An inventory of Kansas City’s water service lines hasn’t turned up any lead pipes yet, but that doesn’t mean the city is finished looking — or out of the woods.

KC Water’s initial investigation, which involved searching public records like building permits and other filings, found that almost three-quarters of the city’s 178,000 service lines are not lead. But the materials used for 24,827 lines remain unknown, and 22,951 are made of galvanized steel and classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as “requiring replacement.”

Although KC Water officials are hopeful they can show that many of the galvanized lines are safe to leave in the ground, replacing them could cost the utility — and ultimately ratepayers — more than $450 million, between $12,500 and $20,000 per line. Property owners are responsible for paying for the portion of the line running from their house to the city’s line.

The city encourages homeowners to buy insurance for their portion of the water line, but that coverage is unlikely to include a lead or galvanized line replacement. Myles Meehan, a spokesperson for HomeServe, said the company’s service plans “are designed only for the emergency repair or replacement of service lines that are experiencing an operational failure … due to normal wear and tear.”

This story was inspired by The Beacon’s Kansas City Documenters, a program that trains and pays people to document public meetings.

Read the meeting notes

Meanwhile, Kansas City is just starting the process of identifying lines categorized as unknown, which could turn up lead pipes. 

“I’d be shocked if we didn’t find a few,” said Blake Anderson, facilities engineering division manager with KC Water. “But I don’t think we are going to find a lot.”

The water department replaced about 100 lead lines around 1990, soon after a 1986 federal ban on new lead water pipes took effect. But for the most part Kansas City’s developers in the early 20th century seem to have been more likely to choose galvanized plumbing, Anderson said.

The city will begin the process of identifying those unknown lines this spring, sending city contractors to inspect lines starting first in two northeast neighborhoods: Columbus Park and Lykins. It will also begin required spot checks of lines identified through records searches, Anderson said.

At its Feb. 5 meeting, the Kansas CIty Council approved an ordinance that allowed the water department to accept a $1.8 million grant from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources to fund the work. The ordinance also approved the water department’s contract with Ace Pipe Cleaning to handle the two-neighborhood pilot project.

Regardless of what inspections turn up, Kansas City is better off than many other cities around the country.

Chicago, for example, has found more than 400,000 lines that are lead or suspected of being lead. Denver is dealing with more than 60,000. And across the state, the city of St. Louis has close to 10,000, while St. Louis County reported 9,400, according to the EPA’s service line inventory.

Closer to home, St. Joseph reported more than 1,000 lead pipes, Lee’s Summit found 78, Topeka found 291 and Douglas County in Kansas reported 185. 

“We’re very, very lucky,” Anderson said.

Response to Flint

As part of a federal effort to eliminate lead from the country’s drinking water supply, the EPA required all community water systems to take an inventory of their water service lines — the portion of pipe that carries water from the city’s water main to individual properties — and replace any lead lines by the end of 2037.

The effort was in large part a response to the catastrophe that befell Flint, Michigan, a decade ago when dangerous levels of lead leached into the city’s water supply from old lead pipes, exposing people across the city to the toxic metal. 

Scientists believe no level of lead exposure is safe, especially for children and pregnant people. Ingesting it can leave lasting damage, affecting children’s brain development and adults’ kidney function and causing other serious health problems. 

Yet millions of lead pipes remain in place across the country.

In 2024, the Biden administration estimated that 9 million remained. Last year, the Trump administration lowered that estimate to 4 million based on results from an ongoing nationwide inventory of water lines. The Trump administration also recently cut some of the funding that had been allocated for replacing lead pipes.

In a statement, the EPA said that, under the Trump administration, the agency had funded 110,000 lead pipe replacements and, among other investments, awarded $26 million in grants to states and territories to support lead testing and remediation in schools and child care facilities.

The statement said the agency “is committed to Making America Healthy Again by ensuring that all Americans can rely on clean and safe drinking water. This work includes reducing exposure to lead.” 

Galvanized lines — steel pipes treated with a protective coating to prevent corrosion — can also contain lead if they were ever downstream from a lead source and especially if they were directly connected. The EPA says galvanized lines must be replaced if they’ve ever been downstream from lead or if a water system can’t prove they never were. 

Kansas City officials hope they can secure that proof for many of the galvanized lines currently listed as requiring replacement. Other nearby municipalities that have galvanized lines listed as needing replacement include Independence with more than 1,600, Gladstone with 43 and Lee’s Summit with 23.

Lasting damage

Water service lines remain a primary source of lead exposure, but they are far from the only source affecting drinking water.

Plumbing fixtures like faucets can still be sold with a small amount of lead, which becomes a problem if water is corrosive, said Adrienne L. Katner, a professor at Louisiana State University Health New Orleans who studies the effects of lead on public health.

And older water meters, water lines inside homes and solder once used to connect copper plumbing can also be sources of lead in drinking water.

“It’s very hard to find a house, whether it’s old or even new, that doesn’t have some kind of lead in the plumbing or the pipes,” Katner said.

It’s important for people to understand that no level of lead exposure is safe, Katner said, and to take precautions. Even relatively low-price water pitcher filters designed to filter out lead can help, she said.

For now, scientists are still studying the long-term health effects that could show up years after someone is exposed to lead. They’ll have a big cohort that could provide clues in coming years.

People born in the 1960s and early 1970s had by far the greatest lead exposure thanks largely to the ubiquity of leaded gasoline, which got in the air and soil alike. As they age, that lead could likely affect their health.

“The thing about lead,” Katner said, “is even though we’re probably going to urinate most of that lead out that we’re exposed to, there is a small amount of lead that remains in the body.”

Some is stored in bones, where it has an extremely long half-life. It could take 30 years, she said, to get rid of just half of it. The rest is dormant until stress, pregnancy, lactation or other events like aging prompt it to leach out and recirculate in the body, causing issues like heart disease.

“Even at these low levels that we’re drinking,” Katner said, “it accumulates in us, and it will come back to haunt us, because now we have this endogenous source of lead in our body.”

Preparing for inspections

Angie Hicks-Curtis, executive director of the Lykins Neighborhood Association, helped KC Water make an informational video for residents to understand the water line inspection process and why it was starting in their neighborhood. She said some of her neighbors were initially concerned that being chosen for the pilot project was an indication that more lines might be suspect.

“They wanted to know why they are targeting Lykins. And are there concerns?” she said. 

But in reality both Lykins and Columbus Park were chosen for the early inspections because they fall in disadvantaged census tracts, which are the only areas that qualify for state grant funding.

Eventually all parts of the city will see inspectors checking water lines, but the water department will have to come up with funding for many of them. The utility is working to educate customers about how they can help with the process.

To check lines, the department will use hydro-excavation, a process that involves high-pressure water to bore into the ground. 

”The worst thing it’s going to do is rip up some tulip bulbs,” Anderson said.

Inspectors will also need to check lines inside people’s homes to determine the line’s material if it is unknown. Property owners can check their water line’s status by entering their address on the city’s inventory map. If the line is listed as unknown, a self-reporting tool lets people do their own inspection and report that to the city.

Here are some characteristics to look for, according to a water department video.

If a magnet sticks to a water line, it’s probably galvanized steel. If it doesn’t, it’s probably copper, plastic or lead. Using a coin to gently scratch the pipe — the way you might scratch off a lottery ticket — can reveal more. On a copper pipe, the scratch will reveal a bright copper color. The galvanized lines will stay dull and gray. And scratching the lead line will turn up a shiny silver surface.

Even if some lead lines are still in use in Kansas City neighborhoods, Anderson said, there’s no reason to panic. The high pH level of the city’s water, brought about by the water system’s use of lime in its treatment process, would help protect people from being exposed to the toxin, he said.

“Any lead lines that we do find are probably going to be pretty scaled over so it’s unlikely the lead would have diffused out,” Anderson told members of the Kansas City Council’s Transportation, Infrastructure and Operations committee during a Feb. 3 meeting. “I think because of the way our treatment processes work, even if we sample those lines, we probably wouldn’t find (an actionable level) of lead in there.”

But Katner warned that water meeting the EPA’s “actionable level,” which is the most lead allowed to comply with regulations, isn’t always safe. The actionable level still isn’t lead-free, Katner said.

“The regulations are not health-protective,” she said. “The health-based standard for lead is zero.”