Featured Deployments
Check out our innovator showcase featuring a few recent testbed participants:
Lead Service Line Research Facility
In addition to our Smart Lake Erie Watershed testbeds, CWA partners with Cleveland Water to provide innovators with access to a Lead Service Line Research Facility.
The Lead Service Line Research Facility is has been created to test and demonstrate technologies that can physically detect the material comprising service lines without breaking ground, and without the use of broader data inputs (like statistical/AI-prediction methods), The envisioned technology or device would ultimately be used by utility contractors during service-line replacement seasons in the field.
The Lead Service Line Research Facility is a parcel of land which contains a small, simulated version of a water distribution system buried underground. The simulation includes service-line pipes comprised of various materials such as lead, copper, galvanized steel, and brass, buried beneath soil, sand, clay, gravel, and more.
The need for technology that can detect lead pipes underground
Environmental exposure to lead can have significant health impacts, especially to our most vulnerable populations, including children, pregnant women, and the elderly. Though the U.S. has been implementing legislation to mitigate the harmful effects of lead for over 50 years, events like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan have put a new spotlight on lead exposure which can enter water systems as a result of the corrosion of lead-containing pipes and plumbing materials. As we face aging water infrastructure across the country, the US EPA has been evaluating stricter regulations around the use of lead in water service lines.
Currently, the US EPA is targeting 2024 for water utilities across the country to provide a complete materials inventory of the water service lines within their distribution systems.
This development represents a pivotal market driver for innovations in the detection of lead service lines in the very near future. Utilities have few ways of effectively and accurately identifying these antiquated service lines across their entire territories without physically excavating and examining each individual line, making this approach impractical and prohibitively expensive.
There is an urgent need for a technology to detect service line materials in situ, without the need for excavation. The creation of a tool or technology that is capable of detecting service line materials including lead, copper, and galvanized steel, to an efficiency of 90% or greater without excavation would serve as an asset to the water industry in achieving this EPA regulatory requirement.