Career spotlight Grade 6 Careers & CTE
Mapping Stannington's Lead Service Lines: A GIS Analyst Profile
A grade 6 career spotlight on a utility GIS analyst who builds a lead service line inventory, with the education path and percent-of-inventory questions.
Objectives
- Students will describe how a GIS analyst builds a lead service line inventory.
- Students will explain how a federal drinking water rule shapes utility work.
- Students will use percent reasoning on inventory and sampling counts.
Vocabulary
- Service line
- A service line is the small pipe that connects the water main under the street to the plumbing inside one home or building. It is the last leg of the trip water makes to your tap.
Also: GIS, inventory, attribute, records research
Teacher overview
Every water utility in the country now has to know what each of its service lines is made of, and someone has to build that map. This profile follows a GIS analyst in the fictional city of Stannington who is assembling a lead service line inventory. Students often assume the utility already has this information filed somewhere. In most cities the records are paper cards, tax maps, and handwritten job tickets from many decades, so the map has to be rebuilt one address at a time. Mapping work is reached through several education paths, including a two-year certificate, a four-year degree, and on-the-job training after time in the field.
Career Profile
What the job is. Priya Raman is a GIS analyst for the water utility in the city of Stannington. GIS stands for geographic information system. It is mapping software that stores a location together with facts about that location. Each of those facts is called an attribute. For a service line, the attributes include the address, the year installed, the pipe size, and the material.
Her main project is the lead service line inventory. A service line is the small pipe that runs from the water main in the street to one building. Older lines were sometimes made of lead, which can dissolve into the water. The federal Lead and Copper Rule Improvements require water systems to inventory those lines and replace nearly all lead ones within ten years. The rule also lowers the lead action level from 15 ppb to 10 ppb in 2027. Nationally, EPA estimates that about 4 million lead service lines are still in the ground.
A typical day. Priya starts with records research. She opens scanned permit cards from the 1920s through the 1950s and reads the pipe material written by the plumber. Each card that she can read becomes a confirmed record in the map. Cards that are blank or unreadable stay in a category called unknown.
Next she works with the field crews. When a crew digs at a curb stop, they photograph the pipe and scratch it with a key. Lead is soft and scratches to a shiny silver, while copper scratches to a penny color. The crew enters the result on a phone, and the record lands in Priya's map that afternoon. She checks each entry, fixes addresses that landed on the wrong side of the street, and colors the map by material.
In the afternoon she builds reports. The state wants a count of confirmed lead, confirmed non-lead, and unknown lines. The utility wants a replacement order, so Priya shades the blocks with the most lead and the most schools and child care centers. She also prints a letter list, because every household with a lead or unknown line has to be notified.
Getting into the role. Some GIS analysts hold a four-year degree in geography, environmental science, or computer science. Others earn a two-year college certificate in GIS and start as mapping technicians. A third route begins in the field, since crew members and meter technicians who know the pipe network well often move into mapping. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a separate pay figure for water utility GIS analysts, so none is listed here, and utilities post the pay range with each job notice. For sector context, the Bureau projects about 10,000 openings each year from 2025 to 2035 for water and wastewater operators specifically, which is a different job from this one.
Student Handout
Discussion questions
- Name two sources of information Priya uses to decide what a service line is made of.
- Explain the difference between a confirmed record and an unknown record in the inventory.
- The city of Stannington has 12,400 service lines. Priya has confirmed the material of 4,340 of them. What percent of the service lines are confirmed?
- In one older neighborhood in the city of Stannington, crews dug up 200 service lines and found that 30 of them were lead. What percent of the lines dug in that neighborhood were lead?
- Explain how the federal Lead and Copper Rule Improvements change what Priya does at work, using the Career Profile.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Any two of these sources.
Scanned permit cards from the 1920s through the 1950s, photographs and scratch tests sent in by field crews at the curb stop, and the pipe size and install year already stored in the map. - Answer: A confirmed record has a known pipe material, and an unknown record does not.
A card that a plumber filled in legibly, or a pipe a crew dug up and scratched, becomes confirmed. A blank or unreadable card leaves the line in the unknown category. - Answer: 35 percent.
4,340 divided by 12,400 equals 0.35, and 0.35 written as a percent is 35 percent. - Answer: 15 percent.
30 divided by 200 equals 0.15, and 0.15 written as a percent is 15 percent. - Answer: The rule makes the inventory and the replacement plan required work.
The rule requires systems to inventory service lines and replace nearly all lead ones within ten years, and it lowers the lead action level from 15 ppb to 10 ppb in 2027, so Priya must produce counts for the state, a replacement order for the utility, and a notification list for households.
Differentiation
Support
Give students a five-row table with the columns Address, Year, Material, and Status, filled with two confirmed rows and three blank-material rows, and ask them to mark which rows are unknown. Provide the fractions 4,340/12,400 and 30/200 already written for questions 3 and 4, so students only convert to a percent.
Extension
Ask students to look again at question 4, where 15 percent of the lines dug in one older neighborhood were lead. Have students write a paragraph explaining why a utility would not simply apply the neighborhood percent to every block, and what extra information would make an estimate more trustworthy.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "service line," "inventory," "attribute," and "records research" with a simple sketch of a street, a water main, and three small pipes running to houses. Label one pipe lead, one copper, and one with a question mark. Allow questions 1 and 2 to be answered with short phrases or with labels added to the sketch.
Extensions
Have students write the short notification letter a utility would send to a household with an unknown service line. The letter should say what unknown means, what the household is asked to do, and where to get more information, in language a reader without a science background can follow.