Reading passage Grade 6 Science
Finding and Replacing Fernwald's Lead Water Lines
A grade 6 science reading passage on how a fictional town finds and replaces lead service lines, and the national rules that keep tightening.
Objectives
- Students will identify how a town finds and replaces lead service lines using evidence from the text.
- Students will read a timeline table to find when the federal lead limit changes.
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.
- Lead (Pb)
- A soft gray metal that is poisonous, especially for children. It can get into drinking water from old pipes and plumbing, so utilities work hard to control it.
Also: coating, inventory
Teacher overview
This passage explains how a town finds and replaces old lead water pipes, using Fernwald, a fictional town, as the example. It describes what a service line is, how a coating inside lead pipes lowers the risk, and how federal rules are tightening. A teacher can assign it to build science reading skills and to connect a real public-health topic to how communities solve problems.
Passage
Every home gets its water through a small pipe that runs from the street main to the house. That pipe is called the service line. In many older towns, some service lines are made of lead. Lead is a metal that can harm people if it gets into the water they drink. Children are most at risk.
Water plants add a treatment that coats the inside of lead pipes. This thin coating greatly lowers how much lead gets into the water, but it does not stop all of it, and digging or a change in the water can knock it loose. No amount of lead in drinking water is known to be safe, so the lasting fix is to replace lead lines.
The town of Fernwald did not know which homes still had lead lines. To find out, the water crew dug small test holes and checked what metal each pipe was made of. They also read old building records. Then they made a list and a map that marked every known lead line. A list like this is called a service line inventory. It is the first step, because a town cannot replace pipes it has not found.
Replacing the lines takes time. Fernwald plans to swap out every lead service line for a safe one. To do this, crews must dig up each pipe and put in a new one. There are many lines, and each one costs money to replace. For these reasons, the work will take years, not weeks.
Fernwald is not alone. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 4 million lead service lines are still in use across the country. That 2025 estimate was built from inventories that towns like Fernwald made of their own pipes. Federal rules are getting stricter, as the timeline below shows. Today a town must take action if lead in the water reaches 15 ppb, which means 15 parts per billion. In 2027 that level drops to 10 ppb. Newer rules also ask towns to replace nearly all of their lead lines within about ten years.
| Year | What the rule requires |
|---|---|
| Now | Act if lead reaches 15 ppb |
| 2027 | Action level drops to 10 ppb |
| Within about 10 years | Replace nearly all lead lines |
Questions
What is a service line, according to the passage?
What did Fernwald's water crew do to find out which homes had lead lines?
Using the timeline table, in what year does the action level drop to 10 ppb?
The passage says water plants add a coating inside lead pipes. Explain what the coating does and why towns still replace lead lines, using details from the text.
Why does the passage say replacing the lead lines will take years and not weeks?
The passage says about 4 million lead service lines remain across the country. Explain why this makes Fernwald's work part of a much larger national effort.
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: The service line is the small pipe that runs from the street main to a house. The passage states this in the first paragraph.
Answer: The crew dug small test holes to check what metal each pipe was made of and read old building records, then made a map of every known lead line. This describes the inventory step in the passage.
Answer: 2027. The timeline table shows the action level dropping to 10 ppb in that year.
Answer: The coating greatly lowers how much lead gets into the water, but it does not stop all of it and can be knocked loose. Because no amount of lead is known to be safe, replacing the lines is the lasting fix.
Answer: Because there are many lines, crews must dig up and replace each pipe one at a time, and each replacement costs money. The passage lists these reasons when it says the work will take years.
Answer: Answers will vary but should note that about 4 million lead lines remain nationwide, so many other towns face the same job as Fernwald. This shows Fernwald's replacement work is one small part of a much larger effort across the country.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a simple labeled drawing of a service line running from the street main to a house, and a coated pipe versus an uncoated one, for students to reference while reading. Allow questions 1, 2, and 3 to be answered by pointing to the sentence or table row that gives the answer.
Extension
Ask students to use only the passage to explain, in a short paragraph, why making an inventory must come before replacement, and what could go wrong if a town started digging without one.
ELL supports
Pre-teach service line, coating, and inventory with plain definitions and pictures before reading. Allow the literal questions (1, 2, 3) to be answered with short phrases, and provide the frame "The coating helps because ___, but towns still replace lead lines because ___." for question 4.