Bert Roberge posted:

The two times I've gone there my shoes/clothes would be covered in nastier street grime than you'd see in NYC or Boston subways after only walking around for a short while. I imagine it might be slightly cleaner now that a bunch of the steel mills are shut down but I doubt it.

quote:

hree years after Flint, Mich.'s lead crisis began, many other cities are still struggling to deal with the same problem. Pittsburgh is one of them, mired in an effort to replace lead pipes laid down decades ago. The city is now under state mandate to lower the amount of lead in its drinking water. But as The Allegheny Front's Reid Frazier reports, it faces legal, technical and financial hurdles.

(SOUNDBITE OF SHOVELS DIGGING)

REID FRAZIER: On Pittsburgh's North Side, a work crew digs through asphalt, cement and clay. An hour in and five feet below the street, Mark McClafferty shovels out one last scoop of dirt before finding what he's been looking for.

MARK MCCLAFFERTY: Lead.

FRAZIER: He sees the telltale sign of lead pipes, large round lumps where different sections of pipe join together, almost like the pipes are swollen.

MCCLAFFERTY: Like a ball there. It's round. That's when they heat it up and melt the lead together. Anything else would have a nut on it.

FRAZIER: Since failing a lead test last year, Pittsburgh's Water and Sewer Authority has been required to find and replace lead service lines, the pipes that take water into houses. Now, the city only has authority to replace the public side of the water line, the part from the curb away from the house.

But doing that and leaving the private side in place can actually make the problem worse. Bob Weimar is interim executive director of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority.

BOB WEIMAR: We had some particularly high results well over a hundred parts per billion.

FRAZIER: That's six times the EPA threshold for lead in drinking water. Turns out there's a coating inside the pipes that keeps lead from leaching into the water.

Mariana Horchata posted:

AKA Hell w/ the lid off op.gl

Duscat posted: