The Kansas City Water department will use new state funding to identify water supply lines made of lead in disadvantaged neighborhoods. They’ll start the work this spring in the Lykins and Columbus Park neighborhoods, before expanding the search.
Kansas City Council approved the $1.8 million grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources in early February, and paired it with a two-neighborhood pilot project to investigate supply lines made out of unknown materials.
Of nearly 180,000 water service lines already reviewed by the city through public records, building permits, and other filings, none were found to be made of lead. Tens of thousands are made of an unknown material or from galvanized steel.
Health authorities and water experts say those could pose a concern to the city and the 650,000 residents it supplies with water.
So far, the Kansas City Water department has identified 24,827 lines made out of unknown material and 22,951 made of galvanized steel.
Galvanized pipes, popular with builders from the 1900s to the 1960s, are essentially steel dipped in a zinc coating to prevent rust and corrosion. They’re designed to last up to 50 years, but the pipes eventually corrode from the inside out. While this on its own poses a minimal health risk to people, it can in some cases warrant replacement, especially if it’s ever been connected to lead supply lines
“Lead particles could have abraded off of an upstream line and potentially become attached to the galvanized line, and then maybe leach out lead,” KC Water’s Facilities Engineering Division manager Blake Anderson said.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s recently-updated Lead and Copper Rule, galvanized pipes require replacement within 10 years if they are currently or have ever been downstream of lead pipes. The new regulation goes into effect in October 2027.
But in Kansas City, the hope is that many of those lines aren’t at risk of lead contamination and won’t need immediate replacement, Anderson said. Costs to replace all the lines in question could exceed $450 million.
KC Water has suggested the cost to replace a single supply line could be somewhere between $12,500 and $20,000. In most cases, that would be split between the city and the property owner, who covers the portion of the pipe running from their house to the city line.
Despite the relatively low immediate risk, Anderson said homeowners should be proactive.
“My general recommendation to anyone who’s looked at the inventory and seen they have galvanized line, I would seriously consider getting service line protection just simply for corrosion replacement costs,” he says.
To help customers find coverage, KC Water and other municipal utilities partner with Service Line Warranties of America.
Because of past efforts to remove lead pipes, Anderson said the department is likely to find only a few lead lines. In 1990, the water department replaced approximately 100 lead lines after a federal ban on new lead water pipes took effect. And, for the most part, local developers have mirrored national trends, using galvanized steel supply lines starting in the early parts of the 20th century.
The ongoing search for lead supply lines is part of a concerted effort to keep already high ratepayer costs down, Andersons said.
A 2010 federal consent decree with the EPA for the multi-decade KC Smart Sewer Program resulted in double-digit rate increases for customers, he said, and KC Water is now trying to keep costs low while keeping residents safe.
That includes an effort to fund and build a second water treatment facility for the city.
“Every day we're providing water that people are drinking and ingesting,” KC Water operations manager Jarrek Lucke told KCUR in December. “We have to be at a level of proactive response for anything that could harm the public.”
