BY ADAM ATKINSONNorth Country This Week

POTSDAM — The village DPW is taking the opportunity to replace any rusty or worn out curb shutoff boxes during the restarted lead lateral survey of village residents.

Village DPW Supervisor Brian Barrett told village trustees at their meeting Oct. 5 that if the crews digging for lateral water line lead surveys encounter faulty boxes at curbside the village is swapping in new ones.

“We are taking the opportunity to replace curb boxes, that’s the stem that comes up out of the ground, and it has our shut off in there,” Barrett said.

“So as we are digging these if those curb boxes are rusted and old, or we can’t actually operate the valves, we’re replacing those curb boxes and stems while they are being dug up,” he said.

The DPW supervisor said the work and replacement was an expense to the village, but necessary. Barrett said the valves in the boxes allow the crews to shut down water to a residence if the owner needs the water turned off.

“A lot of times now, some of these are so old that the minute we try to turn them they just snap,” he said. The DPW is then faced with more excavation to shut water off to a building if needed.

Barrett said a DPW member is inspecting the boxes at the residences where the excavation for the lead service lateral inspections are being done, taking advantage of the opportunity to determine which shut off mechanisms need to be swapped.

Barrett said overall the contractor handling the excavation for the lead service line inspection, Haggett Excavating of Norwood, is making progress. He said they are using two excavators and can conduct a fair number of inspections in a day's time.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is requiring Potsdam, and other municipalities to inventory all water service lines and identify sections containing lead. Any lead lines can then be removed over the next decade as required by the EPA.

The village is using the information from the survey to create an inventory of its nearly 1,400 water service lines.

The village has secured a grant from the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation to pay off the financing it secured to cover the inventory project cost of $1,077,000.

Excavations to survey the lines began a few weeks ago, after initial attempts to do the survey with an electrolysis process conducted by the firm ElectroScan in 2024 returned less than stellar results, said village officials.

The village had hired the firm in 2024 through the main contractor on the project, North Country engineering firm Barton & Loguidice, to conduct the onsite lead inspections. The electrolysis process was to determine if lead was present in underground water lines, sidestepping the traditional excavation of the lines to visually inspect the pipe. However, communication issues with the company and problems with the scanning process, left many service lines undetermined after the scans.

The village ended up freezing payment to ElectroScan at one point over the issues.

With the newly restarted survey process, excavations for the service line inspections are being done near the roadway around each residence’s curb valve.

Village DPW is backfilling at each location after the line has been documented.