Bloomington residents expect excellence from all their municipal services. We know that this is especially true for City of Bloomington Utilities (CBU) because we provide drinking water to Bloomington and Monroe County. It’s our job at CBU to take every precaution to ensure water delivered to your home is free from contaminants. Our teams at the Monroe Water Treatment Plant, Water Quality office, and Transmission & Distribution Division are doing that already. Our latest infrastructure endeavor, which is a requirement of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), will further protect residents and keep drinking water safe.
CBU is in the early stages of a Service Line Inventory (SLI) project that is another step in our effort to remove and replace active water service lines that are made of lead. A service line is a pipe that connects your home to CBU’s water meter and ultimately to the water main. Throughout the middle of the 20th Century, it was common industry practice to make service lines from lead. While the installation of new lead service lines was banned in 1986, many lead lines remain in active service. The goal of the SLI project is to identify which lead service lines remain active on both the private and public side of the water distribution system.
Is there lead in your water?City workers are checking residential water lines
If your service line, or the pipes in your home, are made of lead, it’s likely that you shouldn’t be concerned. CBU maintains the chemistry of the water that we send to your home at a pH value that ensures the water won’t corrode your pipe; it’s corrosion that dissolves lead into drinking water. If you’re worried that you may have lead in your home, please reach out to CBU Water Quality and ask to have your water tested for lead — we do it free of charge.
We are using several methods to gather inventory of the entire distribution system including our Geographic Information System, building plans, historical data, and physically looking at water lines. The physical inventory requires CBU to excavate two holes — one on the private side of the water meter and one on the public side of the meter — to determine the composition of the pipe. The equipment and staffing for the SLI project was paid for with dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), with support from Mayor Hamilton, the Bloomington Common Council, and the Utilities Service Board.
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How can you help? Not every property owner will be selected for a physical inventory of their water service line. If your address is selected for the physical inventory, please sign the “Right of Entry” agreement we mail to you. Returning that signed agreement is crucial in helping CBU keep this project moving. This is also an opportunity for you to definitively learn the composition of your water service line.
Once we have all the data to complete the inventory, we will submit our findings to the US EPA and start to devise a service line replacement strategy. We expect to complete the inventory by the end of 2023.
I want to stress that drinking water in CBU’s distribution system meets or exceeds all local, state, and federal standards. If a service line is determined to be made of lead during the inventory process it doesn’t mean lead is in your water.
I encourage residents to visit bloomington.in.gov/utilities/inventory for more information about this critical project. It also has ways you can contact us with any questions regarding the SLI project and the quality of your drinking water.
Vic Kelson is director of City of Bloomington Utilities.