A lead-pipe-replacement update in Albany

Across Albany, crews are digging up city streets. On Friday, city leaders reminded that this work is all part of Albany making progress toward safer streets and replacing lead drinking water service lines.  

Standing at the corner of Western Avenue and Manning Boulevard, Mayor Kathy Sheehan announced the installation of high visibility crosswalks, new trees, and lead infrastructure replacements in Albany. Sheehan says keeping Albany a "walkable city," means taking all users into consideration to ensure safe streets...   "...including installing approximately 75 new street humps across 25 streets all throughout our city that will be happening just this year, adding to the street humps that have already been installed. We are using the hard earned dollars that we have by working smarter, and that is why we have been coordinating. And I think part of the reason that we've been successful in doing this is that last year, we created a new Department of Engineering with its own Commissioner, taking all of those engineering resources that we had across traffic engineering and various departments and put them under one roof, and that group has been able to work very closely with the engineers in the water department to replace lead services," Sheehan said.

Rebecca Caldon, a supervising engineer with the Albany Water Department, says the city has been replacing lead pipes prior to street-repaving initiatives.

"We've done almost 200 service lines in conjunction with the paving project, and that's just with our contractor. In addition to that, within the city of Albany water department staff, we've used them to do about 60 or 70 additional ones that also on some streets, precede that paving work. And all of this is possible because of $12 million in grants that we have from the State Lead program and from the bipartisan infrastructure law that has given us that funding to go ahead and get these lead services out, with the goal of completing that within 10 years," Caldon said. 

Caldon says the city is on track to meet federal mandates. About 1,500 to 2,000 service lines have been replaced, with thousands more to go. She notes that, whenever possible, lead pipe replacements are done in tandem with street-paving projects to minimize disruption to neighborhoods. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s deadline for municipalities to replace all lead and galvanized drinking water service lines is November 1, 2037.