Water crisis took toll on Flint adults’ physical, mental health

In my household we do not trust the tap and would never drink from it directly. We have something called hard water here and came here from New Mexico where our tap was frequently brown. Both were “safe” to drink, but we choose to drink neither directly.

We buy 20 ounce water bottles from the grocery store which are filled from the “local” spring. We keep a Brita water filter pitcher in our fridge that we fill out of the tap and replace the filter on regularly. Generally we each open a new bottle in the morning and then refill it from the brita filter for the remainder of the day.

I drink directly from the tap, and grew up trusting my access to water. Now, I'm aware that not everyone has that privilege and our government, increasingly neoliberal and enamored with privatization and fracking, has allowed the public freshwater infrastructure to degrade in various parts of the country that didn't previously have problems with their tap water.

It's one of the first questions I ask when I visit someone else now. It's probably the greatest modern civilizational decline.

A lot of people mention Brita filters, which is an activated carbon filter, however a lot of households would probably benefit more from limescale filters.

That said, water purification is big business. People have filtered water pitchers (think Brita) or large units that supply the whole house (Culligan)

Oddly, I recall that the "workaround" solution being to the Flint crisis was to ship in tons of bottled water. Cheap filters, if they remove lead and bacteria fully, would seem like a much more cost effective way.

From what I've seen Germans seems pretty suspicious of their tap water(or maybe just hard water?) and use brita filters a lot. There is no actual health benefit or harm avoidance for using them as far as I understand.

> This precipitated the tragic decision in 2013 to end the city’s five-decade practice of piping treated water for its residents from Detroit in favor of a cheaper alternative: temporarily pumping water from the Flint River until a new water pipeline from Lake Huron was built. Although the river water was highly corrosive, Flint officials failed to treat it, and lead leached out from aging pipes into thousands of homes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#Lead_exposu...

> The documents falsely claim that the city had tested tap water from homes with lead service lines, and therefore the highest lead-poisoning risks; however, the city did not know the locations of lead service lines, which city officials acknowledged in November 2015 after the Flint Journal/MLive published an article revealing the practice, using documents obtained under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. The Journal/MLive reported that the city had "disregarded federal rules requiring it to seek out homes with lead plumbing for testing, potentially leading the city and state to underestimate for months the extent of toxic lead leaching into Flint's tap water."

Then Flint decided to save money by changing water sources from Lake Huron to the Flint river which changed many properties of the water including ph. This relatively abrupt change caused the biofilm and mineral coating to weaken and expose the lead of the pipes to the water.

So are lead pipes at fault or the sudden change in water chemistry? Water chemistry changes are well know to cause these issues, the water quality chemist in most jurisdictions will be aware of the potential issues, not sure if they were ignored.

IMO the pipes should have been changed out long ago, but that doesn't absolve the decision makers from the issues caused by changing water sources to save money without consideration for the side effects.

> Despite the Romans' common use of lead pipes, their aqueducts rarely poisoned people. Unlike other parts of the world where lead pipes cause poisoning, the Roman water had so much calcium in it that a layer of plaque prevented the water contacting the lead itself. What often causes confusion is the large amount of evidence of widespread lead poisoning, particularly amongst those who would have had easy access to piped water, an unfortunate result of lead being used in cookware and as an additive to processed food and drink (for example as a preservative in wine).