Lead pipe replacement gets complex
A lot of landlords in town are obliged to replace their old water main connection made of lead pipe, and it can get expensive. Although the headline here hints at irregularities over the city doing the work itself, the story doesn’t really bear out any corruption. You can get it done by a contractor you choose, but that might be more complicated. End of story.
mare 17:08 on 2021-09-06 Permalink
Replacing the water mains entry involves opening the road and removing a 1M section section of the sidewalk.
After the work is done, the situation is as follows:
1) there is a section of the sidewalk missing. That sections is fixed, by the city (!), in stages. First the edge will be cut square, a few weeks later some gravel is thrown in, a few weeks later more gravel, and then finally a new concrete sidewalk is poured. The whole process can take many months.
2) there is a piece of road patched, by the plumbing company on the same day they replace the pipe. The gravel supporting the asphalt isn’t compacted very well, because that takes a few weeks and rainfall, so over the course of a year, the patch sinks 20 cm, cracks open and is yet another recurring pothole location.
In our block there are now about 10 sections like that, and a few times already the sidewalk was interrupted on both sides of the street, making the street a no-go for people in wheelchairs or mobility scooters. That’s just in one 250m section of one street, there are thousands of sections like it.
It makes so much more sense to do this work all at once, per block, combined with the redoing of the roadbed, which has to be done anyway, partly because of the potholes caused by the work already done. But the city refuses to provide any timeframe *when* the roadbed will be redone, so some owners start doing the work now anyway. (The lead levels are pretty low here, we had the water tested a few years ago, but we regularly get an alarming letter from the city.)
Interesting factoid: last year we asked three companies for quotes, together with both of our neighbours and thus combining three buildings. The different quotes were remarkably close, and they said that they had a standard price per building and doing three at the time wouldn’t be any cheaper. It would definitely be cheaper for them…