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It reads like the additive would have fixed almost everything for every house with lead plumbing. I'm not surprised an additive would have improved the situation, but I'm skeptical it would have avoided all of the $600M spend.

A similar article with more detail...I'm still reading it. https://www.materialsperformance.com/articles/material-selec...

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My understanding is that it was a loss of institutional knowledge that came from the passage of time and from arrogance. The engineers who knew why the additive was required were fired or ignored or both. Could also be a lack of documentation?

Oh, what I meant was that they switched water sources also. It's not clear to me that "new source + additive" would have been as non-corrosive as "old source".

Edit: The article has a chart that says just one additive would have improved things, but still left the water 3.5x more corrosive than the original water source: https://www.materialsperformance.com/uploads/images/Articles...

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