"The quality of the water is not bad," said Robert Huber Thursday. The DeKalb resident says the water he gets from DeKalb County’s water system is an upgrade from other municipal water he’s used.
"I have better confidence in the municipal (water) here than I have in other parts of Atlanta," he said.
DeKalb County is among the metro Atlanta counties that have spent years rebuilding the countless miles of pipes connecting homes to the county water system.
"Some of our water pipes, public or private, are 100 years old, or 50 or 60 years old," said DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond. He says the county recently tested all those public water pipes—and all of the county’s pipes came up clean.
"The public portion of the system we inventoried, and we found no lead pipes in any of those pipes," Thurmond told 11Alive News.
However, the county didn’t inventory the water pipes leading from county water lines to residents' private homes or businesses. The county recently sent letters to residents urging them to test the water from those pipes themselves. Such test kits are commercially available.
Johnny Sughrue says his DeKalb water is probably OK. "It was built in the sixties, so I’m fairly confident the piping was done with maybe, hopefully, copper," he said.
Thurmond says homeowners can decide whether or not to test their water for lead now or at any time. If they do, the homeowner would have to absorb the cost.
