BENNINGTON — Thanks to a one-time, $11 million funding opportunity, Bennington plans to replace about 1,575 lead pipes that carry drinking water into homes, at no cost to residents.
Largely in response to the water crisis in Flint, Mich., federal legislators devised the Water Infrastructure Fund Transfer Act, which allows states to transfer money from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which is used primarily for infrastructure projects that improve the health of streams and lakes, to the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund.
“As far as we know, this is a one-time opportunity to transfer that money,” said Megan Young, drinking water capacity program supervisor at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s never happened before, and my understanding is there aren’t plans for that moving forward.”
The project became official when the state finalized an intended use plan for the two water funds on July 16.
Construction will begin in the fall; the work is expected to take several years.
Responsibility for the replacements could have otherwise fallen to residents — the pipes are on private property — at a cost between $5,000 and $15,000 per installation.
Though lead in service lines can permeate into drinking water, which can be harmful to health, Bennington was among the nation’s first to take anti-corrosion measures to coat the pipes in an attempt to prevent lead from leaching into drinking water. The town has also removed all of its main water lines that contained lead.
Replacing the lead pipes to homes is the next step.
“No lead levels are safe,” Young said. “Anything we can do to ensure that people are not receiving any lead is what we all should aim for.”
Select board president Donald Campbell said the funding is a big move forward for the town.
“Bennington residents are very pleased to be ahead of many communities in getting rid of lead water service lines,” he said. “This grant is an incredible boost to the final, hardest push to get individual hookups to be lead-free.”
When officials at the Department of Environmental Conservation learned about the funding change, they immediately turned to Bennington. Since 2017, the state has provided grants to MSK Engineering and Design, hired by the town, whose team has been identifying the exact locations of the service lines.
Those grants, provided through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, were offered to communities interested in mapping the extent of lead-containing infrastructure in their drinking water systems.
“In Vermont, an $11 million project is huge for us,” said Terisa Thomas, senior program manager of water financing at the Department of Environmental Conservation. “We needed a project that had already been in the works, so we identified Bennington as the main candidate because they had done a lead identification plan, which was a super extensive look at their system.”
In 2017, MSK Engineers began something akin to detective work, sifting through a patchwork of records that detailed materials used in town and private infrastructure.
“They varied from initial property books that dated back hundreds of years to field notes that were scrawled informally in notebooks by operators,” said Patrick Smart, an engineer with MSK. “There’s a wide spectrum in the amount of information and the reliability of it.”
As engineers collect more information through sampling efforts, resident surveys and through their records search, the project becomes easier to tackle.
“At the end of the day, there’s just a lot of uncertainty,” Smart said. “There are some where the records are very clear: Oh yeah, that’s lead, and nobody thinks it was ever replaced. There are others where people think, oh, we replaced that pipe. What we’re also trying to do is, through the design process, develop a higher degree of certainty.”
Engineers have been reaching out to residents through a combination of mailings, phone calls and door-to-door outreach, asking if they know the history of their service lines, and whether they’d like a replacement.
The town now has an interactive, searchable map on its website that lists the likely locations of lead service lines on private property.
In the coming months, project leaders will begin work on 140 properties in three areas of Bennington.
Not all of those properties have lead pipes. The selection of properties matches a broad range of descriptions in the records. From there, engineers will assess the accuracy and process associated with their identification methods.
At all 140 homes, engineers will perform an excavation at the curbstop, where the service line in question is divided into town property and private property, with a shutoff valve separating the two. They’ll inspect each side of the pipe for lead.
The initial phase will include water-quality sampling — largely left to residents because Covid-19 prevents the engineers from entering homes — along with a visual assessment of the line by the resident.
These initial processes will make subsequent phases of the project more efficient, as the team determines which type of assessment is most accurate, Smart said.
When a lead pipe is identified, the team will determine what the excavation process will look on a case-by-case basis.
“We have a field crew that is going out to do surveys to try to develop detailed information about existing conditions so we know what other utilities or infrastructure the contractor should be ready to encounter when they’re trying to replace these pipes,” Smart said.
The 1,575 lines will each require their own removal plans — some pipes might be found under the roots of mature trees or driveways, for example.
“You really don’t want to disturb things if you don’t have to,” said Liam McRae, an MSK engineer.
Water sample test kits will also be sent to residents so they can assess levels of lead in their drinking water.
The town’s ability to fund the project is an anomaly in the state. Bennington officials learned in the 1970s that blood samples showed high lead levels in children, and the resulting research gave them knowledge about lead infrastructure in town.
“A lot of other communities do not have that detailed information on something that was put into the ground 60 to 70 years ago,” Young said. “You have no idea. That’s why Bennington was taking these steps in the first place, because they were well aware.”
Campbell recognizes the enormity of the project.
“This is a huge investment of federal dollars in our community,” he said, “and I am thrilled that it goes directly to improving health and property values.”
