Maryland Mega-Utility Among First To Try Zinc Piping Fix

A utility in Maryland appears to be among the first in the nation to use new zinc treatment technology as it upgrades its water infrastructure.

“Maryland’s largest water utility says it’s among the first in the country to begin installing a new kind of water main with a protective wrap that is designed to withstand breaks for a century or more, compared with the 50 to 75 years its current pipes typically last,” The Washington Post reported.

“The current piping, most of which is iron in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties” will be replaced with “zinc-coated iron piping wrapped in a V-Bio Enhanced Polyethylene encasement,” WTOP reported.

The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) “is the first water utility in the country to make zinc-coated pipe with V-Bio film standard materials,” according to Allen Cox from the P.E. Ductile Iron Pipes Research Association, per WTOP. Zinc-coated pipes have been tried in in Kansas, New England, and Europe, according to WTOP.

WSSC, which provides water and wastewater services for customers near Washington D.C., is one of the largest water utilities in the nation. It manages a network of nearly 5,600 miles of fresh water pipeline and over 5,400 miles of sewer pipeline, according to the utility.

As the utility upgrades its infrastructure, it chose a solution that is designed to ward off corrosion, reports said.

“The zinc is designed to corrode faster than the iron, making it dissolve sooner and defer the corrosion of the iron. The encasement keeps bacteria away from the piping to minimize organic factors that cause corrosion,” WTOP reported.

Gary Gumm, WSSC’s chief engineer, explained the benefits of this approach to WTOP.

“This is really going to get us to 100 years,” he said. “At 100 years, we’ll have to replace them less frequently and at $1.6 million a mile for design and construction, replacing less frequently over a long period of time means a whole lot of money saved.”

Rates were raised for nearly 2 million WSSC customers this year in part to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades, according to a previous WTOP report.

Carla Reid, the CEO of WSSC, wrote a letter to customers at the time of the rate hike explaining the change: “Yes, water rates are going up.”

For the typical user, rates went up more than $3 per month, Reid wrote. She explained: “The short answer is aging infrastructure.”

For more on infrastructure changes visit Water Online’s Asset Management Solutions Center.