The impact of lead pipes in the US

While watching the reporting on the Flint disaster, it occurred to me that in various degrees this might be a problem throughout the nation in homes which use lead water pipes.
There seems to be an increase of autism in young persons. Autism is just one result of lead poisioning. Can this be (in part) attributed to the long term effects of lead poisoning?
Considering the number of lead water pipes throughout the nation, may this not be considered a National problem?

 

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There have been lead pipes in America for over 100 years. There are chemicals which coat those pipes to keep the lead from leeching out into the water. The Flint water department used those to keep the water in the safe range as what the Federal guidelines were. There are many people who don't think that any lead should be found in water at all. The Federal government has been bringing the amounts that are acceptable up over the years from none to now about 15 parts per billion.

 

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Until a few years ago, we were exhausting bioactive lead compound fumes from the tailpipes of every car on every street in the nation. The lead pipe exposure is comparatively trivial - US homes have not had lead in their internal plumbing for a long time.

 

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It isn't a national problem. Water is tested several times a day for many things including ph. It's tested monthly for minerals and other contaminants. So if people are doing their jobs correctly, what happened in Flint should not happen anywhere else in the US, thanks to The Clean Water Act of 1973.

 

Go back 90 years all houses used lead pipes . So all americans born in 1990 should be dead or crazy . what makes this country go because influx of European and Mexican that come were they used water from rivers

 

Well, that's a little misleading. Lead pipes are only a problem if water acidity isn't properly managed per my previous post. Lead pipes form a metal oxide coating on pipes which if properly managed effectively seals the pipe and prevents lead seepage.

 

It got messed up when they changed sources and didn't treat the water properly. What a mess.

 

True, but lead builds a protective lead-sugar layer which sequesters the lead from entering the water supply. As I understand it, it was the chemicals used to treat the (unclean) river water which are responsible for the removal of this protective layer and allowing lead to enter the water supply.

Read more: http://www.lenntech.com/periodic/water/lead/lead-and-water.htm#ixzz40euGSLlw

 

Does Flint have a Lead problem or just rusted water problem ? If it is a Lead problem my question would be do the chlorinate the water to kill the bugs

 

Except lead is not a bug you can kill. In fact it may make the problem worse. Lead is a very heavy element and remains in the body where it lodges and impairs the normal functioning of very sensitive neural systems.

 

Flint has lead problem. Chlorination has nothing to do with lead contamination. The state switched water supply sources in order to save money. The problem was the new water source was much more acidic and corrosive, and that increased acidity caused the lead pipes to corrode thereby leeching lead into the water supply.

Here are the questions to be answered. Did the state not understand the new acidic water source would require more treatment and therefore cost more to process? Did they account for those costs when they made the decision to switch water sources? Why did the state not properly process the water from the new water source? Why did the state not spend the money to properly treat the water from the new source? There is nothing radical about processing water for human consumption. It happens around the clock across the world every day. This is just basic blocking and tackling.

 

I don't mean to disagree on political management. My question are on chemicals solubility if lead in water . Since it was mentioned about acidity of water , so it would be food fo know what was the pH of water in the lead plumbing and what treatment was given to kil l the pathogens in the water prior sending it into infrastructure for the consumer.
If the treatment was with chlorine then it is possible to see the hifh concentration of lead in the water supply for the consumer

 

If you task a financial advisor who has no knowledge of physics, but is good at finding ways to save money, this is what you get.
No different than installing sub-standard (cheaper) pressure valves at the bottom of the ocean, which failed at cost of an entire regional ecosystem affected by the oil-spill.

 

one wonders:
Just how caustic is the flint river?

 

Any good financial advisor/analyst would have done his homework. And sometimes financial advisers are trumped by management. Someone or a bunch of someones didn't do their homework or they acted with malice. I'm not sure what the real story is in Flint. If the Flint water facility was working as it should have been, it should have begun consuming more chemicals to adequately treat the water supply. That should have caused alarms. So what happened at Flint's water processing plant and why? Something is fishy in Flint.

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

 

I suppose fo 40 years Flint did not have lead problem , so it means the lead plumbing is not the culprit. Something was done to the water prior feeding the new water into the plumbing.. So the water comes from the river gets into a treatment. Question what sort of treatment gets the water from the river . I definitively would not be surprised if the river water was not chlorine treated . Chlorine or chlorine compound would corrode the lead plumbing.

 

It's all in the wiki page I posted. Give it a read.

 

Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River) to theFlint River (which Flint officials failed to apply corrosion control treatment to), its drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger.

The corrosive Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of lead.
I believe this statement is a lot of managment hand waving or bull shit

why they don't mention there procedure of water treatment.