Service Line Notice

[Greg Krom]

Good morning,

 

Approximately 70% of our customers will receive or have already received a notice from the Water Department informing them that their service line contains unknown materials which may contain lead.  The notice is required by MassDEP and US EPA as part of recent changes made to lead and copper regulations.

 

Last month we completed and submitted a service line inventory of the system which identified all of the water services in the system and classified them as either known material - does not contain lead or unknown material – may contain lead.  The inventory was the result of approximately 2 years of work which included digitizing plans and service cards and trying to identify materials where possible.  The notices were sent to all of the customers where part or all of their service line contained unknown materials.

 

Topsfield does not have any known lead service lines, nor have we ever found a lead service line in the system.  Historically we have only allowed copper or plastic to be used for service line construction.  However there are situations where we are less confident about what materials were used.  These include areas where our service lines were connected to existing pipes on private property, possibly from an abandoned well or private water system, rather than running a new pipe all the way into the home.

 

Now the process of identifying the unknown materials begins.  The notice specifies which portion of the service contains unknown materials, either the Town side, the private side or both.  If the private side is unknown then the homeowner can inspect the service and notify us of the results or schedule an appointment for our staff to inspect the service.  Identifying the materials in the street is more difficult and will probably involve excavating a statistically significant portion of them and see what we find.

 

Please contact the Water Department at (978) 887-1517 or send an email to gk...@topsfield-ma.gov if you have any questions.

 

Thank you,

 

Greg

 

	Greg Krom, Superintendent Topsfield Water Department 279 Boston Street Topsfield, MA 01983	978.887.1517 gk...@topsfield-ma.gov www.topsfieldpublicworks.org
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