NICK GOSNELL
Hutch Post
HUTCHINSON, Kan. — City Engineer Evan Patterson gave an update to the Hutchinson City Council at their meeting on Tuesday on progress in finding out what kind of lines are underground in Hutch.
"The EPA's lead and copper rule required public water systems to inventory all of the water lines, the water service lines in their systems," Patterson said. "That water line inventory for us is due to KDHE by October 16th this year, so we're working on the final quality control checks of it right now. We plan to actually submit I think on the 14th just in case there are some issues uploading the files, but we have completed the data collection for the initial submittal and our city workers actually began collecting data in 2021 on the water lines and we collected information on 10,000 out of the 17,000 water service lines in the city's network."
The advance work has allowed the city to be ahead of many of its peers in the process.
"That was sufficient to actually allow this third party consultant that was contracted by the state to produce an analysis of the remaining ones, the remaining 7,000," Patterson said. "They predict with a 95% confidence level that we don't have any more than 10 lines that we'll need to replace out of those 7,000 service lines. That confidence level is enough for KDHE to let us reclassify those unknown lines as non-lead, which is a pretty big deal for us. While we still will be doing our due diligence and investigating all those unknowns, it means we're no longer under the same clock for identifying all those lines. We still have a little bit of work left for some of the lines that we've identified as galvanized because galvanized steel and iron lines can pick up lead if there's a lead pipe upstream. We need to be able to verify that those galvanized lines didn't have lead upstream, so we're going through some of that process right now. I don't think we'll complete all that before we turn in our first inventory, but we will be working on it in the months after that."
The need appears to be a lot less than was initially feared.
"We did a pre-application back in May and at the time we thought we'd have about 290 just from a really crude estimate. But again, like I said, now we're looking at just about an estimate of 10, which is significantly less cost to the city. We're still recommending that we go for the full $5.6 million dollar loan amount because for better or worse, we're only going to be able to actually apply against that amount whenever we find water lines we need to replace anyway."
If it does turn out that it is only 10 lines that need replacing, they will likely only use about $100,000 of the loan amount. The council approved the application at their meeting on Tuesday.