100% avoidable, yes. Motivated by greed? No, by indifference. No decision-maker here made a decision about the water supply in order to make money off of it.

If it was not to make money, then it was to save money due to increasing budget constraints. Allowing the poisoning of the water supply due to budget constraints is some third world shit.

They didn't realize what would happen. The Flint River water is safe to drink - it only becomes unsafe when you run it through lead pipes.

Then why did they choose to use lead pipes?

Because it's cheap, easy to work with, and tends to deform under stress instead of breaking.

These were old pipes - they pre-date this problem by decades.

Did they know that they were lead pipes before they decided to start using them?

Water companies should be measuring the quality of the water going into the pipes, but they also need to sample the water that comes out of the pipes - they need to collect samples coming out of people's faucets.

Sad that such an obvious thing needs to be stated.

Using them for what? These are not new pipes. They've been using these pipes for decades.

What? Money was literally the reason:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/what-did...

> To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit’s system, which was deemed too costly. But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

Money being the reason and greed being the reason are two different things. The $5 million in question would have never benefited the decision-makers who elected to make the switchover to river water. They were attempting to be thrifty with money that belonged to the city, which is just doing their jobs (badly).