I'm John Torek. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at a time. Today, Waterdale, One of the drinking water industry's leading experts on biofiltration. We'll talk with Chance about the EPA's new revisions to the lead and copper rule and what that means to everyone from homeowners to schools to local water utilities.
My great grandmother, Ruby McNair, was the first female mayor of a little town called Archer, Florida from 1960 to 1964. It was the only time she'd ever run for office, and she was 60 years old when she did. That's Chance Lauderdale, drinking water director at HDR. As soon as she won that week, she actually got on a train and went to DC to begin lobbying the Florida senators for some funds with the explicit intent to
build a water system for the community. And, she got a million dollar grant and used that to develop some wells and build a water tower. And that was completed, I think, in, like, 1963. It still still stands there today. As a child growing up in the Florida Panhandle, Chance already felt a calling to a career that would follow in his great grandmother's footsteps.
Honestly, as like a eight year old kid, I would have to walk up and down the beach and pick up all the trash that, like, washed ashore and, you know, being annoyed at that, it kinda sunk in as well. You know, honestly, like most of my generation, I'd probably lived and breathed doctor Seuss. That said, The Lorax was one that stood above a lot of the books that
I really love. It's like a kid sized serving of good stewardship and resource management, and it, also is a really explicit call to action for environmentalism and conservation. I remember that there was a poignant line at the end of it, and it's unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Chance took those words to heart, pursuing a bachelor's degree, master's, and doctorate, all in environmental engineering,
from the University of Florida. My dissertation was really trying to open a black box of an emerging treatment technology in the drinking water market, and that's biological
filtration. And, certainly, this is a treatment technology that existed before my PhD, but my PhD was one of several parallel research efforts that were going on in the industry at the time that really sought to open that up and develop guidance that's helped inform utilities across the country and in some parts of Europe and and other parts of the world. Chance further explained the difference between traditional drinking water treatment and biofiltration.
When we traditionally look at filtration and a water treatment process, it is what it sounds like. There are suspended particles, colloids, pathogens that are present in our water that go through a filtration process where they're separated out through various physical chemical processes. For example, a chemical such as chlorine is often added to the water to remove viruses, bacteria, and other
pathogens that might cause illness. While biofiltration sounds more like a solution which had its seeds planted in the mind of a child reading The Lorax. You're leveraging mother nature. Right? So there's inherent efficiencies. These contaminants are present in environmental bodies. They're present in our source waters and in our soils. And mother nature has already figured out a way through environmental cycling, through microbial cycling to manage a lot of these contaminants to keep them from
accumulating. In other words, using bacteria strategically to naturally consume contaminants in the water. What the biological front does on that is it actually leverages biology and biological metabolism to also take out dissolved compounds
that are present in the water. You know, instead of just particles, we can also remove contaminants like pharmaceuticals, disinfection byproducts, or their precursors, and the biological process is sustainable in that you're not continually adding chemicals or tons of energy into the process. And then it also doesn't really produce a concentrated waste stream. Chance estimated that well over 30,000,000,000 gallons of water are now being treated using some form of biofiltration.
Over 1,000,000,000 of which are using strategies stemming from his research. But today, we're focusing on an issue that's garnered more headlines since the water crisis hit Flint, Michigan, preventing lead and copper from getting into drinking water through the pipes that carry it to homes, schools, and businesses. Joe, believe it or not, over the past century, we've had a growing awareness on the negative health impacts associated with lead exposure, particularly
in children. And we actually started to see some regulatory action in the seventies and early eighties when we started to limit, you know, lead in gasoline and lead in paint. Those actions resulted in a significant drop in lead exposure for children, which has been associated with irreversible behavioral and developmental challenges, anemia, memory loss, weakness, pregnancy and fertility issues, and cancer. Yet there remained another significant source of lead
to consider in our plumbing. Lead is a material that was heavily used for plumbing and conveyance infrastructure through the industrial revolution and up until World War two. We saw really heavy reliance on lead as a reliable pipe material because it's malleable. You can easily bend it around corners. It resists corrosion for the most part, and it was really one of the better available technologies
at the time. After World War two, the use of lead began to diminish, but we still saw some contractors and some builders included up through the nineteen seventies. In fact, it's estimated that there are still six to 9,000,000 service lines containing lead in The US, carrying water to tens of millions of people. It was then recognized that a lot of the lead that people were getting exposed through through water systems was actually coming from their plumbing and from some of the piping that
actually led to their house. And so in 1986, the EPA mandated, quote, unquote, lead free plumbing that dropped the acceptable levels of lead to be at 8% in wetted surfaces. That was that's credited with a pretty big drop in exposure. In 1991, the US EPA took that one step further when it published a new regulation
known as the Lead and Copper Rule. The intent there was to really increase the monitoring and increase the characterization of lead coming from what's called a service line, and that's the line from the water main down the street and the home itself. The rule requires drinking water utilities to sample drinking water at customers' taps.
If the lead or copper concentration reaches what the EPA calls an action limit, then the drinking water utility must inform the public and take further actions to protect their health ranging from corrosion control measures to complete service line replacement. That lead has formed stable layers of scale on the pipe after years of operation. And usually, when there are changes in water chemistry, so changes in finished water stability, those scales can become unstable, and they can
release lead to the customer. And so that's why you've got instances like Flint, Michigan, where the utility went to a different water source and treatment facility, and that caused lead release and exposure to the community. And then even areas like DC Water where there were some treatment changes at the treatment plant that was believed to be responsible for lead release about twenty years ago. Though the lead and copper rule has undergone minor revisions over the
last thirty years. The original 1991 rule yielded positive results. We saw a drastic increase in lead exposure to many of the communities. This is found in parallel to a continued drop in the lead blood levels of children across The US, a pretty precipitous drop that is continuing today. The rule also improves transparency and communication to the public in terms of what was coming out of their tap. And the rule also you know, it elevated the awareness of this overall risk to our community.
However, three decades of implementation and data have also suggested room for improvement. The original 1991 rule, it did not have a lot of teeth on the replacement side. In other words, a utility would have several opportunities to continue to optimize their system, continue to optimize their water quality. I think the biggest limitations of the rule are it provided too many opportunities to avoid service line replacement, and so we really still have a lot of that buried lead infrastructure
across The US. Which brings us to present day. In December 2020, the EPA released its first major revisions to the rule, which are still in the process of being finalized. The revisions include six main components. -The first component is for utilities to better identify and inventory their lead service lines. -Second, strengthening drinking water treatment requirements. -And third,
driving more lead service line replacements. -Including state of the science in terms of corrosion inhibition and corrosion control, as well as adding a new limit called a trigger level to lead regulation, and that's 10 parts per billion.
And at the trigger level, utilities that hit that level are now required to develop a lead service line replacement plan so that when they exceed the action level, which hasn't changed 15 parts per billion, they actually have a mandatory lead service line replacement program they have to follow. And that is over a two year period, four consecutive six month intervals, they have to replace 3% of their total lead service line inventory.
And this is, substantial expansion of the existing rule because now utilities are no longer able to test out of having to do lead service line replacement. The fourth component, better guidance on sampling procedures.
And fifth, better public communication of risks. There is additional language in the rule to improve public communication, and that includes twenty four hour notifications to homeowners where an action level, it seems, has been notified, publishing the lead service line inventory so that it's accessible to everyone in the community so they understand where it is and where replacement programs might be occurring.
In addition, the new rule requires additional public outreach and communication with primacy agencies and health agencies to help with epidemiological data in case there has been any exposure within the community. And finally, the sixth component, an emphasis on testing in schools and childcare facilities. And what this is gonna require is that every single utility will monitor for lead at fountains and taps at every school and registered day care facility within their system
once every five years. So 20% of all schools and day care facilities have to be sampled for lead, and then the utility will have to communicate those results and recommend and potentially recommendations to the school board and associated school leaders. A significant change in regulation brings significant challenges
for local water providers across the country. The two biggest challenges are the communication piece because the new rule is gonna require substantially more transparency, both when lead is identified at the tap as well as when lead service lines are identified through the inventory development. And so, you know, utilities are going to need to be able to communicate that they're improving conditions of the community, that they are being transparent, that they are protecting their brand
as protectors of public health. The impact on schools and childcare facilities also introduces a new element. The communication with the school districts and the day cares is gonna be an elegant balance because utilities don't own the premise plumbing on those schools. They don't own the water fountains. They don't own the solder within the plumbing, but they're providing water that has water quality that could cause lead corrosion from that
premise plumbing. Which really gets to the heart of what makes the lead and copper rule so complicated beyond the science. If the federal government institutes a regulation on a service provided by local municipalities and following that regulation requires infrastructure replacement that those utilities don't own, then how will the replacement of those lead service lines be funded? I think that the next major element that's gonna be important for utilities to address is the financing.
This is going to be a modest rule for utilities that are relatively new, that have newer infrastructure where most of the community was developed post 1960. But those utilities that have older systems where they saw a lot of growth in the forties and thirties, this could be a very expensive proposition. A proposition that almost certainly won't be shouldered alone by the utilities. As they look to be proactive for lead service and replacement, you're talking huge, huge expenses in the millions
or even modest sized communities. The homeowner is also going to have cost burden. The cost to replace a lead service line pipe for the homeowner on their side is likely going to average somewhere between 8 and $10,000. So how this is funded, how it's financed, how we push forward this rule that really is seeking to serve the underrepresented and underserved elements of our community, yet still have to figure out a way to carry both the cost on the utility side and the cost on the private owner
side is going to be a challenge. However, there are options for utilities. There is EPA guidance to show and highlight what these options are and some of the many nuances. There is federal funding like WIPA. There's also state revolving funds where utilities can get low interest loans. There's also the ability to add a surcharge to a utility bill to cover the capital cost of doing the lead service line replacement.
There's also non ad valorem taxes that can be assessed on properties to help support the payment. The infrastructure replacement required by regulations like the lead and copper rule also has utilities stepping back to look at all the services they provide more holistically. The one water paradigm is something that utilities across The US and even the world have been moving towards over
the past several years, if not decade. Really, what this approach is is to develop water planning that looks at water usage and treatment and management with a view of the complete water cycle, so the entire hydrologic cycle, and how people and aquatic ecosystems can be impacted either upstream or downstream. It's also an intent that there's a single voice and message that provides a a holistic overview
of how all these pieces fit together. Which includes a wide range of water related services that the general public takes for granted as long as they're operating as expected. So think about you've got your drinking water that feeds into your community. Your community then has wastewater that goes into a collection system, into the
water reclamation facility or wastewater treatment facility. That's either then discharged into a receiving body or it's injected into the groundwater or it's recycled through a reclaimed water system, purple pipe, or we even have potable reuse. And those are just really high level overview of the interconnection of those elements, but you also have stormwater and you also have rainwater capture and other things that kinda fit into
the one water paradigm. Whereas in the past, many communities might have had separate departments and separate budgets for a drinking water and wastewater treatment, for example. The one water paradigm in this holistic management considers how investments work within in the individual sector and how that investment can impact other sectors positively or negatively, providing opportunities or challenges. The lead and copper rule is a major investment.
It will require many communities, cities, utilities to reprioritize how they're looking at everything across the board, including their wastewater systems or their stormwater systems. So a one water approach could help utilities do that prioritization, see whether addressing lead and copper rule fits
into that bigger picture. One specific challenge that can benefit from that approach arises when a chemical added to drinking water to prevent corrosion of pipes needs to be removed from wastewater before it's discharged into streams and groundwater. The best available corrosion control treatment technology that's being recommended within the lead and copper rule revisions is orthophosphate phosphorus addition. And so orthophosphate is a
corrosion inhibitor. It forms stable metal complexes with lead so that it no longer comes out of solution under a wide range of water quality. The problem is is that the concentrations of orthophosphate, phosphorus that are going to be added will have downstream impacts to many wastewater treatment systems
and effluent discharge. And so utilities that, you know, are operating their wastewater treatment system to remove phosphorus, they're now gonna need to reevaluate their treatment process in some instances because there's gonna be additional phosphorus coming in. And so there's likely going to be some collaboration between drinking water and wastewater sides of utilities to get a better understanding of this, to optimize it further, and to prepare for potential
changes on effluent management. Implementing changes related to the lead and copper rule won't be simple for water utilities, though Chance said he expects preliminary measures to begin soon. It's still gonna take a little time for many of the state primacy agencies to adapt and implement the rule locally. And so a year from now, you'll probably still have many utilities across The US waiting on their state primacy agencies to roll out the
rule within their state. That said, I fully anticipate utilities everywhere to begin working on some of the major elements of the rule, including the lead service line inventory and then getting their field staff accustomed to and trained on the new recommendations on sampling and monitoring. That said, the lead and copper rule has experts like Chance digging into the details to
be prepared to provide guidance. I think the the biggest thing that people in our industry can do to help our utility clients and to help these water systems address the new rule is at the planning level right now. And so the rule is huge. It's nearly 300 pages. And as I said, there are six major elements, and each of those elements inherently have a wide range of requirements and things that utilities are gonna
need to understand. And so I think that it's upon the consulting industry to help educate utilities, help understand the requirements of the rule, help benchmark their current practices, and then identify the steps steps that are gonna need to be taken in a systematic and intentional way to reach compliance for the new rule when it's required. For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more information about this project.
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