Iola will test its water more frequently for lead over the next year as part of an edict handed down from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Toby Ross, water plant superintendent, and Mitch Phillips, the city’s water distribution superintendent, spoke about a recent KDHE notification, directing the city to ramp up its testing after three homes tested above the EPA threshold of lead in their drinking water over the summer.
The threshold, mind you, is 15 parts of lead per billion units of water, a number infinitesimally small, Ross noted.
Technically, any lead consumption is a health hazard, but “our water’s safe to drink,” Ross said. “We haven’t changed anything with our water.”
LEAD and galvanized steel water lines were once the standard for growing communities. Iola was no different.
“Lead was everywhere,” Ross said. “Even if you used copper lines, you used lead to solder them.”
That changed in the mid 1980s, as health officials learned the dangers of excess lead exposure and contamination, leading to a ban on such materials for new water lines and fixtures.
The end goal, Ross noted, is for all municipalities to remove all lead from their water systems within the next decade.
Iola is on track to do just that, Phillips said. “We’ve got almost 99.9% of our lead pinpointed and located.”
He expects those lines and other components such gooseneck and pigtail lines — lead also was used to solder joints back in the day — to be completely removed from the city’s system by 2035.
“We’ve been replacing it all along,” Phillips said. “When I started in 1991, we were doing it then.”
WHILE the city has tested for lead and other contaminants for years, the issue was given an added sense of urgency following the Flint, Michigan, water crisis of 2014-2019, when the Michigan city changed its water supplier but did not change its treatment process.
An imbalance in its alkalinity resulted, which in turn caused corrosion along multiple points within the system, causing lead to leach directly into the water.
More than 100,000 residents were exposed to elevated lead levels.
With that as a backdrop, the Environmental Protection Agency began handing down more stringent standards for other water suppliers across the country.
Other communities — Iola included — received a new list of lead and copper treatment rules, dictating what they need to monitor and how often.
