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The US still has lead pipes for drinking water??? Wtf.
Yes. 😕 They were originally coated on the interior so there wasn't direct exposure of the lead to the water. But lack of funding (in some cases deliberate, see Flint, MI) for maintenance leads to the coating wearing away, resulting in contamination of the water. There's plenty of Starving The Beast going on with things like this (also see bridges collapsing and public schools failing) by conservatives to try and grift on replacing public infrastructure with private ownership. Pretty disgusting.
Purely pedantically: the coating isn't applied to the pipes, it forms there from a reaction between the water and the pipe material.
It's not something that maintained by directly putting it on the pipes, but by managing the composition of the water supply, which they can't not do.
http://www.sedimentaryores.net/Pipe%20Scales/Lead%20Solubility.html
The issue in Flint wasn't that they cut maintenance funding, but that they cut water supply funding and so the utility switched from Detroit water (fine, stable and nice to pipes) to local river water which had a different acidity which destroyed the coating.
I agree with all your conclusions, just wanted to let you know why we're not constantly digging up pipes to fix the coating. 😊
Appreciate the clarification/correction.
How else do you explain there are still people voting for trump?
The US Education System
Same underlying deliberate underfunding problem.
It's actually not uncommon in industrialized countries, and a lot of countries have similar active projects to phase them out. Flint was a wake-up call to places outside the US as well, so everyone has been accelerating their efforts, since there's a good example of how bad a "normal" error can make things.
Other countries don't often have to advertise that their governments are doing their jobs as much as the US has, since they don't have as much "all public spending is waste" rhetoric.
It's OK, they're only in places like Flint which is full of black people that nobody cares about, or Florida where everyone is already too brain damaged for anybody to really notice the difference.