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To get rid of water-borne lead, replace lead pipes, official says
SEBRING
The only way to eliminate the risk of lead exposure in residential drinking water is to replace lead plumbing and service connections.
And government funding is the only means to ensure such replacement, according to a village councilman familiar with the issue, both in his home community and in his Canfield workplace.
“The government’s going to have to step up, whether it be through grants or low-interest or no-interest loans,” said David L. Wright, who joined Sebring Village Council in August 2010.
“People are just not going to be able to re-plumb their house, re-plumb their service lines and do stuff like that. It’s just not going to be economical for them,” Wright said.
The state should use its $2 billion rainy-day fund to pay for such replacements, Wright said.
Wright added he doesn’t see why such funding should be limited to low-income people.
“It’s something that has to be done, and the only way to get people to do it is to provide the money to do it,” the councilman said.
Wright is familiar with the problem of lead in drinking water because of the state-declared lead emergency in Sebring’s drinking water and because of lead toxicity in his employer’s well water.
His employer, Linde Hydraulics Corp. of Canfield, recently remedied its problem by installing tanks to hold water hauled in by truck.
Having served as Linde’s shop operations manager for the past 12 years and having held a Class 1 water-treatment operator’s license the past five years, Wright was the Linde official with whom the Ohio EPA had been corresponding concerning its water-quality problem.
In a Feb. 4 letter, Christopher Maslo, an OEPA drinking and groundwater specialist, informed Wright that, because of Linde’s Jan. 25 conversion to a hauled water system, Linde “is no longer subject to regulation by the Ohio EPA as a public water system,” and now will be regulated by the Mahoning County Board of Health.
Except for saying he drinks the bottled water his company supplies at work, Wright said he wasn’t authorized to discuss Linde’s water-supply system in an interview.
Linde’s designated spokesman, corporate controller Thomas J. Pryor, however, said the company continues to supply bottled water to its 40 employees and to ask them not to drink its tap water because of concerns about potential contamination lingering in the plant’s plumbing.
Pryor said he believes the well-water problem was due to past coal mining in the area, which he believes disturbed the underground water table.
Although he didn’t say much about the situation at Linde, Wright said he drinks the tap water at his Sebring home, which was built in 2006 and does not have a lead-service connection or lead plumbing.
He said his children, however, age 8 and 11, drink bottled water, which he prefers they continue to do “until I know 100 percent” that their home’s water is lead-free.
Wright said he’ll have his water lead-tested when the village catches up on water testing.