The San Antonio Water System is searching for lead pipes within its 600,000-plus water service lines — and wants residents’ help identifying potential problem spots.
To come into compliance with new federal rules, SAWS must figure out how many of its service lines contain lead or copper, and prepare an inventory by Oct. 16. A service line is a pipe that connects a water main to the interior plumbing of a home or business.
Lead and copper can cause serious health problems if too much enters your body from drinking water or other sources. The Environmental Protection Agency created new rules which were first issued in 2021, and updated in 2022, to reduce lead exposure in drinking water after the lead water contamination disaster in Flint, Michigan.
Earlier this month, the publicly owned water utility’s board of trustees approved allotting an additional $9.7 million toward the effort, having originally approved a $2.6 million contract with a third party in 2022. SAWS is now entering into what it is calling phase two of this investigative work, which includes creating and maintaining a systemwide inventory.
Phase two will continue through 2027. SAWS officials said the utility plans to share the inventory with the public starting in October, which will state if a service line is lead, galvanized, non-lead or “unknown.” A galvanized pipe is a type of steel pipe that has been coated with a layer of zinc to protect it from corrosion and rust but that can collect toxins if it’s downstream from lead or copper.
With SAWS expecting hundreds of thousands of pipes to be listed as unknown, the focus of phase two will be to identify the makeup of as many of these as possible, explained SAWS water quality manager Monty McGuffin.
“The EPA, followed by [the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality] said, ‘Hold the phone — we want people to help reduce the amount of unknowns in the inventory,’ because that’s the biggest thing that most large utilities are struggling with,” McGuffin said. “Your smaller utilities only have 500 to 1,000 connections — that’s easy for them… But for larger ones like us, it’s going to be a big effort.”
Residents with “at-risk” or unknown pipes will receive a letter in the mail and/or via e-mail alerting them of what their service line is made of. A large percentage of them will be unknown, McGuffin said. SAWS will need residents’ help to fill in some of the unknowns, he added.
“We want people to participate,” he said. “If you happen to know what your infrastructure is at your house — we’re going to have a portal that you can fill that out and submit it, because there’s a lot of residents that have lived in their homes for decades, and they know if they’ve replaced that yard piping.”
Residents will be able to either self-declare to SAWS what their service line pipe is made of, or they can send in pictures of their service line from their main shut-off valve to get SAWS’ help to identify the pipe makeup, said Kirstin Eller, SAWS potable water quality supervisor.
The utility will utilize some of the extra funding its board approved to also have its contractor use the time SAWS is dedicating to switching out old water meters with its new smart meters, McGuffin said, adding SAWS has only found one lead pipe service line on its side of the system at this time, which has already been replaced.
“That’ll be a great cost savings to the company and to our ratepayer,” McGuffin said. Additional funds will go to public relations and outreach.
According to Eller, approximately 230,000 of these lines are made from non-lead materials. While SAWS owns the pipes from the mains to the meters, the sections between the meters and homes or businesses are the responsibility of property owners. Eller said that there are about 150,000 lines with unknown materials on both sides of the meter, and another 235,000 lines where the materials are known on the SAWS side but not on the customer side.
According to SAWS, Texas homes built after 1989 are unlikely to have lead pipes. Lead is typically found in pipes installed before 1986 when Congress banned its use in public water systems. SAWS has until 2037 to remove all lead and copper pipes from its system, McGuffin noted.
Phase two will also include some potholing — digging small holes into areas around the city to view the pipelines directly — and continued monitoring at meter installation sites. The utility also plans to utilize some existing non-evasive technologies that will be able to scan from above the ground to help detect specific metals below the ground, McGuffin said.
Phase three will include sampling drinking water from local schools and daycares starting in 2026, Eller said. The TCEQ has an in-house program for Texas schools and some daycares that will allow them to also do self-testing and logging, potentially alleviating SAWS from having to do some of this work, Eller added.
“That’s a fully funded program, so it’s not costing the schools anything,” she said. “If they find a problem, [the TCEQ] will actually work with the school to provide filters in the case that it’s needed.
