CROTHERSVILLE — Crothersville residents: Do you know the type of material of the water service line entering your home?
It could be copper, galvanized, plastic or lead.
Crothersville Utilities is applying for a $15,000 grant and asks customers to complete a short survey to help complete the mandatory inventory of service lines within its system.
Utility Director Mason Boicourt said he received 20 responses when the survey initially was sent out, and he just found out the second phase of funding had the threshold for service lines lowered to 700 to 1,000 customers, so he is eligible to apply.
The Crothersville Town Council recently unanimously approved for Boicourt to apply for the grant on behalf of the town and move forward with the existing GIS provider, WTH, to help get the inventory completed.
“Basically, what they are offering to do is help us get this inventory completed and meet the deadline and then help us after that figure out where we need to start verifying where places might be that we could find lead or galvanized or stuff like that that we would have to take out of service within 10 years,” Boicourt told the council.
WTH was the first one to contact him.
“They can do it with our GIS system that we currently pay for and kind of compound on that, and they will add layers on our map that will have individual service lines for the different addresses,” Boicourt said. “We can use that to complete our inventory, and then they will help us submit it to IDEM (Indiana Department of Environmental Management).”
Boicourt said WTH also will add other features to the GIS software.
“We can actually take it via smartphone out in the field with us to verify for utility locates and update our inventory in the field,” he said. “With our current GIS provider, they have excellent support. We’ve been using them for GIS for probably 13, 14 years.”
According to the service line inventory survey, Crothersville Utilities is responsible for completing a full overview of the water service lines from the water main to customers’ houses by October.
This means without customers’ participation, the utility will be required to go door to door to ask if they know what their line is coming into their house. If that can’t be done, then the utility will be required to dig on the customer’s side of the meter and the utility’s side of the meter to determine what kind of material the service line is made of.
This is a rule and regulation enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency with every public water system in the United States to comply with the Lead and Copper Rule that has been implemented.
Taking the short survey helps Crothersville Utilities achieve its goal of gathering information for this required assessment.
Anyone who owns more than one property with water service in Crothersville should take a new survey for each individual property.
The survey is accessible on the town’s website, crothersville.in.gov.