‘Normal practice’ will waste millions of gallons of water in Seattle
Apr 23, 2016, 7:12 AM
Seattle Public Utilities recommends customers run their tap water for two minutes if they haven't run it in a few hours. (Joe Shlabotnik, Flickr)
(Joe Shlabotnik, Flickr)
After discovering lead in water pipes in Tacoma, Seattle Public Utilities took a look at its own system and suggested that customers run their water for two minutes if they haven’t used their pipes in about six hours.
Though Seattle Mayor Ed Murray argues that despite Tacoma’s discovery, the Seattle utility didn’t recommend the two-minute practice out of any relation to Tacoma.
“That is a normal practice,” Seattle Mayor Ed Murray told KIRO 7’s Alison Grande. “That is not new advice based on Tacoma. That is a standing recommendation, federal standards that any of us should do.”
“Anyone who is gone for a while, particularly for a few days, should just run it as a matter of course,” he said. “That is standard recommended practice.”
Those two minutes can add up. According to the Seattle Times, up to 5 gallons can go down the drain in that timespan. That amounts to about 1 million gallons in two minutes across the 164,000 customers in Seattle.
But Linda V. Mapes with the Times notes that all this concern is from three pipes in Tacoma that showed evidence of lead leaching from a pipe. A gooseneck pipe in particular — a pipe that connects a home to a water main.
Seattle Public Utilities is currently determining which homes in Seattle may have the same problem, — approximately 2,000. Mapes notes that the city’s most recent test of tap water in 2014 found no lead or copper in the water.
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