The Crisis in Flint MI - Details

This is a mess but could happen in other places where the plumbing infrastructure is old and broken down.

Here a quick brief on what happened in Flint.

So in Flint, Michigan, some people said, well, we have this other source of water this other river, and it's got old infrastructure.  But it's going to be much cheaper to deliver this water to the people in Flint if we make a switch to this, and the governor said, Great idea, everybody's gung ho, let's save some money.

So they made this switch, and they switched to old led line pipes as a distribution system into Flint.

So this is where Flint parallels Los Angeles to a degree because the problem was they started pulling the water from the river and they said, we have to kill the bacteria in this water.

So because we have to kill the bacteria, let's just use the disinfectant of choice.  And the disinfectant of choice right now is chloramines. It's a combination between chlorine and ammonia.

Back back, way back in the old days, it was just free chlorine only, but there are a whole a host of reasons I could talk about for six hours about why they made a change, and started introducing ammonia with it.

Some of those things are beneficial. Some of those reasons make sense. Other reasons. It's created a whole bunch of other problems. 

So now they put this disinfecting in, and now all of a sudden they're stripping the lead off the pipes and driving it into the community. Little children are getting sick. You know, there were some deaths and all that stuff. I know that they had court cases against a couple of the people who had made the decision.  

More on tap water issues.