Flint's mayor has floated a shockingly high price tag to fix the Michigan city's lead-contamination problem: $1.5 billion to replace damaged pipes. Gov. Rick Snyder put the figure at $700 million.
In the meantime, officials and water experts are hopeful that there is a less drastic and far cheaper step — using a chemical to recoat existing pipes and contain the lead. If it works, that could make the water safe enough to drink until the damage to the system can be fully assessed.
The problem is that nobody knows how badly the pipes were damaged after the state's disastrous decision in 2014 to use the Flint River as the city's drinking water source without adding a chemical to control corrosion. That caused lead to leach into the water for a year and a half and contributed to a spike in child lead poisoning before city and state officials fully acknowledged the problem.
“I don't think anybody knows how long it will take or the amount of corrosion built up in the pipes,'' longtime City Councilman Scott Kincaid said.
The city last fall resumed buying Detroit water, drawn from Lake Huron, and experts said they believe lead levels are already dropping with the addition of phosphate, which helps form an interior coating on the pipes to prevent lead leaching.
Damage prematurely aged pipes
But it's impossible to say how long it will take before the water is safe enough to drink without the use of filters, which the state has been distributing to residents along with bottled water.
Experts also say that Flint's lead service pipes, which connect homes to the wider water system, must eventually be replaced because they have aged the equivalent of 10 years in 18 months.
“Damage to the pipe integrity can never be reversed,'' Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech civil engineering professor who helped identify and expose Flint's lead problem, said in an email.
The Environmental Protection Agency, which said this week that it would take over lead sampling in the city, said Friday that the Flint treatment plant has greatly increased the level of phosphate “in order to more quickly coat the insides of the city's pipes.'' An agency task force plans to go to Flint to try to determine how badly damaged they are.
It could take a long time to determine the actual costs of fixing the disaster in Flint, a financially struggling city where more than 40 percent of people live in poverty.
