| Vermont town scores $11 million grant to remove lead pipes
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Vermont town scores $11 million grant to remove lead pipes

National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week 2020 Oct. 25-31The success story below is in recognition of National Lead Poisoning Prevention Week, being celebrated Oct. 25-31.

A one-time, $11 million opportunity is making it possible for the Town of Bennington, Vt., to replace lead pipes that carry drinking water into homes -- at no cost to residents.

The opportunity stems from the Water Infrastructure Fund Transfer Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 2019. Recognizing that states didn’t have adequate Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) amounts to address lead contamination in drinking water, the legislation allowed states to transfer money from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund to the DWSRF during a one-year period ending Oct. 4, 2020.

Town of Bennington, VTBennington’s water department, an AWWA utility member since 1988, submitted a lead line removal proposal that was approved in July by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Terisa Thomas, senior program manager of water financing at DEC, said an $11 million project “is huge for us.”

“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,” she said.

Beginning this fall, about 1,575 lead pipes on customers’ private property will be replaced over the next several years. Without the funding, customers would have had to pay between $5,000 and $15,000 per replacement.

“This grant is an incredible boost to the final, hardest push to get individual residential hookups to be lead free,” said Larry Gates, Bennington’s assistant department of public works director. “Before this, we also took early action to prevent lead from leaching into drinking water using a corrosion control method that coated the inside of the lead service lines.”

In addition, in 2017 Bennington initiated the lead identification plan that was key to the acceptance of the town's $11 million grant proposal.

“That task included sifting through records dating back to the late 1800s and informal field notes scrawled in notebooks by operators,” Gates said, noting that a local engineering company was hired to carry out the plan. Other information was collected through sampling, resident surveys and records searches.

Bennington, chartered in 1749 as Vermont’s first town, is located in the southwest corner of the state. It boasts a spring in town that feeds a state-of-the-art ground water pumping station and withdrawal facility. In addition, the water department sells water from the spring to private water bottling companies.

More information about lead service line removal is available on AWWA’s Lead Resource page and through the Lead Service Line Replacement Collaborative, of which AWWA is a member.

 

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