collecting all of this lead-pipe data was one of the largest asset management tasks your water utility has performed in the last decade or more: Congratulations! While it may not have been easy to collect, that data is a valuable resource – and perhaps a historic opportunity for your water utility. Make the most of it. Capitalize on this edict from the EPA and make this an inflection point for dramatically improving your asset management practices so that you’re always incorporating new data and using it to its full potential by tying it directly into your ongoing CIP planning.
Thank you, Autodesk customers, for making lead removal a priority. It won’t be easy, but technology can help you not just accomplish this epic task but tackle it in a fiscally responsible way. The cost of replacing every lead pipe and fitting in the good ole U S of A will be significant, but the benefits to society will be even greater.
The future will thank you!