Hello, my name is Kareem Adeem.
I'm the Acting Director of Department
of Water and Sewer Utilities
at the city of Newark, New Jersey.
So actually what we're doing here today,
we're replacing lead service lines.
The city's replacing a little of 18,000 lead service lines
in the 24 to 30 mile period.
We're in the Northern, New Jersey.
When they first started building water and sewer
infrastructures, the sewer they were using,
wood or clay pipe.
And later on, they started using lead service lines.
They didn't have these heavy equipment machinery.
So we dug holes with picks and shovels.
Lead is very flexible.
It's very bendable.
So this is a lead service line.
Durable, heavy, and they use lead, like I said,
when they were digging trenches, right?
Lead's very flexible.
Right?
And the late '30s, mid '40s, lead started being scarce.
They were having World War I, World War II.
They started using that for bullets.
And they started using copper.
Copper became a new thing to use.
And the machining was different once they used copper.
And we continue to use copper.
In the late '60s, early '70s,
they started looking at PVC, the little plastic pipe.
They use that more now.
But all the cities like New York City, Chicago, Detroit,
most of the older cities on the East Coast,
they used lead and they transitioned over to copper.
Technology has improved.
As technology improves, science has improved.
So things that we though were good for us 10 years ago,
five years ago, 20 years ago,
we're finding out they're not.
In 1953, Newark banned the use of lead.
If you built a new home, you had to use copper.
If you made a repair on an old lead service
that was leaking, you had to replace it with copper.
In 1986, the Federal Government banned the use of lead
and lead solder.
Health defects of lead.
To replace all the lead services
in the entire United States.
Today that price is between 60 to $80,000,000,000.
So in 1991, they came up with corrosion control,
ways that you can prevent lead from leaching into water.
No raising the PH, putting in orthophosphate
or sodium silicate.
They would create a prophylactic liner throughout the pipe
that would prevent lead from leaching into water.
2017, after 25 years,
the city had it's first lead exceedence.
Which required the city to take a number of steps
to find out what was going on.
And also educate the public about having a lead exceedence.
In October of 2018,
the US EPA let us know that the corrosion inhibitor that
we currently were using was failing.
That liner was coming apart.
So Newark, at that time, decided to give out 39,000 free
water filters to its customers
as an immediate relief to protect lead
from leaching into the water.
In April of 2018,
we rolled out the lead service replacement program.
And a year later, started replacing lead service lines.
We just want to get rid of lead services.
We don't want to keep having to put chemical,
find the chemical 20 years from then they may fail again.
Let's just get rid of the lines.
This crew right here is responsible
to replace 25 lead service lines per day.
They come in, they make arrangements
with the homeowner saying,
"Are you gonna be available tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m.?"
We're gonna come and do a pre-inspection the night before.
Letting the homeowner know at seven in the morning today.
We're gonna start construction
to replace the lead service line.
It could be a full replacement,
which would be from the water main
to the house.
Or it could be a partial replacement,
meaning they have copper from the meter to the curb,
and they have lead coming form the curb
to the city's water main.
This crew is actually do a partial in this home right now.
They're gonna do from the street to the curb.
They'll tie in those two copper pipes
with a little valve.
In this house, they're doing a full replacement.
They're using a bullet trenchless technology.
Trenchless technology allows us not to make an open cut.
We're doing a trench from the building all the way
to the street into the city's water main.
So we use these little moles or bullets they call them
that penetrates underneath the ground.
To make a hole, they either pull the pipe
or push a pipe through.
So the bullet works by compressed air.
It's a compressor air hose.
And the air pressure's just forcing it to come through
like it's a mole.
And it just penetrates through
through the soil.
This is going through.
And we can reach into the city's water main.
So now we created a hole
where we're gonna push the copper pipe through.
Right and they bring it through.
And also you seen earlier,
they hook up a little cable wire onto the copper pipe,
and we pull that cable,
and as they're pulling that cable,
it just rings the copper pipe through the hole.
After the plumber comes,
and made the connection at the meter,
he tied that in,
we flush it out for about 30 minutes.
We come back out,
we re-compact these holes,
just a temporary patch that we do on the street.
After all the lead service lines are replaced
on this whole block,
the city's gonna come, probably in the Spring,
and mill and pave this whole block.
Gonna put new asphalt down.
But little over 2200 have been removed throughout the city.
And how many are there in total?
About a little over 18,000.
We're also employing local residents on these projects,
and putting money back in the community
as we do these replacements too.
We work in extreme weather conditions.
When it's raining, we're working.
When it's snowing, we're working.
When it's 100 degrees, we're working.
When it's below 10 degrees, we're working.
Everybody needs water.
Everyday.