Monday, December 22, 2014

Anti Lead Freaks at work

So, yesterday I find two Xeroxed sheets in my mailbox raving about the dangers of lead in my tap water.  I guess the local water board had the mail man put them out.  The sheets lack an author, although I would guess that the Environmental Pollution Agency is responsible.  They are all hot about a level of 15 parts per Billion of lead in the water.  Me, I don't worry about anything until it reaches one part per Million, a 1000 parts per billion.  
    We fixed the lead poisoning problem back in the 1960's when we stopped using lead dioxide as the pigment in white house paint.  Titanium dioxide makes paint white now.  But bureaucracies never die, the Environmental Pollution bureaucrats went out looking for something else to do.  They decided that the solder used to fasten copper water pipe together was dissolving in the water and poisoning people.  Nice theory, but in actual fact, solder is a metal and does not dissolve in water. 
   We have been using lead water pipes since Roman times.  In fact, the words plumber and plumbing come from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. 

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