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Flint, Michigan Declares State of Emergency Over Lead In Children's Blood (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 writes: The Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014. "City officials have also said the use of corrosive Flint River water also damaged Flint's water infrastructure after state regulators never required the river water be treated to make it less corrosive." FEMA is now supplying bottled water to the city.
Lots of feels for Flint.
Wasn't Flint the city that basically got abandoned by GM when they closed their plants years ago? They're held up as a poster child for Rust Belt decline, much the same way my hometown was back in the 80s. So the question is where the lead is coming from -- is it a natural source? I thought most large-scale industrial activity that could cause that much lead emission outside of auto production was done in Michigan long ago.
Whatever the cause, talk about a crappy set of circumstances. A city now has an environmental mess to deal with after losing all of its industry and chance of a recovery.
Of course this is "so far". This is after only 15 months or of exposure. If detection and intervention had not occurred this number would have kept rising as lead accumulated in children's bodies.
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It doesn't sound like the lead problem as-described is simply a case of service-entrance lead pipe from the street to the residence. If the water was acidic enough to leach the lead from 30' of pipe to reach these lead-levels then the people would be complaining of acid burns of the mouth and esophagus, and the pipes would have rotted away.
It doesn't take dangerous levels of acidity to leach 25 PPB from lead piping. a PH of about 6 would do it. That's the same PH as a peeled potato...
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The problem is the pipes were designed for water with a certain pH. The river water had a different pH, in which lead was soluble. Nothing to do with river water lead pollution. The old source of water, Detroit, was safe to use with the pipes. The river water wasn't. But the river water was cheaper.
Also Flint is full of poor people, and was forced into bankruptcy (don't know the details) by the governor, who then appointed a representative to run the city. The water change was his policy, as was selling off many needed city assets. For some reason this didn't solve the problem, but did create new ones, like lead poisoning.
I'm not sure, but this appears to be "crony capitalism" in action. It looks as if several laws were broken, but none that bothered anyone powerful enough to get any enforcement.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's a bit of a half-truth. Michigan's Emergency Financial Manager laws were put in place back in 1990 under Democratic governor Blanchard. It wasn't used too much, but Democratic governor Granholm (2003-2011) appointed 7 of them. With the slight expansion of powers in the 2011-2012 changes one concession was that the local government could boot an EFM after 18 months. Granted, if the "triggers" to require an EFM were still there they'd get a new one, but that's probably why Flint has bounced through so many since 2011.
WikiPedia has a handy chart of when/where they were used in Michigan.
The blind partisan vitriol on the issue of EFMs is rather staggering to me. I've seen Snyder called a racist for appointing an EFM (like in Benton Harbor) when all he did was reappoint the EFM previous governor Granholm had already put in place.
And it's not like the new water treatment system was a new idea. Flint spent $50 million upgrading their unused water treatment system between 1998 and 2006, well before anything related to EFMs came into play, though they were under one from 2002-2004. I don't think it's all that illogical to ask/force a city government that just spent $50 million on a water treatment plant to actually use it instead of buying it from Detroit and letting the plant sit idle while they go broke.