Happy Thanksgiving! 

Make sure to give thanks for safe, clean water!

Not everyone has my engineering background, so I thought I would attach a diagram and some annotated photos to explain what all the fuss is about and get all of you "city people" out there thinking about how the water actually gets to your house.

The original sketch comes from the Ontario.ca website and is credited to the City of London.  I have marked the curb stop valve location and included a couple of photos of my own.

My issue is that the City is asking my plumber to retain at least six inches of lead pipe on the "Private side" of the "curb stop" shut-off valve to make the transition with a City-provided coupling to my new copper service pipe.  They are promoting this because the pipe on the Public side of the curb stop valve is also made of lead (as you can see in the photo) and which they would rather not replace for budgetary reasons. 

But from a health standpoint, that obviously makes no sense at all.

In fact, replacing the service line is relatively easy with the right equipment.  The City of Boston, for example, has been replacing lead services free-of-charge since 2023 and claims that, in many cases, they can pull a new service pipe from the residence to the main within 4-6 hours by attaching the new line to the old one, and pulling it through the ground with a backhoe - no excavation required except to make attachments.   Horizontal boring also uses a similar method to winch new lines back through the ground without disturbing the surface.

In any case, attaching a new line of any kind to an existing lead line is just a bad practice.  Disturbing a lead line by moving or cutting into it, risks breaking up the calcified layer that typically forms over time on the inside of the pipe, potentially freeing lead-containing particles and exposing more fresh lead to the flow of water. 

Also, you don't need to be an engineer to know that joining a new pipe to any pipe that is over a hundred years old (and that has already failed once in my case) just sounds like another leak waiting to happen.  I wonder who would be held responsible if the joint between new-and-old fails on the Private side of the service line a year later?

Hope this was helpful.  Thanks again to everyone who has signed!