Flint Water still unsafe

Were the pipes always lead?

Our family home is now forty-eight years old, and the only lead pipe in that place is the bend on the sewer pipe off the toilet. All the water pipes are galvanised iron, except for those I've replaced over the years.

I know there's an element of lead in galvanising.

The pipes were okay, until the contaminated water was fed into them.

Why aren't the pipes OK again now that treated water has been passing through them for a period of time? Surely by now there is a layer of protection sealing off the lead again.

I just did a quick search, and came up with this rather alarming information.



A new analysis from Reuters has found that lead poisoning is a national epidemic, mostly affecting low-income communities that receive little funding to rectify the problem.

Credit – flintwaterstudy.org

Last year, the community of Flint, Michigan was thrust into the national spotlight for all the wrong reasons. Children were being diagnosed with lead poisoning at previously unheard of levels and the town’s water supply was later found to be the culprit. City officials, not long before, had switched the city’s water supply from the Detroit water system to a polluted and corrosive nearby river in order to save money. Though several of the city officials responsible have now been criminally charged for their role in the disaster, nearly two years have passed while residents of Flint remain without clean drinking water.

Though Flint is the most recent example of lead poisoning in the United States, a new analysis by Reuters has found that it is just the tip of the iceberg. The study found that nearly 3,000 communities throughout the country recorded incredibly high rates of lead poisoning, over a third of which were quadruple that of Flint at the height of the water crisis. Pockets of major urban centers like Baltimore and Philadelphia were the locales found to suffer the most from lead poisoning. In many of these communities lead poisoning has been a problem for generations. There, the rate of elevated lead tests has hovered between 40 to 50% for at least the past ten years. Other communities are more rural, like Warren, Pennsylvania. 36% of children living in Warren, a town of under 10,000 along the endangered Allegheny river, had elevated levels of lead in their blood.


Read More: http://www.trueactivist.com/nearly-3000-us-communities-have-higher-rate-of-lead-poisoning-than-flint-mi/

Yes, I saw such studies a while back. And they wonder why the electorate is upset with government.

I wasn't actually aware of what initially happened in Michigan.

Privatisation is upon us here in Australia, despite evidence that it's a very short-term solution to a problem.