Can Robots Find Our Lead Service Lines? Durfee Elementary School Students Think They Can!

Last October I got an email from the Durfee Elementary School Robotics team asking me to teach them about lead service lines and talk about things we could do to provide safe drinking water when there are over 100,000 lead service lines in Detroit. We talked about corrosion control and construction. They considered a solution involving filters since kids like them live in homes with lead service lines and filters help reduce lead exposure right now. But it just wasn’t the right solution for them. One of the 11-year-olds looked up at me and said “Detroit says they’re going to remove all the lead service lines in 20 years. That’s too long. I’ll be an adult, I might even have my own kids. What can we do to speed this up?”

When I came back a few weeks later, they came up with the idea of a lead pipe detecting worm-bot. Many water utilities do not have good records of which homes have lead service lines, and confirming all the materials in every service line would require digging up pipes and shaking up lead, increasing exposure risk during the process. Worm-bots could swim through the distribution system collecting information about every service line. Then water utilities would only need to dig up the pipes they confirmed are made of lead. This strategy could save a lot of money identifying the 6.5 to 10 million lead service lines that deliver drinking water to homes in the United States every day.

I’m not the only one who thought this was a great idea. The Durfee Bulldogs won second place at the state level competition for Michigan. These kids are motivated to put their new knowledge of robotics to work to help their community. Take a closer look at their work at this Fox 2 News story about their hard work.

Durfee Bulldogs Robotics Team