What It Will Really Take To Replace America's Lead Lines
By Shelley Copsey
Ohio’s plan to replace 745,000 lead service lines in 15 years is bold, urgent, and emblematic of a broader national mandate. States across the country are launching similar initiatives to eliminate lead from drinking water infrastructure — and rightly so. Nobody can stand for another public health disaster.
But, if we're to meet these targets, we must be honest about what it will truly take to deliver.
Aging infrastructure improvements are among the most complex initiatives communities can tackle. Recent Deloitte research confirms that delays and cost overruns persist as significant challenges for large infrastructure projects.
Replacing lead pipes isn’t just about digging and swapping materials. It’s about solving for workforce shortages, incomplete data, and execution at scale. Without addressing these constraints head-on, communities risk failing to meet compliance deadlines and incurring rising costs. Avoidance could also lead to ongoing public safety issues and the loss of public trust.
Build Capacity Now, Not Later
The water sector is already operating with a significant skilled labor shortage tied to recruiting, training, and retaining employees. Lead pipe replacement will demand thousands of field workers — many of whom don’t yet exist within the current workforce.
If states wait until funding is secured to start building capacity, they’ll fall into the trap of sequential delivery. We see this all the time: funding flows in, but the workforce isn’t ready, so each phase happens slowly and in isolation. Delays compound.
Utilities and contractors should instead be asking today:
- What adjacent trades can we upskill into pipe replacement roles? Trades like landscaping, plumbing, and telecommunications already work underground and could be trained to support replacement efforts with minimal ramp-up time.
- How can we use purpose to draw new talent to the field? Framing this work as a once-in-a-generation chance to solve real-world problems — and participate in a digital transformation of how fieldwork gets done — can help inspire the next wave of workers to join and stay. About nine out of 10 Gen Zers and millennials consider a sense of purpose to be important but many also don’t think of this sort of infrastructure work as meaningful. This is a miss.
- What can we do now to prevent diverting labor and other resources from other critical infrastructure efforts? Beyond people, lead pipe replacement will create a ripple effect across the related supply chain, including materials, PPE, safety inspectors, and more. If every state competes for the same resources, we’ll see artificial inflation and delays. By sequencing projects regionally and using data to prioritize high-impact areas, utilities can smooth demand and prevent strain across competing programs.
The right answer won’t come from one strategy. It will come from designing delivery models that make the most of the resources we have, while rapidly growing the ones we need.
Use Technology That’s Proven
This isn’t work you can manage with clipboards and spreadsheets. Lead pipe replacement demands speed, scale, and precision, none of which can be achieved without technology. From compliance to coordination, real-time digital tools are the backbone of modern infrastructure delivery.
However, you can’t spend half of the first five years of a mandate in procurement and the other half testing a pilot. You need to move quickly and decisively.
It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the numerous tech choices. Here’s how to make smart technology decisions that move you forward.
- Focus on AI-first platforms. AI learns from field data in real time, helping utilities move from reactive problem-solving to proactive decision-making. For lead line replacement projects, that means automatically flagging work that may be out of compliance, predicting areas of potential delay, and streamlining oversight across large, distributed crews.
AI-first tools also reduce the administrative burden on field teams by capturing key details through video, voice, and GPS — freeing workers to focus on quality and safety while delivering faster, cleaner reporting back to the office.
- Choose tools that are already delivering outcomes and can scale. This isn’t the time to experiment with unproven solutions. Communities are on the clock, and the consequences of delay are real. Prioritize platforms that have already demonstrated value in field-heavy, compliance-driven environments that mirror lead line replacement work.
Evaluating scalability can be tricky if you're not a tech expert, but there are a few ways to think this through (outside of calling in your resident tech expert).
Ask vendors about specific scalability indicators such as system performance under high usage, response time, and throughput. Request references from customers and ask whether they experienced any breakdowns or roadblocks as project needs expanded. Prioritize platforms that are modular and flexible, meaning they are capable of adding features or expanding user capacity without major disruption. Finally, confirm the provider offers dedicated support and upgrade paths to ensure your systems evolve with the project’s scale and complexity.
- Make sure those tools center the fieldworker. If fieldworkers won’t use it, your project is dead on arrival. Choose platforms designed with input from field teams that reduce friction in day-to-day operations and allow crews to capture data on the go. That means intuitive interfaces, features that support voice and video instead of typing, and workflows that reflect how jobs actually get done on the ground.
When you do choose a tech partner, don’t get stuck in pilot-itis. The urgency of lead pipe replacement doesn’t allow for years-long testing cycles or small-scale rollouts that never move forward.
If a technology has demonstrated success elsewhere and meets the other criteria outlined above, build a fast but thorough onboarding plan and move quickly into implementation. Teams need to learn by doing. The longer you wait to go all in, the more ground you lose.
Deliver With Evidence, Not Assumptions
Now that your people, processes, and technology are in motion, it’s critical to establish a stronger data foundation that captures and verifies what’s actually happening in the field.
One of the biggest causes of inefficiency in fieldwork today is poor asset documentation. Incomplete records of where lead lines exist or what materials were used in past upgrades add hours or days to every job.
To avoid recreating that problem for the next generation, we must build a better standard for infrastructure data. That doesn’t just mean digital twins. It means real-time, field-generated digital evidence, like:
- GPS-stamped photo and video logs
- Workflow-verified documentation of material replacements
- Live collaboration between inspectors and crews
All of these activities and interactions anchored in physical reality should be ingested and used to improve future projects. We’ve seen partners like Cadent Gas boost productivity by 12.5% in the first week alone by simply understanding when and where teams were on site. That visibility also reduced standing time and cut customer complaint fines in half. These are the kinds of proven gains needed to meet the scale and urgency of America’s lead line replacement mandate.
Replacing lead service lines is a mandate. It's also the right thing to do. But doing it well will take more than funding and political will. It will take strategic delivery planning, integrated technology, and field-centric execution.
We have the tools. We know the risks. Now we need the resolve to replace what’s in the ground and how we work above it.
As the co-founder and CEO of FYLD, Shelley Copsey leads a venture that empowers infrastructure field teams and managers to make data-driven decisions in real-time, leading to greater safety, productivity, and quality assurance. She has over 20 years of experience in the intersection of physical infrastructure and digital technologies, as well as the human transformation required to deliver on the promise of emerging technologies.