Starting Wednesday, water customers in Texas and nationwide will be able to find out what their utilities know about the lead contamination risks of service lines delivering drinking water into their individual  homes and other buildings. 

Houston Landing asked a sampling of large local water utilities to give a preview of what their water line inventories found. Here’s what officials in Houston, Galveston, Sugar Land, Baytown and La Porte told us.

Houston: The City of Houston’s water system, which dates to 1879, says it has found no lead service lines, but the system acknowledges it also doesn’t know the lead status of pipes at more than 400,000 addresses. The system has posted an interactive water service line inventory map on its website and is asking customers with unknown pipes to inspect their own lines. You can read more about Houston’s water system and its pipe search here.

Galveston: The City of Galveston’s water system, which also dates back to the late 1800s, is about 95 percent done physically inspecting each of its customers’ water service line as part of a meter replacement program. So far the city has found 27 lead service lines and 961 galvanized lines requiring replacement because of their potential to have absorbed lead from upstream lead pipes. The system will be posting an interactive water line inventory map on its website. You can read more about what Galveston found here.

Sugar Land: The City of Sugar Land used a combination of reviewing documents and physically inspecting pipes as part of normal repair and replacement work to determine the lead status of all of the approximately 40,000 water connections in its system. While parts of the city date to the 1800s, much of the city has newer construction. Only about 12,000 water service lines were installed before the 1988 Texas lead pipe ban, said Katie Clayton, Sugar Land’s director of utilities. In addition, she said, Sugar Land officials found old plumbing codes that showed lead was not an approved product for use in water service lines in the city back to the 1960s.

No lead service lines were found in Sugar Land’s system. But the review identified 110 galvanized lines at homes built between 1905 and 1965  that need to be classified as galvanized requiring replacement because the city lacks documentation to prove they were never previously downstream from lead pipes. “They’re centered on the oldest parts of our town, the areas around Highway 90 near Imperial,” Clayton said. No lines are classified as unknown. The city will be posting a map on its website. 

La Porte: The City of La Porte public works department said that it does not know the lead status of about 70 percent of its water customers’ lines. The city, which submitted its inventory to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Friday, told Houston Landing that no lead lines have been identified so far and that city staff “don’t anticipate any in use, given the installation age of most of the service lines in the city.” No galvanized pipes requiring replacement have been identified, the city said. La Porte’s inventory was conducted using a combination of reviewing records and doing visual inspections during repair work and meter reads.

Baytown: In Baytown, the city’s water system has not been able to determine the lead status for all or part of 15,277 customers’ water service lines. The other 9,689 service lines in the city have been cleared as being made of non-lead materials, mostly through records reviews; 125 received field inspections. “We are bringing in a field contractor to pair with our City staff efforts to help expedite our field inspection efforts,” Baytown spokesperson Jason Calder said by email. He said the city is continuing to ask the public to help by self-testing their lines.

Baytown was established in 1948 and the age of water system pipes vary across the city, Calder said. “That being said, the City has not found any lead service lines or galvanized lines requiring replacement in its initial field investigations, nor are there any records of lead being used for service line material prior to the lead ban,” he said. 

Find out about your water service line: The Environmental Protection Agency will require these and other water utilities nationwide to publicly share certain information from their service line inventories. Utilities that serve more than 50,000 people must post this service line information online. Smaller water systems can either post online, or make the information available some other way, such as by mail or at their office. Check out this Houston Landing guide on how to protect yourself from the risks of lead pipes.

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