Many cities lack a good estimate of how many lead pipes remain in communities and where they are buried, which forces public water systems to rely on expensive survey by licensed plumbers to identify the location of lead and galvanized service lines. Galvanized and lead service lines are mostly observed in houses built prior to 1934 and during World War II. However, city records have led to the over identification of lead service lines, likely because old records are not being updated as these lines are being replaced. Since the Flint water crisis, many cities have been scrambling to locate all lead service lines in their water supply systems. The Flint drinking water contamination issue started in April 2014 when Flint, Michigan changed its water source from Luke Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River. The Flint River water that was treated improperly caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, leading to extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin. The situation arose when officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water. As a result, there were series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger. According to “A Case Study of Environmental Injustice: The Failure in Flint, Campbell accounts for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan which lead to a lawsuit against the city because there was sufficient evidence to prove that various government officials were stating false information to the citizens of Flint concerning elevated lead levels which exposed young children to health effects such as behavioral disorders, hearing problems, impaired cognition, and reduced fetal growth in pregnant woman. The fact that it is difficult to find these lead pipelines mainly because of how old they are and how wildly inaccurate their location becomes each year, is terrifying and poses a huge health risk for any citizens living near these pipelines.  

According to recent studies, a geospatial approach has been innovated to predict the likelihood that a tax parcel has a lead service line or a galvanized service line based on a house inspection and city records pertaining to the year the pipeline was created. This new information will help inspectors know exactly the location of aged pipelines. This tool was created by Pierre Goovaerts whose approach is flexible enough to accommodate additional type of information for lead mapping in distribution systems. An incredulous amount of technology and money has to be present in order to accurately find the location of a pipe line. Such quality is much more informative than assigning tax parcels based on their dates of construction into categories of likelihood that service lines include lead. In addition, given the application of this method to the Flint water public system, one can observe how city officials can prevent another water security crisis from happening ever again in other US cities.  

In “A Novel Smart Caliper Foam Pig for Low-Cost Pipeline Inspection”, Ramella explores the advantages and disadvantages of former and newly developed methods concerning pipeline maintenance procedures. The paper reports the field test results of a novel low- cost and low-risk Caliper Smart Foam pig. The obtained results were then compared to those provided by a commercial Caliper pig, which was launched in the same pipeline under the same conditions. The developed instrument was able to provide much more information about the pipeline structure. The journal primarily focuses on a new tool which embeds special sensors and low-cost electronics conceived to detect, locate, and size inner diameter changes, defects and other significant problems. 

Although there exist numerous solutions to the issue concerning galvanized and service lead pipes, the cost of these new technology advances has skyrocketed since being introduced to the market and have a cost of risk associated with them. If a county were to implement one of the several solutions outlined in this paper, it would cost an enormous amount of money to have the entire solution adaptive to the homes located around the aged pipe lines. So, the county has two options, either they spend a fortune adapting these methods to their city pipe lines or they choose to keep their old, unreliable city records that date back to World War II. This is often the roadblock many cities face when deciding on what plan of action they decide to take. Because of how recent the events of Flint are, many cities have taken the initiative to update their city records periodically and help monitor lead pipes that truly need to be replaced in fear of a health situation arising. Take for example Ian Vazquez-Rowe’s study which centralized on Peru and how the country adapted technological solutions to its water systems. Vazquez-Rowe examined the basic characteristics of the main treatment systems that are currently in operation in the Peruvian capital, highlighting the myopic and inefficient nature of these investments. It digs deep in the debate between centralized and decentralized water management systems in a city that is exposed to numerous hydro-meteorological and geological hazards. 

However, there exists cities within the U.S. who happen to fall behind when it comes to standard water quality. In Chatterjee’s report, “Willingness to pay for safe drinking water: A contingent valuation study in Jacksonville, FL”, he writes that a surprising number of U.S. cities have drinking water with unhealthy levels of chemicals and contaminants. The city of Jacksonville, Florida, the location for this study, owns the distinction of being ranked among the worst major American cities in water quality according to water quality tests conducted between 2005 and 2009 by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). This report of toxic chemicals in the Jacksonville water supply generated considerable negative publicity and coincides with a frequent and common complaint among residents of foul-smelling water.

In addition, there are some solutions that lack a base of credibility and research such as Jianfa Gao’s report: “Evaluation of in-sewer transformation of selected illicit drugs and pharmaceutical biomarkers” which outlined that wastewater-based epidemiology is considered to be a useful tool for monitoring chemical consumption in the population. However, the lack of information on potential transformation of biomarkers in the sewer system can compromise the accuracy of the consumption estimation. The present study contributes to addressing this issue by investigating the in-sewer stability of biomarkers from a number of commonly used drugs using laboratory sewer reactors that can mimic different sewer conditions.  

In conclusion, although there exist several solutions that could potentially put an end to health concerns surrounding water quality, these solutions will only be implemented to areas that have the money and luxury of said solutions. That is why what happened in Flint, Michigan went on for so long before someone finally decided to look into the situation. The sad truth is that Flint would have never gone through a water crisis had it been a rich neighborhood able to institute solutions to the already growing problems. In today’s America, water quality is regulated by how much money how house is and by how much money you make. 
