Do you have lead service lines? Salt Lake City seeks info as it begins replacing them

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Salt Lake City launched a program to replace lead service lines at no cost to homeowner.
• The initiative, funded by a federal grant, aims to replace possibly up to thousands of lines.
• Residents can check online to see if their homes are affected by lead lines.

SALT LAKE CITY — Spencer Hogan had no idea that lead service lines were feeding water to his home until he received a flier advising him of the potential in September.

Hogan, who has lived in his Bueno Avenue home with Salt Lake City's Central City neighborhood for over 30 years, never really thought about it, but he wasn't surprised either. His home was built in 1894, well before the public was aware of lead toxicity.

He took a short survey before a Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities employee came to his home to test his water, confirming the presence of lead. However, that employee also informed Hogan that the department could fix the problem at no cost to him. He was sold.

"There are a lot of long-term effects from the toxicity of lead, particularly in young children," he said, standing on the street outside of his home on Wednesday. "It would behoove anyone to have it removed from their drinking water."

Moments later, excavation crews crawled into a small trench in his front yard and yanked out his old line, before unrolling a fresh copper one to replace it. It marked the first service line replacement from the department's Lead and Copper Program, which seeks to replace potentially thousands of remaining lead service lines within the department's vast service areas — at no cost to the homeowner.

The department, which also provides water to Millcreek, Cottonwood Heights and other parts of eastern Salt Lake County, phased out lead from its main system decades ago. It has already identified about 200 other homes with lead, but it's seeking to review thousands of additional homes within its service area so it can remove any remaining lead from its system.

"This is an opportunity for us to mitigate any future risk, as well as replace aging infrastructure," said Laura Briefer, the department's director.

Lead is extremely durable, which is likely why it was commonly used for water pipes within Salt Lake City's service area from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

It coincided with one of the valley's first population booms, and many homes from this era, like Hogan's, have lead pipes. It's unclear exactly why, but the department began phasing out lead by the 1930s and 1940s, and was virtually done with lead by the 1950s, well before the federal government began cracking down on lead in the 1970s, and completely banned it in water systems in 1986 over health risks.

"We're pretty fortunate that the powers at be decided to kind of stop using it in our system (by the 1950s)," said Dustin White, the department's water quality manager.

Yet, it wasn't until a few years ago that Salt Lake City began exploring service lines, underground pipes linking buildings to the department's main water line. White's wife asked him about lead as they were preparing to have a child, and he realized he didn't know if their service line was lead-free or not.

It got him thinking about other lines across the system. He sifted through plumbing, engineering and other records, where he found there was very little information indicating whether private service lines had lead or not.

This took place about the same time Congress was considering a bill to remove any remaining lead nationwide, largely in response to severe environmental issues with water in Flint, Michigan. Utah ultimately received $39.5 million for lead pipe removals from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was awarded in 2024.

The Utah Department of Environmental Quality helped disperse that money to the Salt Lake City Public Utilities to cover the cost of replacements. It's big savings for homeowners like Hogan, who said his neighbor had received a quote of about $10,000 for similar work.

Most replacements take a few hours to complete, and the department says it will complete restoration afterward. The department only has to repay half of what it receives through a low-interest loan, and money collected from water rates helps fund the costs.

Officials have already identified 200 additional lines from 65,000 units within the department's system. They plan to reach out to about 23,000 property owners to help determine the remaining lines that need to be replaced, or conduct work to figure it out themselves.

Those who have homes built between the late 1800s and 1950 are most at risk, White said. Residents can view an online map to see if their home is among the 23,000 with unclear data. The site has information on how people can contact the department to submit their service line data or receive a review to see if their lines contain lead.

The city hopes to replace all remaining lead lines over the next decade, which could cost upward of $100 million, but the number could drop if unknown lines don't have lead, Briefer said.

"This is not a small investment into our community and into public health," she said. "This service line replacement is just beginning ... and we're going to be doing these replacements for years to come."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Carter Williams

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Carter Williams is a reporter for KSL. He covers Salt Lake City, statewide transportation issues, outdoors, the environment and weather. He is a graduate of Southern Utah University.