By Robert Tomlinson
News Director
THREE RIVERS — As part of its recent partnership with the EPA’s Get the Lead Out Program, residents in Three Rivers may get a knock on their door next week.
The EPA and the Three Rivers Department of Public Services will be going door-to-door in the Three Rivers community Oct. 1-4 to verify water service line material inside homes in the city where the service lines come to the water meter.
The work is also in conjunction with a $600,000 grant the city recently received from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) that will help with the work on identifying and verifying lead service lines in preparation for replacement.
“It’s huge,” Three Rivers Department of Public Services (DPS) Director Amy Roth said in an interview Tuesday. “We’re going to learn what’s coming into the house, and then the $600,000 grant is telling us what’s outside at that curb area, so it’s three pieces of the puzzle. Once we put those three pieces together, we can fully determine what the service line material is, and which ones need to be replaced.”
Roth said there will be six members of the EPA’s Get the Lead Out team going door-to-door across the city alongside at least one employee from DPS to talk with residents and perform the verification, and door-knocking will occur from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. during the days they’ll be out. She said they hope to verify materials at 1,000 homes during this time period.
How the verification will be conducted, Roth explained, is they will do a visual inspection first, and if the visual inspection doesn’t yield a result, the workers will use sandpaper to clean the pipe off and then use a magnet to determine if the pipe is magnetic or not. If it’s magnetic, Roth said, the pipe is galvanized, and if it’s not magnetic, then the pipe could be either copper or lead. The sandpaper cleaning will then determine the material from there.
Galvanized and copper pipes, Roth then explained, are okay materials to have, however lead or lead connected to galvanized are the pipes that would be of issue in the verification.
Those who do not wish to have their door knocked on, Roth said, can fill out a self-verification form on the city’s website, threeriversmi.org, in the Drinking Water section of the Department of Public Services page of the website. There are steps on how to identify your service line material listed on that site.
“If we don’t see a homeowner the day that we’re out there knocking on their door, we’ll leave a door hanger that has a QR code on it that they can scan to get to the self-verification. It also has our phone number, if they don’t want to do self-verification, we’ll come out at a better time for them and help them verify as well,” Roth said.
Overall, Roth said she hopes residents can help the city in the process of identifying where lead service lines are in the city.
“Help us build the inventory, so we can better plan our replacement program,” Roth said.
Robert Tomlinson can be reached at 279-7488 or robert@wilcoxnewspapers.com.
