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The City of Shreveport has been accepted into EPA's "Get the Lead Out" initiative, which will help the city identify the lead pipes it will have to remove to meet new federal requirements. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File) Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save The federal government is going to help Shreveport in preparing to meet new EPA mandates requiring the removal of lead water pipes from its infrastructure portfolio. The City of Shreveport has been selected for participation in EPA's "Get the Lead Out" initiative, part of the nationwide effort to find and remove lead pipes in community water systems.
Those plans will start in Shreveport next week with a door-to-door campaign. Communities across the United States are facing new, likely expensive mandates on lead pipes. Cities like Shreveport will have three years to inventory the lead pipes in their systems and 10 years to replace them.
Shreveport's Water and Sewerage Department will conduct a door knocking outreach and field verification effort Nov. 18-22 from 11 a.m.
to 6 p.m., according to a news release.
The campaign is part of the city's efforts to create an inventory of its lead pipelines. "The process is quick and simple! It involves a visual inspection of your water service line to identify the material and ensure accurate community data collection for the inventory," the news release reads. As part of new federal requirements, the city recently sent its initial inventory to EPA which showed at least 1,300 out of approximately 70,000 homes in Shreveport are outfitted with lead pipes, according to Water and Sewerage Director William Daniel.
Through the GLO initiative, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, EPA will partner with 200 underserved communities nationwide to provide the technical assistance they need to identify and remove lead service lines, according to a news release. The GLO initiative will help those communities identify lead services lines, develop replacement plans and apply for funding, according to the news release. "An estimated 9.
2 million pipes that provide drinking water to homes across the United States still contain lead, and they are most commonly found in older homes. This means they disproportionately impact families with the fewest resources to remove them. That's why this new initiative is so critical – it will provide the kind of assistance that's needed to accelerate the removal of lead where it's needed most," EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox said in the news release.
To learn more about GLO's efforts, contact the Shreveport Department of Water and Sewerage at (318) 673-7660..
