BY ADAM ATKINSONNorth Country This Week

POTSDAM — The engineering firm handling the village’s lead service inventory project is having difficulty getting residents to sign up for the inspection.

According to a David Powers from the engineering firm Barton & Loguidice at the village board meeting July 15th, about 250 properties had signed up thus far out of 1400 to have the inspection done after an initial mailing to residents and businesses.

“So we’re only at about 18 percent from that initial mailing,” Powers said.

The engineering firm Barton & Loguidice, with offices in Watertown and other areas, is the lead firm on the lead inspection and is contracting the lead inspection portion out to national company Electro Scan Inc.

“ElectroScan said when those mailings first went out, we had about 100 people sign up in the first few days, and then as you can expect it just slowly tapered off to where we are only having a few people sign up each week,” Powers said.

As of the second week in July the firm had completed scans at 122 residents, Village Administrator Isabelle Gates-Shult told the village board at the meeting July 15.

“Sixty-four were complete with no lead that was detected. And then 58 were abandoned due to the crew’s inability to access the lateral which was due to the presences of bonnet valves,” Gates-Shult said.

For the locations that were abandoned, ElectroScan will schedule a time to bring in their plumber to return to the house and replace the bonnet valve, the administrator said.

“The cost to replace the valve is the responsibility of ElectroScan and is included in their inspection price,” she said.

The project, required by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lead rules, seeks to identify lead sections from the service pipe lines feeding residences. Many of the lateral service lines installed prior to 1986 are expected to contain some amount of lead in the solder, fixtures or pipes.

The sections identified can then be removed by the village in a second phase of the project over the next decade as required by the EPA.

The village has 10 years for full compliance with the removal of the lead laterals.

The village was awarded a grant for just over a million dollars to pay 100 percent of the inventory project. B&L is subcontracting the work to Electro Scan, which will use electrical resistance to analyze the material used in the village’s roughly 1400 service laterals, looking for lead. The scan will take less than one hour and require no digging.

However, the village needs more residents and business owners to sign up with the village to get the scan complete.

Powers told the board that he and village officials are working on potential ideas to get village residents and property owners engaged to sign up.

“The first thought, it’s an easy one, is door hangers,” Powers said. “Most people might have that piece of paper on their counter or in their junk drawer and the door hanger might remind them to get it out and sign up. Fred (Hanss, village planner and economic development director) had some other ideas, including potentially getting an article in the paper, maybe doing a radio spot,” Powers said.

Powers said the homes that don’t sign up for the initial inventory document, due in October to the EPA, get marked as “unknown.” Powers said the federal government requires this preliminary inventory be completed by October.

“Most communities aren’t where you are. They are going to have 99 percent ‘unknown’ unless they know from a recent project,” the engineer said.

To sign-up for the survey with ElectroScan, village residents are encouraged to visit www.electroscan.com/Potsdam or calling 315-856-3156.