Montague city officials reported this month that the city is well ahead of a Michigan-mandated schedule to identify and replace lead water-service lines on both public and private property.
The state plan was put in place in 2021 as a result of the mid-2010s crisis in Flint, when aging pipes delivered water with dangerously high levels of lead to residents of the city. The state plan called for, within 20 years, all known or suspected lead service lines to be inspected and all water lines made of lead, and galvanized pipes possibly connected with lead, to be replaced. An October 2024 announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency further imposed a 10-year time frame on the replacements.
As of February, the city had already replaced 165 of the 440 service lines it determined needed to be replaced under these criteria - over a third of the needed replacements, with the city on course to complete all replacements within 8 years. Nearly all inspections have been completed and residents who need their pipes replaced were notified at the end of last year.
“Beginning in 2021, we needed to replace about 27 service lines a year to meet the state’s 20-year mandate,” city manager Jeff Auch said in a press release. “We started by replacing the lines in priority areas where older services were known to exist.”
According to the release, the city covers the cost of the pipe replacements and has not had to raise customers' water rates to do so. The city added that Montague continually tests its water system as a whole, including the water mains, well houses and other designated sites, to monitor water quality. In addition, the city samples for lead and copper every three years. Recent samples show that the lead content of the water is substantially less than the mandated minimum and meets public water quality standards.
"Our priority has always been the safety of our residents,” Auch said in the release. “We’ve been mandated to test for lead in our water system long before we were required to replace the lines. Our tests have always met public water quality standards. Fortunately, because of improvements in water supply materials, the use of lead diminished over the past 30 years, and most service lines and water mains in Montague have already been replaced."
Work is usually done in the fall and winter, when contractors are more often available, and groups jobs together when possible to save time and money. The city uses a local contractor and replaces the lines with a process called directional boring, which minimizes landscape work needed after the job is complete.
