On July 20, Heart of the Community Neighborhoods, Citizen Action of New York, Open Buffalo, Buffalo Sewer Authority, BlueConduit, NRDC, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and elected representatives from New York held a press conference about the launch of a community-led project to locate and remove lead drinking water service lines in Buffalo. The project is funded by Google.org.
Here are examples of the press coverage. The image at the top of this post is Oluwole A. McFoy, P.E., General Manager of the Buffalo Sewer Authority speaking to Channel 2 News.
Channel 7 WKBW
BUFFALO, N.Y. (WKBW) — A new lead pipeline map is launching in Buffalo to track outdated infrastructure homes to replace the city’s entire network of lead pipes that’s estimated to cost half a billion dollars.
WKBW (full story)
The video of the live broadcast on Channel 7.
“The EPA and WHO have shown that we have a significant amount of lead in our [drinking] water system, and in Buffalo, we estimated about 40-thousand lead lines.”
Executive Director Stephanie Simeon of Heart of the City Neighborhoods
“So to take existing records, water tests, even census information about housing conditions. And lot size and parcel size, all of that together can generate our estimate on what homes have lead service lines.”
Eric Schwartz, BlueConduit co-Founder and co-CEO, quoted in the WKBW news story
Read the full story and watch the video on the WKBW site.
Channel 2 WGRZ News
There is a new tool being used in select cities across the country to detect and identify lead pipes, and it is coming to Buffalo.
WGRZ (full story)
“We want to find those service lines, and we want to get rid of them.”
Oluwole McFoy, the CEO and general manager of Buffalo Sewer, quoted in the WGRZ news story
“There might be starting out only a small number of homes for which we have some verified data, and part of this project is increasing that number. But what we can do is, we can then extrapolate from outside of that set into all of the homes for which we have not yet verified it, and that’s really the way that this statistical machine learning algorithm works,”
Eric Schwartz, BlueConduit co-Founder and co-CEO, quoted in the WGRZ news story
Watch the video and read the transcript on the WGRZ news site.
Resources
- Read the press release
- Learn more about the project funded by Google.org
- Take a tour of BlueConduit’s lead service line prediction platform
