"Union spies would come round in the afternoon pulling out the mains leads from the design engineers' computers, to prevent them working a minute longer than permitted," recalls one senior figure.
Glasgow told MLive the city struggled to find enough homes known to be connected to water mains via lead service lines.
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, many American cities actually required houses to be connected to water mains via lead pipes, despite known health dangers, because the metal is malleable and durable.
It's also up to the utilities which homes are included in the sampling pool, which gives them a chance to dodge the action level by avoiding homes connected to water mains via lead service lines.
Flushing samples collected at the hydrants contained the highest PAH levels, which suggests that disturbance of sediment in cast iron mains may lead to high PAH levels, and that the PAHs measured in these samples are associated with particles in the distribution network.
Lead is a soft material that's easy to work with, and many old pipes leading from municipal water mains into homes are made from lead, as was the case in Flint (and possibly your own home, depending on the age of your house).
And $2,000 budgeted for yearly hardware upgrades has simply been scratched off the list.(In a bit of poetic justice, this correspondent was awake at 3 am this Sunday to fix a few errors after a lightning strike at one of his VPS host's data centres took out mains and battery backups, and led to damage to hard drives on which his jarred brains operated.
Like many American cities, Flint has a lot of homes that are connected to water mains via service lines made from lead.
Sloppy demolition led to burst water mains and expensive cleanups.
Meanwhile, there are as many as 10 million lead service lines that connect water mains to homes and public buildings such as schools and hospitals across the country.
