"It has been a bit of a challenge to get them to change
lead pipes."
The
lead pipe replacement program was enacted at the advice of City Manager Rick Kozal in response to directives from the Illinois Department of Public Health and possible legislation coming from Springfield regarding
lead pipes.
(35) John Wisely and Todd Spangler, Where are the
lead pipes? In many cities, we just don't know, Detroit Free Press, February 28, 2016, available at http://www.freep.com/story/news/ Iocal/michigan/flint-water-crisis/2016/02/27/ lead-water-lines-lurk-unknown-many-cities/ 80551724/.
The company is in the process of replacing hundreds of
lead pipes with modern plastic ones to ensure it continues to exceed water quality regulations.
Lead pipes have traditionally been used because they have a long life span and they resist pinhole leaks, which are a common problem with underground pipes.
Flint's new mayor--Karen Weaver, elected in December-has called for quickly removing
lead pipes. But replacing them could take years and cost billions of dollars.
Unfortunately, as the historian Werner Troesken has observed, cities with soft water overwhelmingly chose
lead pipes over iron because iron pipes corrode in soft water.
Alerted about the incident, two other Alpha Sigma members identified as Ernesto Luis Pangalangan and Mario Andrefanio Santos II went to the area an hour later but were also attacked by masked men wielding
lead pipes who fled in a silver Peugeot van.
"And in all this I'm either covered for replacement of
lead pipes or I'm not.
The main concern is
lead pipes, which are toxic and will need to be replaced.
Preliminary data show that strategies of replacing only the publicly owned portion of
lead pipes (known as partial mitigation) do not decrease (and might increase) blood lead levels.
More recently, motivated by elevated levels of drinking water in Greenville and Durham, North Carolina, which appear to be related to water treatment changes that increased the ratio of chloride to sulfate in drinking water, Edwards and Triantafyllidou have been conducting experiments that evaluate galvanic corrosion by measuring electrical current between joined copper and
lead pipes and also by measuring release of dissolved and particulate lead.