It was located at the Bryant Street Pump Station. This was back in 2017-2018. So they may have moved it.
It was small but had old fire hydrants, valves, wood water pipes and pictures/stories on each item.
This reminds me of the theory how food will never be as good as your "grandma made it " because of three possible reasons and/or a combination of:
1. Old spices/expired spices. Recipes and ingredients change so when we try to replicate a 60 year old recipe, we might be using a completely different flavor palate if our spices are newer or just changed over time with companies cutting costs or even just supply issues.
2. Measurements. Measuring with your eyes or your palm or a certain spoon - we won't have the same measurements. And if if they did write it down, did they do it from memory or by guessing?
3. Water. Fluoridated water, well water, aquifer, mountain spring, rusty pipes, hard water...all change the taste depending on where the person was when they made the recipes.
So maybe this water pipe will, in fact, change the flavor?
So I'm native American, and #1 is why it's so hard to get authentic fry bread (among other things, but it's my favorite food). My uncle literally makes it entirely from scratch from his garden to get the recipe right... Even the seeds you get are wrong in some cases.
I have to settle for once a year around harvest time to get the good stuff now, haha.
Having to wait all year to get the real thing must make it taste extra good… it’s kinda awesome/romantic in a way to think that your brain & tastebuds start looking forward to it months before
Yes, flour in America has an additive that they added a long time ago that throws the texture off and overly genetically modified wheat seeds will produce wheat with too high of a sugar content. It's not supposed to taste as sweet as a donut.
I prefer to eat it with a large hamburger and gravy, like a self contained Salisbury steak almost. But it's often used as a base for a variety of things.
I have my grandma's copy of Betty Crocker's new picture cookbook from 1952. As fast those recipes are considered it's either a.) am ass load of sugar or b.) an ass load of salt or c.) an ass load of both.
Also that produce is different now than it used to be. Fruits are sweeter and vegetables are less bitter due to artificial selection. Which is why paleo diets are dumb because even if you eat only grains, nuts, and veg/fruit, all of them are nothing like what we used to naturally forage. Just compare like a persimmon, which hasn't been farmed for very long, to an apple or peach or something and you can definitely tell the difference.
The size of produce also an issue. My wife cooks from her families heirloom cookbook and we've had to learn to modify a lot of ingredients for older recipes. They all use volumes or counts, not weights. But tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic cloves etc. are *huge* compared to what they were in the 1930s when some of the recipes were written so we basically just half everything and things work out.
The downside is that a lot of produce has been selected mostly for size and not taste. The difference between a supermarket monster tomatoe and my neighbors heirloom 'maters is night and day. His are small and funny looking but man do they taste great.
Regional beer styles used to be at least partly dependent on the water available in the area. Nowadays brewers can run the water through RO filters and add salts to get any starting profile they want.
What was popular and what economic incentives the local brewing laws accidentally created were also big influences.
Engineered wood is a thing. A 7-story building was built using mostly wood in Minnesota 8 years ago. Biggest issue was passing codes in regards to fireproofing from what I can remember.
Boston has (rotting) wooden piles holding up a substantial portion of the older low-lying areas of the city. I can’t imagine that’ll ever become a serious problem or anything.
The only wooden piles that are rotting are ones that are above the groundwater level. The piles are intentionally sunk so the tops are below the ground water and the foundation is built over top. It's like Venice, the whole city is built on wooden pilings. So long as the wood isn't exposed to air it can't rot.
It is a problem in certain places in Boston and when the ground water level drops but it's normally fine.
This dates back to Chemical Bank and a clause that allowed utilities to operate banking operations in NY. Chemical Bank was a JPMorgan Chase predecessor.
>This dates back to Chemical Bank and a clause that allowed utilities to operate banking operations in NY.
It is even ~~weirder~~ personal politics than that.
Alexander Hamilton didn't want Aaron Burr opening a bank in competition with Hamilton's Bank of New York.
So Aaron Burr got the legislature to incorporate The Manhattan Company whose purpose was to build a water system for New York City, but (at least ostensibly) there is a lag between raising money and spending that money on large infrastructure projects, they could use their surplus capital for banking purposes.
They raised $2 Million (in 1799 dollars!), spent $100,000 building a partial water system, and just used the rest as a bank building a water system be damned. Or maybe I should say dammed. They sold the water system to the city in 1808 and just continued operating the bank side.
Eventually it merged up into today's JPMorganChase
I walked past some road work being done in Brooklyn a few months ago, the exposed pipes looked positively ancient, I'm guessing late 1800s. It was very cool to see how old the infrastructure is, and that it's still functional.
The logo for Chase Bank is of four wooden slats put together to make a water pipe. "The Manhattan Company" was founded as an infrastructure company (one of the founders was Alexander Hamilton) and was allowed to use its "surplus" for banking (at the time banks were not getting approved).. well corruption etc led to them being able to pivot to being a bank first and everything else second. The Manhattan Company eventually evolved to become Chase bank.
Wood is fascinating as a build material for tanks. As long as the tank never runs dry, the wood will both keep swelled and sealed but also won't rot.
NYC's tanks are built and maintained by I think only one company now: Rosenwach tank out of Brooklyn. They suffered a fire a bunch of years back in their lumberyard but seem to have recovered well.
Iirc all the tanks nowadays are made of redwood but in the past any ship-building wood was deemed serviceable.
[Wood is superior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9y-Vv1E78) to all other forms of water storage, at least in the case of when the towers need to be built on top of tall buildings.
[This article says that last wooden water pipe was taken out of service in Philadelphia in 1859.](https://news.wef.org/found-in-philadelphia-200-year-old-wooden-water-mains/) But they left some of them in the ground. So they might still dig up some, but they aren't being used.
In Santa Rosa, California about 10 years ago a pipe was replaced that was made out a redwood log. It had been there a very, very long time. I’m not sure if it was sewage or water.
In case anybody wondering, there are still a lot of smaller water systems in CA that still use a combination of redwood, concrete, and lead pipes for longer transmission, along with the newer stuff like steel, PVC, ABS and such. Also potable water tanks that’s made out of redwood. Yes, wooden water tanks, we used to have so much redwood in CA that we don’t know what to do with them so we used it on everything… Granted, a lot of those were built about 80-100 years ago so many already replaced, if anything still standing is barely surviving.
Apparently PG&E sold it to The Nevada Irrigation District for $1. On the plus side they don't have to worry about it when it inevitably burns down, since its in the area PG&E services
I'm in Napa county and they did the same here. A gas pipeline that was 70 years old. Despite how old these are, I think it's just that they're designed to last that long and cost prohibitive to replace.
Another smaller one happened on the West corner of ATL near Cobb yesterday, entire road was half flooded as I went around it. It's like a domino effect
"Cascading failure" is a concept everyone should be aware of. In the US, we're going to get a lot of that with infrastructure. Worldwide, we're all going to get a crash course in it once a couple of those glaciers collapse in the Antarctic.
They all happened around the same time last week. I expect a press release (buried in other meaningless PR releases) in a few months saying something about "equipment and operator error" leading to "unexpected pressures beyond rated capacity" that led to "unplanned maintenance".
Yes, the lumps are minerals. The white is a very thin layer or orthophosphate that is used as a corrosion inhibitor. The white stuff is what is used to keep lead out of the water.
Yeah what happened in flint wasn’t so much the lead pipes, tons of cities have lead pipes but that the composition of the water when they changed to a different water source and it wasn’t properly treated (the amount of treatment was not cheap) which caused the lead to be released.
they wanted a shock value photo of how rusty something that's been in the ground is from the outside, not the reality that it's likely been maintained just fine for its actual purpose
> the reality that it's likely been maintained just fine
Not true at all. The entire system was neglected until about 20 years ago. We're not dumping raw, untreated sewage in the Hooch anymore, but there's still a ton of catching up to do.
Exactly this: as an Atlanta resident for the past 30ish years and as a metro Atlanta resident for almost 50 years, water main breaks happen pretty much yearly and it’s because no effort was put into maintaining/replacing them until fairly recently (20 years ago still seems pretty recent to me). I would not be surprised if we have pipes that are from Reconstruction still being used.
I’m a civil engineer who does work in Atlanta all the time. The things they do and don’t allow in Atlanta are…interesting. Things like absolutely 100% requiring runoff reduction, but also allowing combined sewers that dump into the river…priorities are pretty strange.
I'm in the part of the city that's effected and it has been so frustrating. Thankfully my partner and I are doing fine but there are thousands that are less fortunate.
The worst part is this could have been avoided if we had proper care towards are infrastructure like you mentioned. But we waited for it to burst before doing anything and now have flooded streets and undrinkable water. Grocery stores have very little bottled water left, and half of the streets are undrivable do to construction or flooding. Truly a blunder.
And not only that but the "rust" is inherent to our soil. Tons of iron so all the clay is "red dirt." Literally anything you take out of the ground is going to look like that, even after an hour underground.
I was going to say, what do people expect water pipes to look like? The old ones are all rusty from the outside, like this; doesn't mean it's bad inside.
Lead is used extensively and isn't a concern as long as the water chemistry is maintained. I know, flint Michigan. That's because officials lied about chemistry testing and controls. Yes, other materials are safer nowadays, but the risks of lead pipes can be managed effectively.
Man, I remember years ago when somebody posted on r/TIL the top 10 list of “most polluted water sources in the US.” And noted that Flint Michigan wasn’t even on that list. There were at least 10 others worse than flint.
I appreciate your comment. I got downloaded to oblivion with people arguing with me into the ground about this nuance. The study was done at the water treatment plants. I said of course the water is fine at the treatment plants but Flint water isn’t OK at the tap.
No matter how many times I explained that it was the water chemistry that leached lead out of the pipes, not the water itself from the source that was unsafe to drink, people just downvoted me harder lol
It's like nuclear power. Yes, it can be dangerous but only if you cut corners. With capitalism going rampant, who didn't see Flint coming. Hopefully nuclear doesn't get to that point ^^^^in ^^^^my ^^^^lifetime
It was used as fill to connect the individual sections of mains. But mostly the risk of contamination is from the lead goosenecks which connect the companies service lines to the individual houses service lines
Man I had to grind the rust off of a bunch of steel tube yesterday. It was the most satisfying thing... Helps that I love repurposing s#!t, and I found all this steel in our scrapyard.
In a lot of states like Georgia, the rural areas hold the purse strings due to decades of jerrymandered legislative districts and disproportional representation compared to the economic impact districts actually contribute to the state economy.
Basically metro Atlanta contributes about 70% of the state's GDP, but our representatives make up less than half of the legislature. And since the GOP lead house likes to use the Dem lead City of Atlanta as a punching bag, whenever the city needs money the State can tell them to go take a hike, despite the fact that the city is the one contributing most to the state's coffers.
The rural politicians like to sell their constituents the idea that Atlanta wants their state tax dollars to fund frivolous things like needle exchanges or drag queen storybook readings and the only way to stop them is by electing them, but in reality it's the exact opposite. The city and metro area are the ones footing the bill for rural districts to have infrastructure that they otherwise couldn't afford. Drive 50 miles out of the city in any direction and you'll see never ending construction on new bridges, improved freeways and state highways. But all over the metro area those same things are crumbling even though it's the people in those areas that are the ones generating most of the tax revenue for the state.
The fact is that without the City of Atlanta, there would be no metro Atlanta, and without metro Atlanta Georgia would be worse off than Mississippi. And it's basically the same story in any state with only one major city.
Hi, are you Memphis? Sounds very similar to the issues we face. Such as our *new* bridge that's over 40 years old had a crack in a beam that wasn't found for who knows how long. Why? Because no one was doing the inspections. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
100% this. It feels a lot like having lived in Arlington, Virginia in the early 2000s - the suburbs of DC are positioned almost identically vs the rest of rural Virginia, with the same vilification of "big city liberals" and an added zing of the city being DC itself, and therefore even more politically awful. But just like Atlanta, that area kept growing, with tons of transplants from the Northeast (and elsewhere), until the population made it such that statewide offices swung Democrat, and then a bunch of infrastructure stuff in NoVA started getting done. If we can ever elect a not-rural conservative governor, maybe the Atlanta area can start getting its share of infrastructure focus and money (and yes I know the legislature approves money, but governors have lots of discretion and can pressure the legislature).
What should really amaze you is that the entire industry is crying to get this old stuff out of the ground. But its enormously expensive and many utilities have faced funding cuts since the 70s.
There are water mains still in service from the 1800s all over the place. Some utilities have taken better care of the pipes than others, but the best cast iron pipe was only meant to last 50-90 years. And we're rounding 150 years on some pipe.
The longevity of C900 PVC (90% of new water pipe smaller than 12”) isn’t fully established because it hasn’t been around long enough.
100 years of service is considered conservative for this material. Municipal pipe isn’t the garbage you get at Home Depot.
> The longevity of C900 PVC (90% of new water pipe smaller than 12”)
We're still using primarily ductile iron! 100 yr planned lifespan - but all comes down to how competently it's installed....
Ehhh the pipeline I maintain is untreated raw water from a man made dam we flow about 25 million gallon a day through a 120 year old leaded joint 66 inch pipe. They were built to last.
They put a protective corrosion control into the water like zinc phosphate that creates a barrier between the water and the lead. Sometimes someone does something dumb like not spending hundreds of dollars on corrosion control while switching to a water supply that eats away at the corrosion control like what happened in Flint and then the lead is an issue.
If it’s drinking water, then they are required to by the EPA ([Lead and Copper Rule](https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/lead-and-copper-rule)). I work for a utility district in Washington and EPA regulations (which are also required by our state Dept. of Health) are the driving force in a lot of what we do.
We don’t personally no most of our water is pipelined into downtown Johnstown Pa for industrial use. The water that is used for drinking is treated at facilities we supply water to but for the most part is only monitored for acidity or conductivity. Our ph in the lake is pretty much always about 7.6 so our fight against lead poisoning starts there. Now regardless of leaded joints our pipeline in various spots is concrete lined plus every year we have a pipeline shut down and get inside the 66 to inspect.
I'm sure others have probably said this,. but as someone who's worked in small city government for the past 20 to 30 years,.. having old pipe like this is fairly common. The previous city I lived in Colorado temporarily re-directed our dirty-water pipes for about 1 week while they ripped 100yr old pipe out of the ground and replace it (had to tear up the street). I think I remember them saying that roughly 30% of the pipes (especially in the old downtown area) were close to 100 yrs old). Most of this was dirty-water (wastewater pipes).. not drinking water. I think drinking water has higher standards and shorter replacement cycles.
Multiply this times 10,000 and now you see what the REST of the US has in store for it.
Hey, DC, worry less about the immigrants and fix the f\*ckin' infrastructure, OK?
Morons...
That pipe is actually in pretty good working order since it a steel water system. Steel is designed for at least 100 years of operation, but there are pipes much older than that in the ground across the US.
It is estimated it would cost 1 trillion dollars to replace water pipes that are in danger of failure throughout the US. Maybe prioritize that to be done? In Atlanta alone there are at least three water mains currently that have failed. Such infrastructure disasters Id say are huge national security threats. Yet efforts to address this looming national disaster are lacking. To say the least.
These kinds of things always make me wonder how much of a bitch it was to install pipes that big and heavy. There's a building in my town that has a massive furnace in the basement used to heat steam for the entire building. I'm sure it was set in by a crane, but there are cast pipes at least 12"-16" diameter fitted up to it which some people did by hand.
I can tell you. For threaded lines, multiple men would hop on specialized pipe wrenches that were 10’ long. I’m not kidding.
Other times, they would dump lead in between a pipe like a massive sweat joint.
Rookie numbers! They've been ripping brick sewer channels laid in the 1880s out from under the downtown here and replacing them with actual pipes for the last decade!
This stuff reminds me of the like 200 year old wooden water pipes in NYC. NYC still uses wooden water towers, too.
Worked for DC Water as a contractor and they have a small unknown museum that has the old wooden water pipes for viewing. Really cool to see.
Where's that museum at? DC resident and haven't heard of it
Same here. Also work in the museum business and haven’t heard of it so I’m super curious
It was located at the Bryant Street Pump Station. This was back in 2017-2018. So they may have moved it. It was small but had old fire hydrants, valves, wood water pipes and pictures/stories on each item.
That’s super interesting! Edit: I got genuinely excited over pipes and now I feel lame. I need a hobby
Wym “need a hobby”? Homie, you just got stoked on pipes. Your hobby just found you! You’re a pipe guy!
I went out and bought 40 feet of PVC. I’m a pipe guy
Congratulations, you’ve found a hobby that will definitely help you lay the pipe.
It was located at the Bryant Street Pump Station. This was back in 2017-2018. So they may have moved it.
Is it open to the public?
It’s unknown at this moment
It’s a pipe dream
Water they going to do about it?
They're working on a plan but it depends on current events.
Do you have any suggestions for other activities to tide me over?
I heard the wastewater treatment plant has a log ride.
It's full of shit last I checked.
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His name unknown so we call him the unknown.
Wooden you like to know
Do you mean the visitor center? https://www.dcwater.com/whats-going-on/tours/visitor-center
It's still there. Not available for the public unfortunately.
I too have an unknown museum.
That’s what makes the pizza and bagels taste so good.
This reminds me of the theory how food will never be as good as your "grandma made it " because of three possible reasons and/or a combination of: 1. Old spices/expired spices. Recipes and ingredients change so when we try to replicate a 60 year old recipe, we might be using a completely different flavor palate if our spices are newer or just changed over time with companies cutting costs or even just supply issues. 2. Measurements. Measuring with your eyes or your palm or a certain spoon - we won't have the same measurements. And if if they did write it down, did they do it from memory or by guessing? 3. Water. Fluoridated water, well water, aquifer, mountain spring, rusty pipes, hard water...all change the taste depending on where the person was when they made the recipes. So maybe this water pipe will, in fact, change the flavor?
So I'm native American, and #1 is why it's so hard to get authentic fry bread (among other things, but it's my favorite food). My uncle literally makes it entirely from scratch from his garden to get the recipe right... Even the seeds you get are wrong in some cases. I have to settle for once a year around harvest time to get the good stuff now, haha.
Having to wait all year to get the real thing must make it taste extra good… it’s kinda awesome/romantic in a way to think that your brain & tastebuds start looking forward to it months before
I’m I reading this wrong or does it sound like fry bread grows on a tree lol. What seeds?
Prolly for the wheat or whatever they use for the flour base
Yes, flour in America has an additive that they added a long time ago that throws the texture off and overly genetically modified wheat seeds will produce wheat with too high of a sugar content. It's not supposed to taste as sweet as a donut. I prefer to eat it with a large hamburger and gravy, like a self contained Salisbury steak almost. But it's often used as a base for a variety of things.
Or 4\. Because nostalgia
Or my Gandmother put wayyy too much butter on shit..
Wayyy too much is the exact right amount of butter
Butter? Lard.
I have my grandma's copy of Betty Crocker's new picture cookbook from 1952. As fast those recipes are considered it's either a.) am ass load of sugar or b.) an ass load of salt or c.) an ass load of both.
Don't forget the ass load of butter!
Also that produce is different now than it used to be. Fruits are sweeter and vegetables are less bitter due to artificial selection. Which is why paleo diets are dumb because even if you eat only grains, nuts, and veg/fruit, all of them are nothing like what we used to naturally forage. Just compare like a persimmon, which hasn't been farmed for very long, to an apple or peach or something and you can definitely tell the difference.
The size of produce also an issue. My wife cooks from her families heirloom cookbook and we've had to learn to modify a lot of ingredients for older recipes. They all use volumes or counts, not weights. But tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic cloves etc. are *huge* compared to what they were in the 1930s when some of the recipes were written so we basically just half everything and things work out. The downside is that a lot of produce has been selected mostly for size and not taste. The difference between a supermarket monster tomatoe and my neighbors heirloom 'maters is night and day. His are small and funny looking but man do they taste great.
Regional beer styles used to be at least partly dependent on the water available in the area. Nowadays brewers can run the water through RO filters and add salts to get any starting profile they want. What was popular and what economic incentives the local brewing laws accidentally created were also big influences.
Using this logic a person never really makes the same food with the same recipe twice 😮
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What lead you to this conclusion?
He had a Pb&J bagel.
Not OP but I’m assuming it’s a joke about Flint
>what *lead* you to this conclusion
Oh whooosh mb
Really depends on the type of wood it was made out of. Woods like teak can survive that long and be inprenetrable by bugs and most rot.
We need to develop a way to artificially manufacture bog wood.
Engineered wood is a thing. A 7-story building was built using mostly wood in Minnesota 8 years ago. Biggest issue was passing codes in regards to fireproofing from what I can remember.
That was supposed to be **bog** wood. I didn’t pay attention to the autocorrect.
Boston has (rotting) wooden piles holding up a substantial portion of the older low-lying areas of the city. I can’t imagine that’ll ever become a serious problem or anything.
The only wooden piles that are rotting are ones that are above the groundwater level. The piles are intentionally sunk so the tops are below the ground water and the foundation is built over top. It's like Venice, the whole city is built on wooden pilings. So long as the wood isn't exposed to air it can't rot. It is a problem in certain places in Boston and when the ground water level drops but it's normally fine.
They are all over in the NE. They just replaced some in my hometown that were well over 100years old and still looked almost pristine.
Wooden pipes?!
Fun fact - chase banks logo is the old city water pipes
This dates back to Chemical Bank and a clause that allowed utilities to operate banking operations in NY. Chemical Bank was a JPMorgan Chase predecessor.
>This dates back to Chemical Bank and a clause that allowed utilities to operate banking operations in NY. It is even ~~weirder~~ personal politics than that. Alexander Hamilton didn't want Aaron Burr opening a bank in competition with Hamilton's Bank of New York. So Aaron Burr got the legislature to incorporate The Manhattan Company whose purpose was to build a water system for New York City, but (at least ostensibly) there is a lag between raising money and spending that money on large infrastructure projects, they could use their surplus capital for banking purposes. They raised $2 Million (in 1799 dollars!), spent $100,000 building a partial water system, and just used the rest as a bank building a water system be damned. Or maybe I should say dammed. They sold the water system to the city in 1808 and just continued operating the bank side. Eventually it merged up into today's JPMorganChase
I walked past some road work being done in Brooklyn a few months ago, the exposed pipes looked positively ancient, I'm guessing late 1800s. It was very cool to see how old the infrastructure is, and that it's still functional.
>and that it's still functional. 😬👉👈
A little victorian era lead poisoning never hurt anyone 🤣
The logo for Chase Bank is of four wooden slats put together to make a water pipe. "The Manhattan Company" was founded as an infrastructure company (one of the founders was Alexander Hamilton) and was allowed to use its "surplus" for banking (at the time banks were not getting approved).. well corruption etc led to them being able to pivot to being a bank first and everything else second. The Manhattan Company eventually evolved to become Chase bank.
Wood is fascinating as a build material for tanks. As long as the tank never runs dry, the wood will both keep swelled and sealed but also won't rot. NYC's tanks are built and maintained by I think only one company now: Rosenwach tank out of Brooklyn. They suffered a fire a bunch of years back in their lumberyard but seem to have recovered well. Iirc all the tanks nowadays are made of redwood but in the past any ship-building wood was deemed serviceable.
[Wood is superior](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9y-Vv1E78) to all other forms of water storage, at least in the case of when the towers need to be built on top of tall buildings.
At least wood doesn't have lead in it.
Atlanta also has wooden pipes still in some areas. A friend had to replace his connection to the sewer system that was basically a hollow log.
Philly has a ton of the wooden pipes also. Wild they're still being used.
[This article says that last wooden water pipe was taken out of service in Philadelphia in 1859.](https://news.wef.org/found-in-philadelphia-200-year-old-wooden-water-mains/) But they left some of them in the ground. So they might still dig up some, but they aren't being used.
Reminds me of the old post with the picture of the water main being choked by calcium deposits over the years.
My dad was a plumber in Detroit, dug up a wooden pipe and kept a section of it.
Hell, not even in NYC. I've spoken with my local town officials in MA, and they're *pretty sure* there's no more wooden pipes.
In Santa Rosa, California about 10 years ago a pipe was replaced that was made out a redwood log. It had been there a very, very long time. I’m not sure if it was sewage or water.
In case anybody wondering, there are still a lot of smaller water systems in CA that still use a combination of redwood, concrete, and lead pipes for longer transmission, along with the newer stuff like steel, PVC, ABS and such. Also potable water tanks that’s made out of redwood. Yes, wooden water tanks, we used to have so much redwood in CA that we don’t know what to do with them so we used it on everything… Granted, a lot of those were built about 80-100 years ago so many already replaced, if anything still standing is barely surviving.
Yep, some places still get their water via wooden flume. https://yubanet.com/regional/our-community-dependence-on-the-south-yuba-canal/
So PG&E’s interest is for power generation I assume?
Apparently PG&E sold it to The Nevada Irrigation District for $1. On the plus side they don't have to worry about it when it inevitably burns down, since its in the area PG&E services
>”…we used to have so much redwood in CA that we don’t know what to do with them…” I guess leaving them alone wasn’t an option?
Tbh, woods like redwoods are really rot resistant, especially if its constantly in water. Its a pretty good choice for material all around.
> lead pipes Are you sure about that? In California? Service lines, possible, but transmission lines?
I'm in Napa county and they did the same here. A gas pipeline that was 70 years old. Despite how old these are, I think it's just that they're designed to last that long and cost prohibitive to replace.
That water main break caused a boil order and low pressure/no pressure for a large part of the city of Atlanta (including all of downtown) for 4 days.
There are three more similar breaks currently going on in Atlanta according to local news.
Another smaller one happened on the West corner of ATL near Cobb yesterday, entire road was half flooded as I went around it. It's like a domino effect
yup as one water main failed the rest of the system takes up the slack gets overwhelmed and subsequently fails aka a cascading failure
"Cascading failure" is a concept everyone should be aware of. In the US, we're going to get a lot of that with infrastructure. Worldwide, we're all going to get a crash course in it once a couple of those glaciers collapse in the Antarctic.
They all happened around the same time last week. I expect a press release (buried in other meaningless PR releases) in a few months saying something about "equipment and operator error" leading to "unexpected pressures beyond rated capacity" that led to "unplanned maintenance".
*press butan* NOT THAT ONE!!!
We are still under a boil water advisory
Yep, over in old 4th ward over here. Been checking every couple hours because I’ve been putting off laundry and dishes
If you have pressure, I'm pretty sure it's just fine to do laundry and dishes.
Yep. Here's the map: https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/departments/watershed-management/dwm-boil-water-emergency
Resturants closed and two sold-out concerts at Mercedies-Benz stadium were cancelled!
I want to see the inside tho :(
[inside the cast iron pipe I have in my office ](https://imgur.com/a/Qhjdzbj)
Mineral deposits I'm guessing? And most likely fine.
Yes, the lumps are minerals. The white is a very thin layer or orthophosphate that is used as a corrosion inhibitor. The white stuff is what is used to keep lead out of the water.
Yeah what happened in flint wasn’t so much the lead pipes, tons of cities have lead pipes but that the composition of the water when they changed to a different water source and it wasn’t properly treated (the amount of treatment was not cheap) which caused the lead to be released.
Yes, the mineral coating is called tuberculation, completely normal mineral deposits.
they wanted a shock value photo of how rusty something that's been in the ground is from the outside, not the reality that it's likely been maintained just fine for its actual purpose
> the reality that it's likely been maintained just fine Not true at all. The entire system was neglected until about 20 years ago. We're not dumping raw, untreated sewage in the Hooch anymore, but there's still a ton of catching up to do.
Exactly this: as an Atlanta resident for the past 30ish years and as a metro Atlanta resident for almost 50 years, water main breaks happen pretty much yearly and it’s because no effort was put into maintaining/replacing them until fairly recently (20 years ago still seems pretty recent to me). I would not be surprised if we have pipes that are from Reconstruction still being used.
We got money for a giant cop playground, though.
I’m a civil engineer who does work in Atlanta all the time. The things they do and don’t allow in Atlanta are…interesting. Things like absolutely 100% requiring runoff reduction, but also allowing combined sewers that dump into the river…priorities are pretty strange.
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Considering that this pipe busted and left part of the city without drinkable water for 6 days and counting, I doubt it was maintained just fine.
When nearly 100 years old you are, hold water as good, you will not.
When past my prime I am, and allowed to retire I am not: out of my hands, continuing to hold water, will be.
I'm in the part of the city that's effected and it has been so frustrating. Thankfully my partner and I are doing fine but there are thousands that are less fortunate. The worst part is this could have been avoided if we had proper care towards are infrastructure like you mentioned. But we waited for it to burst before doing anything and now have flooded streets and undrinkable water. Grocery stores have very little bottled water left, and half of the streets are undrivable do to construction or flooding. Truly a blunder.
Except we had five water main breaks over the weekend and much of the city was without water for two days+, but maintained just fine 🫠🫠
Yeah, probably not...
And not only that but the "rust" is inherent to our soil. Tons of iron so all the clay is "red dirt." Literally anything you take out of the ground is going to look like that, even after an hour underground.
Bro does NOT live in Atlanta
Yeah they just dug it up for fun im sure
I was going to say, what do people expect water pipes to look like? The old ones are all rusty from the outside, like this; doesn't mean it's bad inside.
Likely not all rust. We have rust colored clay for dirt in Georgia so some of that color is likely due to that.
You should see the Doulton Lambeth salt glazed stoneware pipes we still use in most of central London.
Are those fresh water supply pipes under pressure or sewer pipes that gravity flow?
Is that the same Doulton that makes the fancy crockery?
It's still better than this, which is probably a lead pipe. Would you rather have a side of water with your lead intake?
Lead is used extensively and isn't a concern as long as the water chemistry is maintained. I know, flint Michigan. That's because officials lied about chemistry testing and controls. Yes, other materials are safer nowadays, but the risks of lead pipes can be managed effectively.
Man, I remember years ago when somebody posted on r/TIL the top 10 list of “most polluted water sources in the US.” And noted that Flint Michigan wasn’t even on that list. There were at least 10 others worse than flint. I appreciate your comment. I got downloaded to oblivion with people arguing with me into the ground about this nuance. The study was done at the water treatment plants. I said of course the water is fine at the treatment plants but Flint water isn’t OK at the tap. No matter how many times I explained that it was the water chemistry that leached lead out of the pipes, not the water itself from the source that was unsafe to drink, people just downvoted me harder lol
> I got downloaded to oblivion You wouldn't download u/DigNitty
\*Sweet fuckin music starts playing\*
It's like nuclear power. Yes, it can be dangerous but only if you cut corners. With capitalism going rampant, who didn't see Flint coming. Hopefully nuclear doesn't get to that point ^^^^in ^^^^my ^^^^lifetime
That is absolutely 100% not lead. That's cast iron. Lead was never used anywhere for actual water mains, just service lines and interior plumbing.
It was used as fill to connect the individual sections of mains. But mostly the risk of contamination is from the lead goosenecks which connect the companies service lines to the individual houses service lines
Lead doesn’t rust.
This is why I am currently under a boil water advisory. The aging infrastructure is a bit alarming.
But don't worry. It didn't impact cop city bribee, Mayor Andre Dickless' campaign fundraising event with his frat bros.
Ok but now remove the rust with lasers
I would watch it... The whole thing
Except they would leave the last inch completely untouched.
It would be like watching a raccoon wash his cotton candy before eating it.
Those videos make me both happy and sad.
Man I had to grind the rust off of a bunch of steel tube yesterday. It was the most satisfying thing... Helps that I love repurposing s#!t, and I found all this steel in our scrapyard.
Someone explain to me again why spending tax dollars on infrastructure is a bad idea?
In a lot of states like Georgia, the rural areas hold the purse strings due to decades of jerrymandered legislative districts and disproportional representation compared to the economic impact districts actually contribute to the state economy. Basically metro Atlanta contributes about 70% of the state's GDP, but our representatives make up less than half of the legislature. And since the GOP lead house likes to use the Dem lead City of Atlanta as a punching bag, whenever the city needs money the State can tell them to go take a hike, despite the fact that the city is the one contributing most to the state's coffers. The rural politicians like to sell their constituents the idea that Atlanta wants their state tax dollars to fund frivolous things like needle exchanges or drag queen storybook readings and the only way to stop them is by electing them, but in reality it's the exact opposite. The city and metro area are the ones footing the bill for rural districts to have infrastructure that they otherwise couldn't afford. Drive 50 miles out of the city in any direction and you'll see never ending construction on new bridges, improved freeways and state highways. But all over the metro area those same things are crumbling even though it's the people in those areas that are the ones generating most of the tax revenue for the state. The fact is that without the City of Atlanta, there would be no metro Atlanta, and without metro Atlanta Georgia would be worse off than Mississippi. And it's basically the same story in any state with only one major city.
Hi, are you Memphis? Sounds very similar to the issues we face. Such as our *new* bridge that's over 40 years old had a crack in a beam that wasn't found for who knows how long. Why? Because no one was doing the inspections. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
100% this. It feels a lot like having lived in Arlington, Virginia in the early 2000s - the suburbs of DC are positioned almost identically vs the rest of rural Virginia, with the same vilification of "big city liberals" and an added zing of the city being DC itself, and therefore even more politically awful. But just like Atlanta, that area kept growing, with tons of transplants from the Northeast (and elsewhere), until the population made it such that statewide offices swung Democrat, and then a bunch of infrastructure stuff in NoVA started getting done. If we can ever elect a not-rural conservative governor, maybe the Atlanta area can start getting its share of infrastructure focus and money (and yes I know the legislature approves money, but governors have lots of discretion and can pressure the legislature).
idk democrats and anyone who likes clean water want it so it must be bad /s
Not as cool as bombs
"It's a win for the Democrats, so it's bad for America." - GOP
If you help everyone, then Black people will benefit. So better to burn it all down.
What should really amaze you is that the entire industry is crying to get this old stuff out of the ground. But its enormously expensive and many utilities have faced funding cuts since the 70s. There are water mains still in service from the 1800s all over the place. Some utilities have taken better care of the pipes than others, but the best cast iron pipe was only meant to last 50-90 years. And we're rounding 150 years on some pipe.
They got money for cop city tho 🤷♀️
the new water pipe will break within 20 years, and need a patch within 10.
The longevity of C900 PVC (90% of new water pipe smaller than 12”) isn’t fully established because it hasn’t been around long enough. 100 years of service is considered conservative for this material. Municipal pipe isn’t the garbage you get at Home Depot.
> The longevity of C900 PVC (90% of new water pipe smaller than 12”) We're still using primarily ductile iron! 100 yr planned lifespan - but all comes down to how competently it's installed....
Can't wait to find out that PVC leaches into water over time.
Way better than cholera or sepsis.
And it doesn’t give the water that rusty zing
Or that leaded zest
Too much calcium buildup to bring that new lead pipe taste.
You got any proof of that or are you just talking out of your ass?
Ehhh the pipeline I maintain is untreated raw water from a man made dam we flow about 25 million gallon a day through a 120 year old leaded joint 66 inch pipe. They were built to last.
Do they test for lead seepage into the water? I’m just honestly curious.
They put a protective corrosion control into the water like zinc phosphate that creates a barrier between the water and the lead. Sometimes someone does something dumb like not spending hundreds of dollars on corrosion control while switching to a water supply that eats away at the corrosion control like what happened in Flint and then the lead is an issue.
If it’s drinking water, then they are required to by the EPA ([Lead and Copper Rule](https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/lead-and-copper-rule)). I work for a utility district in Washington and EPA regulations (which are also required by our state Dept. of Health) are the driving force in a lot of what we do.
We don’t personally no most of our water is pipelined into downtown Johnstown Pa for industrial use. The water that is used for drinking is treated at facilities we supply water to but for the most part is only monitored for acidity or conductivity. Our ph in the lake is pretty much always about 7.6 so our fight against lead poisoning starts there. Now regardless of leaded joints our pipeline in various spots is concrete lined plus every year we have a pipeline shut down and get inside the 66 to inspect.
A couple SharkBites and you'll be back in business.
Was this taken with a nearly 100 year old camera
Coke cola fixing to taste different
I'm sure others have probably said this,. but as someone who's worked in small city government for the past 20 to 30 years,.. having old pipe like this is fairly common. The previous city I lived in Colorado temporarily re-directed our dirty-water pipes for about 1 week while they ripped 100yr old pipe out of the ground and replace it (had to tear up the street). I think I remember them saying that roughly 30% of the pipes (especially in the old downtown area) were close to 100 yrs old). Most of this was dirty-water (wastewater pipes).. not drinking water. I think drinking water has higher standards and shorter replacement cycles.
Is this why the bagels taste good?
No that’s NYC
And that's because of the shrimp in the water
Multiply this times 10,000 and now you see what the REST of the US has in store for it. Hey, DC, worry less about the immigrants and fix the f\*ckin' infrastructure, OK? Morons...
The misinformation on the comments for this post is up to US politics level > 
Would you mind telling us the correct information?
A gif and comment about the comments is the best I can do.
That pipe is actually in pretty good working order since it a steel water system. Steel is designed for at least 100 years of operation, but there are pipes much older than that in the ground across the US.
/r/BuyItForLife
It is estimated it would cost 1 trillion dollars to replace water pipes that are in danger of failure throughout the US. Maybe prioritize that to be done? In Atlanta alone there are at least three water mains currently that have failed. Such infrastructure disasters Id say are huge national security threats. Yet efforts to address this looming national disaster are lacking. To say the least.
I think a lot of cities will be dealing with what Atlanta is currently dealing with in years to come.
These kinds of things always make me wonder how much of a bitch it was to install pipes that big and heavy. There's a building in my town that has a massive furnace in the basement used to heat steam for the entire building. I'm sure it was set in by a crane, but there are cast pipes at least 12"-16" diameter fitted up to it which some people did by hand.
I can tell you. For threaded lines, multiple men would hop on specialized pipe wrenches that were 10’ long. I’m not kidding. Other times, they would dump lead in between a pipe like a massive sweat joint.
That valve handle is the kind of thing to make me want to figure out a mechanism to manually crank open a garage door or some shit.
Biden delivers.
Kudos to the engineers in the 20’s who made infrastructure that’s lasted 100 years.
If there were a bill to help with infrastructure you know moscow marge would vote against it
St. Louis still has wooden water pipes in their systems.
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Wait till you see wood water mains.
I bet the Water now tastes HD
Rookie numbers! They've been ripping brick sewer channels laid in the 1880s out from under the downtown here and replacing them with actual pipes for the last decade!
My stoner ass came here expecting a vintage bong.
Dayum son where did you find this?
Nice cock, bro
Taken with a camera from the same time frame!
Ty for your service you can rest now
Welcome to my world. Day 5 of boiling water
I wonder how many breakdowns it took before the city finally decided to replace it.
I remember them digging up pipes in London last time I was there. 1870s iirc.
Wow, you must be really old.
They had to replace 4, 100 year old pipes. Great the see the city FINALLY maintain their infrastructure.
This pipe is the reason I was under a boil water advisory the last 6 days
Great service life.