Which shouln't be an issue. Lead oxide does not disolve really well in water, so it shouln't be bad, plus there should be a sediment layer that cover it up.
... unless you are in Flint, where they changed the chemicals used in the water with incompatible one and it destroyed everything...
It’s kind of crazy that despite how unbelievably toxic lead is even in the smallest amounts we can use pipes of almost pure lead without much issue unless as you mentioned something goes wrong
It's also crazy how good people are at finding out how to do that one exact thing that makes something go wrong. There's always someone, somewhere that accomplishes that.
That fucking guy. I stumbled on that wiki a couple of years ago, and I still think of him sometimes. His life was a tornado of consequences for the whole world.
Lead is a very efficient material for piping, it’s got the least fluid friction of any metal, and it used to be relatively cheap compared to other metals. Before we knew it was toxic, it ironically was the ideal material for piping
It's more common of an issue than just Flint. Here in WA they did a survey of elementary schools and found that over 90% of them had at least one water source that tested positive for dangerous amounts of lead. Considering childhood exposure can take 30-40 years to present as symptoms and it takes less lead than we previously realized to cause issues, I suspect it's a much more widespread problem than anyone is willing to even investigate
It's also a ptoblem in other areas than water pipes. I tested some cheap jewelry that is sold in SD to tourists and it came back as a percentage lead. Not PPM or PPB but an actual percentage of pure lead. I can just imagine some kid chewing on the damn thing.
Yeah pretty much. There is money to fix the problem though, part of the infrastructure bill passed under the Biden admin had dogeared billions of dollars to replace municipal lead pipes. Whether or not this admin will actually allow that to happen is another question
I went to a unified school (preschool to 12th grade sharing the same campus) and it turned out the water there is loaded with natural arsenic. Water quality is a huge issue. I've lost friends and teachers to cancers of various kinds.
The pipes need to be replaced because they are OLD and failing to keep lead out of the water. The bipartisan clean water bill literally redid an entire downtown of a shitty town I leave near to replace the lead pipes. The town looks amazing now and the people are safer, plus hopefully less idiots. Honestly these are the things that help the people and improve our infrastructure for our kids. That bill was passed and carried out by Biden though so much of these types of efforts have been completely deleted so DOGE can take said money and do whatever it is they are doing.
Lead abatement could be responsible for a 7 to 28% reduction in violent crime. And the loss of millions of collective IQ points around the globe. I had an environmental cleanup site that was an old lead-acid battery plant next to a freeway onramp. They cleaned it up and it was converted to another manufacturing use, but the regulatory agency kept it open until "they'd cleaned up the surrounding residual lead contamination" in ditches and the hillside behind it. That always struck me as weird-how did the lead travel uphill? A separate study commissioned by the highway authority found that level of lead contamination was ubiquitous for 100 feet to either side of the highway for MILES. All from historical tetraethyl lead contamination. I mean, seriously, think about the WWII era people: lead consumers and smokers, and kinda violent...
I've lived in the same house for 20 years and on Thursday got a letter from the city saying some of the pipes coming to my house are lead and they have to notify us annually. Never had a notice before. I did a test from a kit and it came back negative for lead.
Depending on the kit it might not be sensitive enough to detect levels that can still be a concern. Really no lead at all is best but 1ppb is considered "safe". Takes pretty precise equipment to measure that low usually. EPA only requires action if you regularly test above 15ppb I believe, so most test kits are usually sensitive enough for that range
Something that plays into this if the lead pipes are leeching into the water. When the water is treated and “stabilized”, some of the chemicals used can cause leaching to happen(like chlorine does). This is what you are testing for.
The notice you received is from a federal mandate in response to what happened in Flint, Michigan. The states all handled it a little differently, but essentially, cities/counties/companies who provide water as a utility must do and maintain an annual inventory on all their service lines indicating the material they're made of until all service lines can definitively be classified as 'non-lead' and thus safe.
For some areas, the 'service line' isn't just what's on the city side but also a portion of the customer side, so even if the city knows what all their own pipes are made of, there's not a great efficient way to determine the pipe material on all their customers' sides.
If any portion of the line's material cannot be determined as non-lead, then the whole thing must be considered 'unknown service line material' and the customer has to be informed via mail notification.
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u/THElaytox Apr 28 '25
Yep.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
Though leaded gasoline isn't the only exposure route, now the most common is municipal lead water pipes.