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.
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.”