DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Confusion over a letter sent to thousands of DeKalb County homeowners warning of possible lead in water pipes.
Now, county officials are clarifying what that letter means.
The bottom line is DeKalb County says its pipes are fine with no lead. But the pipes that come off their lines into your homes, they simply don’t know.
And if your home is more than 45 years old or so, you may want to get them checked.
“You know, any time you get a letter with a bunch of words that say lead four, five times, it could be concerning,” said Ted Terry, DeKalb County commissioner.
Channel 2′s Richard Elliot went to Maria Houser of the Department of Watershed Management for clarification.
“As part of a federally mandated effort, we really wanted to inform our citizenry of the possibility of lead in their pipes,” Houser said.
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She said there is no lead in any of DeKalb’s public water pipes but the county can’t know about pipes on private property.
If your home is older than, say, 45 years old, there is a chance, albeit small, that there could be lead in them.
So the federally mandated letter was simply supposed to be a recommendation to get them checked.
“This is really a letter of assistance. This is really a letter of information, and this is a letter of transparency,” Houser said.
Terry told Elliot that county commissioners didn’t know the letter was going out at all but understands it was well-intentioned, but probably needed to be better worded.
“It’s probably one of those things where the department, the administration said, ‘Well, the federal government said we have to do this, so we’re going to do it, because we have to follow the law,’” Terry said.
If you do find lead in your private water pipes, you are responsible for them but not required to replace them.