In front is an ACTUAL water pipe from Flint. In the back are what they should look like.

[kpete]

In the front is an ACTUAL water pipe from Flint. Click & examine it.
In the back are what they should look like.
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing

[patricia92243]

1. It is quite nauseating looking and to think that people are still taking baths - much less

drinking from it quit literally is making my stomach churn and feel sort of sick.

[1939]

2. Probably the same

In most of the older cities in this country. Cast iron pipes rust. Often they will have lead in their joints.

Older homes are piped with lead pipes. The word "plumber" comes from the Latin name for lead which is "plumbum" .

[phantom power]

3. A friend of mine is a civil engineer in charge of Ann Arbor water supply...

he said that basically all pipes have various forms of corrosion and/or other kinds of buildup on them. As long as the supply is undisturbed and under normal operation, it's actually not a problem.

Even in Flint, this would not have become a problem if they'd properly treated the river water when they switched supplies, to prevent the lead from being leeched out. But they were too fucking cheap and criminally negligent to even do that, and so here we are.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

5. Yeah. I was surprized to see lead pipes in a building I was doing a project on in Chicago.

It's a 100 year old six flat just like the one I live in.

The plumber was changing out a main shut-off valve on a 1 inch line in the basement. While doing that he disturbed the lead pipe coming out of the concrete floor. A little leak sprung at the floor. That stuff is really soft and fragile.

To fix it temporarily he was able to tap the leak with a hammer. Trick of the trade I guess. This stopped the leak until he came back to bust out the floor and replace the small portion in the concrete.

This building and my building have newer copper piping inside but, apparently, they all have lead coming from the street. *gulp*

I'm glad I was smart enough to not offer to have my guy fix the original problem for these people. Changing the valve piece was a relatively easy job - if not for the nightmare scenario of touching the pies and having leaks spring at the floor. Yikes. Dodged a bullet.

[oldandhappy]

4. gross!

ick

[a kennedy]

6. OMGOSH......ugh, AND the Governor should fry........ eom

[Crepuscular]

7. Just an FYI

Those are not lead pipes, those are water mains, either cast iron or steel and most of the interior build up is likely calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. Any water main in the country that has been in service for long will look like that. Claiming that an installed main will look like the unused section in the photo is pretty disingenuous. Th interior of the 72" pipeline that has been bringing water to Detroit and Flint for 30+ years probably looks identical to this.

[A HERETIC I AM]

13. How dare you......

bring rationality, reason and facts onto a DU thread meant to ignore such things?

[Crepuscular]

14. LoL

Exactly one of the reasons I don't post much.

[pediatricmedic]

8. Looks ok to me

Like many others have already said, any intake system in service for 30 years is going to look like that. Pretty dishonest to link that to the current problem in Flint.

[yellowcanine]

9. BS. The one in back has plastic over it and is brand new.

Looks like normal corrosion to me. Water mains corrode. Even concrete corrodes over time. It is a fact of life.

[Rex]

10. LOL. Everyone complaining in this thread is suddenly an expert at plumbing.

Ah DU...you never fail to disappoint with the Republican talking points. OF COURSE not a one mentions regular maintenance...which is what a public works system is there for.

So predictable and sad really, giving aid to a republican group criminally negligent of poisoning thousands of people...I would say for shame, but for some it is all about pretending to be an expert on something...in this case decades of neglect.

[1939]

12. Although the Republicans only came into the picture a couple of years ago

Not to excuse not adding phosphates to the water under the GOP hired EM (which facilitated the leaching of the lead), but the condition of the city pipes and the feeds to the homes has to be laid at the feet of several generations of Flint Democratic administrations.

The water was probably healthy enough coming out of the water purification plant.

[pediatricmedic]

17. It isn't mentioned because Flint was controlled by Democrats for decades

Where do you think the decades of neglect comes from.

[Nye Bevan]

11. That's "tuberculation" which is not considered to be a health hazard.

Jagged mounds of metal protruded from all sides of the pipe’s interior. Liver red and gooey brown, with purple highlights and dirty yellow streaks. It made me think of those angiogram images of the sclerotic arteries of people on the verge of a fatal heart attack.

This is “tuberculation,” the formation of corrosion on the inside of cast-iron pipes that’s been a known hazard in old water systems since the 1950s, when scientists at the University of Illinois exploded the myth that cast iron doesn’t easily corrode.

It does. Tuberculation comes from the interaction between iron and the “chemistry” of our water, Art Shapiro, Baltimore’s water engineer, tells me. Among the factors are the pH and alkalinity of the liquid flowing through the pipes, along with calcium and the chlorine injected to make it safe.

Thus, did our award-winning water slalom and zigzag around these foul-looking blisters in our 2-inch main – picking up particles of brown sediment that now covered my hands – until something cracked (that manifold, I guess), and the city was forced to replace this rotted remnant of an out-of-date network with a couple feet of clean pipe.

Health officials consider rust and iron in water not to be a health hazard. According to Shapiro, you get more iron from a supplement pill than from the sediment that courses through the city’s pipes.

https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2013/10/25/my-close-encounter-with-a-baltimore-water-pipe/

I hope you don't seriously think that all the city water pipes in Flint looked like the one at the back prior to April 2014 when the supply was switched to the Flint River.

[lumberjack_jeff]

15. In general, used pipes are nasty looking things.

Water lines in healthy water systems are internally coated with calcite precipitates. This scale insulates the water from the harmful materials in the pipes.

That's what happened in Flint, the river water was acidic and dissolved those preciptates and allowed the water to attack the iron, copper and lead in the system.

[tencats]

16. Downtown Chicago water pipe Nov 2014

Throughout 2014 and continuing yet the City of Chicago is doing extensive replacement of the main water supply lines. This is a pic that is typical of how the old pipe appears when pulled out of the trenches. Seen worse and some better. I think that in Chicago the water quality in way better than many other areas I visited. Near by municipalities outside Chicago Cook county can have terrible water quality.