1024
Biden announces proposal to replace all lead water service lines in US within 10 years
(abcnews.go.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
1024 points (99.0% liked)
News
23397 readers
3446 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This has been often speculated as being the cause of the "Stupid American" stereotype. Good decision
That seems implausible. Lead pipes are common pretty much everywhere and it's usually not a problem due to a coating on the pipes.
It's just an issue in the US because there's been a few notable examples of that coating being damaged and causing contamination, which creates political will to do the replacements that everyone is doing at an accelerated pace.
Most places, in the US or not, just replace them during routine maintenance. The UK and Germany should have theirs replaced by 2100, if nothing comes up to make them accelerate the process.
hydrofluorosilicic acid is the cause of all the problems with lead pipes. It is being used as a replacement for standard fluoride
The US hasn't been good about replacing pipes in general, there's even a good amount that aren't even documented in some areas.
Didn't they pull out some wooden pipes somewhere in the US within the last couple years? I remember seeing an article about it.
I believe someone found wood pipes still in use, it may have been flint, since they got a complete overhaul of their pipes.
30 years ago Boston was trying to map their pre revolutionary war wood pipes. I would expect flint was built with metal pipes, as that area is mostly known for iron.
Iron was further north, Michigan was a huge lumber state.
This year Germany passed a law to completely remove all lead pipes until January 2026.
But the allowed levels of lead in drinking water have already been lowered so much since 2013 (10 microgram per liter, this has been lowered again since to 5 microgram per liter) that any water that passed through a lead pipe cannot realistically fulfill the requirements, thus there are only extremely few households left with any lead in their pipes.
Coating the pipes is not a way out of this, since Germany has expressly forbidden this as a way to renovate.
Oh, I'm not saying we should coat the pipes, I'm saying that it's not a massive continuous crisis is because there is a coating on the pipes created by the water treatment.
We definitely should replace all of them because that coating is too easy to damage and there's no reason to take the risk, but "lead pipes" is unlikely to be a US specific health issue like was originally insinuated.
With this I agree wholeheartedly, the biggest factors for differences between the rest of the developed world and the US, including USians being considered more agressive, less intelligent, less patient and with less empathy are definitely located in different fields.
Imho. culturally religiosity, difference in education, worldlyness and levels of societal cohesion are the biggest factors, along with good old prejudice against the militarily superior.
We'll see how dumb Americans are in a generation or two. Hopefully this'll fix it!
I've seen leaded gasoline cited, but not lead pipes.
There was lead in so many products in our parent's generation, not just the water pipes and gasoline. Cosmetics and paint are also two notable ones that, combined with all the other sources of lead, increased exposure to hazardous levels.
Humans are just stupid, not just Americans.