COLUMBUS, Ind. – Columbus City Utilities (CCU) has received a grant from the Indiana Finance Authority (IFA) to help refine the water service line inventory.
The $200,000 grant will “be used to create a predictive model to identify water service line materials and then to validate the model by potholing several service lines to field verify the material,” commented Ashley Getz, Associate Director of Engineering.
All water systems in the country must have an inventory of the material of every service line in their system on both the utility-owned and customer-owned side by the end of October. This grant will help complete that process, as existing records were used for the initial inventory, but there are still a significant number of unknown pipe materials.
“The model will help us reduce the unknowns without having to dig up every service line,” said Getz.
CCU had previously received a $55,000 grant to assist in developing the initial inventory and a service line replacement plan.