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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

I just took a look at the Map of Michigan. I realized after zooming into Flint to try to understand where the water was coming from that Michigan has many, many bodies of water scattered all around the place. Plus they are right next to the world's biggest lakes.

And yet they never took care of their water supply? The one state with so much fresh water has little regulation on keeping water protected.

I keep wondering why its been prophecied that the world in the end will wage war over water, not oil. And now I am beginning to understand.

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The water sources themselves are ok. (They could be much cleaner of course.) It's the aging and decaying infrastructure that brings the water from the source to a Flint homeowner's sink that is causing the issue. Lead is not in the source water; it's in the pipes, solder joints, fixtures, etc. When the State switched Flint over from Detroit's Lake Huron source to the Flint River, the water chemistry change was not correctly accounted for, and thus caused excessive amounts of lead to leach into the water on its way through the system.

The reason it's been prophesied that the world in the end will wage war over water, not oil, is because most places in the world aren't surrounded by gigantic lakes of fresh water... not because Flint, MI has lead in their water supply.

They are constructing a supply that will tap Lake Huron.

Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron are not especially polluted. The little inland lakes vary, but they end up having a lot of trouble with residential inputs (fertilizer runoff and (historically) sewage).

They already had a supply from Huron before. They disconnected from it about a year ago. Now they are hooked back up to Huron but much of the damage has already been done.

They switched away from and back to Detroit as a water supplier. The switch to drawing water from Huron is in progress:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karegnondi_Water_Authority

Clean water is bad for business.

You've been posting unsubstantive and inflammatory comments to HN. That breaks the site guidelines, so please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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