Filtration doesn’t sound as good though. What would you rather have? Water that had lead in it but the lead has been filtered out (we hope) or water that has no chance of having lead in it in the first place? Filters don’t last forever and when they wear out the lead will still be there waiting. But there’s no way for lead to form in a lead-less pipe.
There’s no point in saving all that money if you just have to turn around and spend it on trying to convince people to come back to the city where the water is poisonous but the poison is under control for the moment.
They can most likely get by relining the pipes rather than replacing them.
Overall the high end of replacing all the pipes in Flint is less then a one week of bombing a foreign country. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to update one of our cities to first world drinking water standards.
Choosing ‘fiscally responsible solutions’ got them there. If blowing a shit ton of money to fix it on a permanent basis means the problem will never come back, I’d rather my tax dollars go there than more bombs.
The water was fine prior switching to a more acidic source. Virtually all water supplies are treated for one thing or other. It needs to be properly treated.
You’re creating a straw man argument about luring people to the city. The water can be publicly certified to the same standards as all the other cities with the same set up.
The pipes need to rebuild their protecting lining–the scaling that was worn away by the corrosiveness of the water. But doesn’t the water have to run a long time to rebuild the lining? The residents have been told NOT to use the water for drinking, cooking, or bathing. So how in the hell do the pipes get fixed.
The whole situation has got me very very pissed off.
There is a process of putting in a plastic sleeve on the inside of the pipe. A polyethylene sleeve I believe that is made to adhere to the wall of the pipe by putting in hot water to cure it. An expensive process, but less expensive than digging up and replacing the pipe entirely. This will not work for the individual house connections, only on the mains.
These are expensive projects and lengthy to study, draw up plans, and bid out before the work even starts. I would say the minimum lead time would be 2 years and more likely 3.
It always ends up being more than the original estimate.
I did not know that lead could be filtered. If they’re working on fixing the problem via water treatment, that might be a short term solution, especially for apartment buildings.
Of course that assumes that the problem can be fixed at the source in months rather than years. And that will also not be cheap.
‘Filtered’ is not the correct technical term as the lead is disolved, but it can be removed. Processes like ion exchange are very effective at doing so. It isn’t new or unobtainable technology.
Chicago has a ton of homes that still have lead service lines running to them, including the last house I lived in. We were assured that it wasn’t a problem, but reading up on it some more now, I’m really glad we used nursery water with our first daughter while living there
The switch from pre treated Detroit water to river water was done to save money. The failure to properly treat the river water was due to incompetence.
In 2003, the EPA estimated that replacing all of the lead pipes in the US would cost 276 billion dollars and take twenty years. Since all infrastructure estimates are off by at least half, the low end real cost would be at least 550 billion dollars and would take decades.