About 22 percent of excavations tied to Flint’s lead-tainted water crisis have led to copper pipes that do not pose a threat of leaching lead, city records show.

Flint Action and Sustainability Team project coordinator Michael McDaniel called the 22 percent a “failure rate” because crews shouldn’t have to spent time excavating areas that aren’t problematic, according to the Flint Journal, which obtained the records through the Freedom of Information Act.

“To cut down on the number of times our pipe replacement crews are finding copper pipes, we plan to check the service lines at 4,000 homes with hydro-excavation trucks,” McDaniel said in a written statement. “The trucks use pressurized water to dig two small holes down to the service line to determine its composition, enabling pipe replacement crews to skip homes where copper pipes are found.”

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Source: MLive.com