&gt; The city council vote to switch was 7-1, with 6 Democrats voting &quot;yes&quot;.<p>I don&#x27;t know why you threw that bit in there but it&#x27;s worth noting that the lone dissenting vote wanted to get ALL of the city&#x27;s water from the Flint River, which wouldn&#x27;t have helped anything. (and switching to 100% river water is what they ended up doing anyway, isn&#x27;t it?)<p>&gt; Many articles try to imply that the lead came from the new water supplier; in fact, it leached from lead pipes the existing system used as its water mains.<p>To be precise, the new, different chemistry of the water affected the existing lead pipes. The lead pipes were not leaching dangerous levels of lead prior to the switchover and there is no evidence they were in danger of doing so.