Thousands of U.S. locales where lead poisoning is worse than in Flint
reuters.comThis is a public health disaster. It's tough to really fathom the number of children across the country that will suffer mental and behavioral problems for life because of this.
Why are there not more lawsuits? Is the scope of the damage too difficult to quantify, or the negligent parties too diffuse/remote to sue?
As much as our litigation-based culture is vilified, it can help spur action by changing the cost/benefit of doing nothing and force companies/governments to step up and fix this before more people are hurt. The risk of Mesothelioma lawsuits, for example, help add some seriousness to asbestos exposure claims.
Okay, so you sue Flint. Then what? It has no money. If it had money, it would have invested in its water infrastructure.
That's the case all over the country. When I was there, the legal clinic at Northwestern University was working on, among other things, Clean Water Act issues. They did a report on water quality--tons of municipalities in Illinois failed to meet standards. But lawsuits would have been pointless. Almost all of these are tiny municipal water utilities that have no money.
The problem is only going to get worse. Municipal budgets are in shambles and taxes will go up to make ends meet. Raising water rates--which are far too low--to pay for new infrastructure will be politically intractable.
I'd bet that's down the road. Only recently has testing your water for lead/etc become cheap, easy, and relevant. If you tested your water for lead 10 years ago society would probably label you paranoid - still might in many places.
> If you tested your water for lead 10 years ago society would probably label you paranoid
New York City sends you a free lead test kit, if you ask for it [1].
[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/water-lead-te...
Too diffuse. This is a classic "principal-agent" problem.
There are a shitload of lawsuits, whenever a plausible plaintiff can be found.
Yeah but who do you sue if the old flaky paint in the house you own causes your kid to get lead poisoning?
Aside from the disturbing levels of lead poisoning in some locations, this also reveals how little is publicly knowable about lead levels in some areas. It really paints a picture of widespread problems and obstructions to shining a light on them.
I went to my water utility's website to find out their numbers. First I was shocked that they publish their numbers only once a year! And even in that report they say last lead measurement was in 2013 because Department of Health only requites measurement every 3 years! With Trump about to set loose entire Oil, gas and fracking industry like never before this might get lot worse.
Instead, Reuters sought testing data at the neighborhood level, in census tracts or zip code areas, submitting records requests to all 50 states.
Too bed there's no way to study the dataset directly short of repeating the process.
I'll pay for and perform the FOIA requests through muckrock.com if you do the analysis.
Here is my experience FOIA requesting 100+ universities:
http://austingwalters.com/foia-requesting-100-universities/
In short, you often have to get on the phone, email, snail mail, go in person, and pay quite a bit to get records. It's a very painful process. Careful what you offer lol
summary of the new star wars movie: the tale of an extremely complicated and costly FOIA request
This is the best star wars joke Ive read in a long time. Brilliant. :D
I'm not sure I'm competent to do that, but this isn't the first time we've had this sort of conversation. Maybe you could drop me a line at gmail outlining your interest.
Have you tried asking the reporters named in the byline?
I put together a search engine[1] for this very thing a few months ago. The data is publicly available, but obscure and usually buried in poorly described .gov city pages.
I remember reading years ago about how water utilities were replacing chlorine with chloramine because it was cheaper. From what I understand, chloramine is more corrosive and it erodes the lining in the lead pipes. Does anyone know if it's standard practice for water companies to do their quality sampling at the taps?
Will they get the same attention?
Will the nation ever upgrade and repair ancient and disastrous infrastructure?
In my area (Western PA), the water authority is working to replace lead service lines, but only to the curb. Unfortunately, it is up to the homeowner to replace the line from the curb to the house. This is quite expensive, and depending on the topography, requires a significant amount of digging.
This is not an excuse, but I think it's important to point out in some cases, the issues with lead are on private property, and some municipalities just can't afford to fix everything.
Wait, what? They have actual lead pipes for drinking water? That's insane.
It's safe as long as the water chemistry doesn't leach the pipes. If it does, and you're not using agents in the water to stop it, you get Flint, MI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis
"The Flint water crisis is a drinking water contamination issue in Flint, Michigan, United States that started in April 2014. After Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit Water and Sewerage Department water (which was sourced from Lake Huron as well as the Detroit River) to the Flint River (to which officials had failed to apply corrosion inhibitors), its drinking water had a series of problems that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger. The Flint River water that was treated improperly caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin."
Is anyone else not totally cool with showering and drinking water with flouride, chlorine, and inhibitor chemicals? APEC Water makes a great counter-top tankless RO filtration system for $200 that takes 10 mins to install and doesn't require any permanent mounting (so it's fine to use in apartments). The only downside is that unlike filter taps with a reservoir tank, you only get the RO membrane rate of flow (~2GPH depending on your water pressure) so you kinda need to fill up a jug and keep it in the fridge, otherwise an 8oz glass of water takes about a minute to fill.
What's the risk here? Fluoride helps control dental health and chlorine keeps biological contaminants at bay. These are beneficial for your health! If you really don't want chlorine in your drinking water (or don't like the taste), you can let it sit in an open container for a couple hours - it will just evaporate...
Lead was the common material for pipes until the 1950s and was only banned in the US in the mid 1980's. Most of the infrastructure in the US was built during the industrial revolution around the turn of the century, so most of that infrastructure is lead. If the water is treated properly (with very low levels of extremely cheap chemicals), these pipes are completely safe. It was estimated that spending $150/day in Flint would have prevented the crisis.
In some cases the solution not being obvious isn't an excuse for why there isn't proper disclosure and prompt remediation when the solution is obvious.
It looks like California is relatively clean on this scale, but what about the Superfund sites? I feel like those are gray areas that get much less attention than I would expect. With former semiconductor fab sites and former military sites getting increasingly developed with sometimes only a few feet of topsoil removed for cleanup (plus some kind of shielding material?), and a seeming lack of hard data for long term health impact, count me among the concerned.
(happy to have my worries put to rest by HN'ers!)
Yeah, can't wait for them to try bringing manufacturing back to America. Hopefully California will shut anything like that down.
Because having it elsewhere is better?
Here we'd have the resources to hopefully make it safe(r). China doesn't give a damn about the environment.
When it comes to testing your water, some counties offer home testing services to concerned residents for free. I urge everybody with kids or thinking of having them to check your local county government's website for information. Even if the water treatment facility in your area is free of lead, the pipes in your home or neighborhood might not be.
It is hard to sue government. It is even harder to make them lose their jobs. When it comes to compensation they will simply use our own money to pay back.
Utilities remains a major pain in USA partly because of the ridiculous government control which invariably leads to corruption.
I have been exclusively using distilled water in Sunnyvale for last 3 years. Water in Sunnyvale has dangerous levels of pesticides if not lead.
I don't see any reason to think totally privatizing and deregulating utilities would be any safer.
Here's one: companies like repeat customers.
lol. Yeah, it works great for broadband. What are you going to do, shut off the water? Or will multiple companies be building out competing water infrastructure? Let's be realistic here.
Remember PG&E and the San Bruno fire? Companies fight hard to deny liability when they harm their customers. There is no competition in many cases.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/27/san-bruno-blast-pge-cr...
Assuming you can even figure out you're being slowly poisoned.
So Reuters is finally getting around to doing their job; moving beyond a sensationalized story which sells ads, to the unglamorous work of uncovering the truth, that Flint isn't special at all and that the government knew that and has been covering it up.
It's a shame they couldn't get around to reporting the truth behind the sensation a year ago when public outcry was enough to get substantial Federal funding allocated to fixing this nation-wide.
First there should be a Federal law requiring disclosure of testing data nationwide, and the full sets should be put online in standardized formats.
Childhood lead rates should be shown next to walkability score and crime stats on Realtor sites. Home sellers should be mandated to report their local area exposure rates at the time of sale.
Second, setup a super-fund type cash pool which provides for remediation of the top X% of effected areas.
Third, new laws for mandatory testing and reporting, and fines and felonies for underreporting, misreporting, or falsifying reports of childhood lead exposure.
Here's to hoping that major infrastructure spending includes the unglamorous water mains replacements as much as the more glamorous monument-style projects.
As much as I would like to agree with you, this article shows that it takes time and organized manpower to do this kind of research.
For whatever reason, this kind of work and reporting could not be done instantly, either due to investigative funding issues, politics, priority, or sequence of research.
So giving credit where it is due, I am glad Reuters succeeded at publishing this data.
Flint made news because the problem was new. Flint water used to be safe, and then it became unsafe.
There are a lot of problems nobody bothers with because they're not new problems.
Flint also made news because local control was subverted by the state to make the decision.
Not the state as a generic entity, Republicans specifically, neocons with a very specific ideological privatization agenda practicing good old disaster capitalism by wrecking the state budget then claiming the need to privatize and cut budgets. It's important to point out what actually happened (is happening, will continue to happen), and not gloss over it by pretending it's a generic government problem.
>Not the state as a generic entity, Republicans specifically, neocons with a very specific ideological privatization agenda practicing good old disaster capitalism...
That's biased enough to be wrong. Flint wasn't in receivership because of Republicans, and in fact the mayor, a Democrat, signed on to the plan to use water from the Flint river. A plan which, by the way, was conceived by the city's emergency manager, also a Democrat.
This story is from Reuters, not AP; also, there have been stories about large numbers of places being worse than Flint since very early in the period when Flint's water issues were getting attention.
> So the AP is finally getting around to doing their job
This is a report by Reuters.
> Here's to hoping that major infrastructure spending includes the unglamorous water mains replacements as much as the more glamorous monument-style projects.
Yes! This is a very fixable problem -- and fixing it will create jobs in the short run, and reduce dependency in the long run. Definitely money worth spending.
I wonder to what extent Michael Moore's Flint pedigree influenced the media.
I'm guessing it's decidedly non-zero.
Edit: this was not intended as a dig at Michael Moore or anyone else. The fact that he made a documentary featuring Flint means that more people than otherwise should be are aware of the place, hence, media stories about it are more likely to gain traction with the general population. Michael Moore humanized Flint. His making it recognizeable, I think, aided in the rise of this particular story, IMO.
I also think the name of the city helped its presence in the news cycle. Flint, being short and a homonym for another English word is far more memorable than say "Scarborough" (which, amusingly, was the first name that came to mind when I tried to come up with the most memorable unmemorable name for a town.)
The problem is, this kind of speculation really goes nowhere. It's unprovable. And, even if there was a connection between peripheral awareness of Flint due to Moore and the legs this story has...so what?
Fair enough. I disagree that it's unprovable, but I'm certainly not going to reach any solid conclusions by posting on a forum :)