Posted on 04/21/2016 12:01:09 PM PDT by Sean_Anthony
Good. No one is above the law.
Investigators in Michigan are continuing to pursue their inquiry into precisely who is responsible for the Flint water crisis. Attorney General Bill Schuette has a small army of people sifting through reams of internal government correspondence trying to determine who knew what, and when they knew it. Yesterday, the first charges were announced - and we were warned that they will not be the last.
The investigation is ongoing, and everyone is in its crosshairs.
I’m just wondering— How do you charge these guys for crappy pipes owned by home owners. The water didn’t have lead in it, the crappy pipes did.
The water was supposed to have chemicals added to it to prevent the new, different pH water from leaching lead out of pipes.
Somebody made the decision not to treat the water as necessary with corrosion inhibitiors to prevent the lead leaching into the water (something that WAS done with the previous water supply), but I’m betting it wasn’t these guys.
The water was too acidic. The epa made us add a phosphate to our water to correct for this condition. epa’s fault!
They left it out for cost savings...$140 per day. A penny saved, as they say.
Yes yes, pick a couple of techies as scapegoats. What about the management types who ordered them to do it?
Well the water itself was within standards. (I Think). There was a shift in Ph levels and Acid but the old lead pipes reacted to the water which was well within normal purity and the old pipes just started dropping lead. Everyone who owns old lead pipes from the 40s and 50s needs to dig them up and put in PVC and everything will be fine. I sure don’t want to pay for other folks pipes though. They needed to do that but to bring charged on these men for the crappy pipes of the residence is beyond my comprehension.
Many of the pipes taking the water from the water pumping station are lead or they have lead solder so even having PVC in your house does not stop you from having lead in your water.
That is why they have to check the PH of the water to make sure it is not acidic enough to leach the lead out of the pipes.
If the water department had dug up all their old their pre 1986 water pipes and replaced them you might have an argument. But they did not.
This is not just a problem in Flint, anywhere you have old pipes the potential is there if the water has the wrong PH balance.
“Environmental engineers that C&EN contacted say that, on the basis of how Flint treated the river water, the water chemistry was not optimized to control corrosion.
Most important, the treated Flint River water lacked one chemical that the treated Detroit water had: phosphate. “They essentially lost something that was protecting them against high lead concentrations,” Giammar says. Cities such as Detroit add orthophosphate to their water as part of their corrosion control plans because the compound encourages the formation of lead phosphates, which are largely insoluble and can add to the pipes’ passivation layer. By press time, C&EN was unable to get a comment from Flint city officials about why a corrosion inhibitor wasn’t added to the river water.”
Good article;
http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i7/Lead-Ended-Flints-Tap-Water.html
Is that correct? Are you telling me that Detroit used lead solder in 1986? And this is all the result of lead solder and Ph. Was is known that the lead solder would breakdown over this specific Ph differential? I have no information to the contrary of what you say but I just have a real hard time 1. believing that Lead Solder on joints would have been allowed in 1986 and 2.that that in an of itself is the problem standing alone. But I am no expert on Detroit . Sounds like local water officials who did that in 1986 need to be arrested , not these guys unless it was clearly known that this would happen and then done anyway. They are just fall guys for bad government.
We added ortho-phosphate to our system. Small system, with 380 connection, 4 wells.
“The entire Flint water crisis could have been avoided if the city had just added orthophosphate, Edwards says. He bases his opinion, in part, on experiments his group ran on the treated Flint River water. The researchers joined copper pipes with lead solder and then placed the pieces in either treated Flint River water or treated Detroit water. After five weeks in the Flint water, the joined pipes leached 16 times as much lead as those in the Detroit water, demonstrating just how corrosive the treated Flint water was. But when the scientists added a phosphate corrosion inhibitor to the Flint water, the factor went down to four.”
Detroit keeps an eye on it's water ph as do all water companies for that very reason. Why Flint chose not to do that is the question.
good article. I came away with the conclusion that is was lead pipes in houses and distribution systems. All that needs replacing . How would like to face every day for your children wondering if the lead is flaking off any pipe to my faucet because the Ph level is off? Seems to me that time is of the essence and I wish them good luck. It was the pipes not the water. I see these criminal cases as thrown out very quickly unless they knew the total disaster was happening and did it anyway.
Where I used to live they used paper pipes called “ orange “ something. Everyone had to dig that out and replace with PVC. It was used prior to 1950. It was thousands of dollars to repair.
It had a tendency to deform if not bedded properly but I don't know why they would remove it for health reasons.
I realize this might go against Occam’s razor but I think this is another intentionally self inflicted disaster to inflame the black population and hype the BLM crowd. At some level this was organized by Obama underlings to satisfy the need to drum up the victimized masses - where better than the disaster zone otherwise known as Flint, Michigan.
yes . Thank you. It was real cheap in the 50s. It might have been sewer rather that water if memory serves me but is would just collapse . It comes to mind here. There is no telling the amount of lead pipe was used in the post WWII era. No PVC available. Ha.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.