Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is >100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance an

Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is >100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance and replacement. For this issue specifically, part of the problem is that the U.S. kept installing lead pipes through much of the 20th century, and as a result is saddled with a lot of them. Flint's lead pipes aren't even particularly old, most dating to its big population/construction boom of the 1920s-40s. That is late enough that concerns were already pretty widespread by then, e.g. Helsinki decided to phase out lead pipes during the 1890s. I can't seem to find a date for when the U.S. as a whole phased out lead pipes, but I do find that NYC stopped new installations in only 1961, so it seems to have been quite late.