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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.
Man, I bet those city officials must have a serious headache what with the state regulators not telling them not to hit their head with hammers.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Lots of feels for Flint.
What's wrong with having the most blood?
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.
Because "nearly doubled" isn't a super useful stat for evaluating the relevance of something:
In the affected area, 2.1% of children less than 5 years old had "elevated" blood levels of lead (more than 5ug/dL). After switching to the new water source, 4.0% of children less than 5 had elevated lead levels. Sample size was about 900 both before & after the water switch; so this roughly translates to 18 unexpected cases in the study. The population of Flint is about 100K, with 8% under 5 years old, so we can estimate that somewhere around 160 children in Flint received a high dose of lead as a result of the water switch.
You won't find the phrase "Emergency Manager" in this article, which indirectly positions the parasitic state government as our saviors in this crisis. And yes, I can say that without apologizing for city misconduct. When a newspaper of record like the Washington Post or The New York Times fails to report a detail as enormous as the persistent erosion and suspension of home rule in a time of public austerity, they essentially mislead their readers and distort the historical record.
Here are a few details that the Detroit Free Press and the Flint Journal managed to include but which the Washington Post and the New York Times did not:
- In 2011, newly elected Governor Rick Snyder passed Public Act 4 which allowed him to appoint an Emergency Manager over financially distressed cities with the power to liquidate assets, suspend and renegotiate contracts, and even disincorporate cities.
- In 2012, Michigan voters repealed Public Act 4 by public referendum, but within weeks the Republican majorities in the state legislature passed an almost identical bill, Public Act 436, that, as an appropriation, is referendum proof. Snyder signed this bill.
- From most of 2011 to 2015, Flint has been under a sequence of four Emergency Managers who, during their tenure suspended local officials, liquidated assets and, oh yes, DECIDED TO DRAW OUR DRINKING WATER SUPPLY FROM THE FLINT RIVER! Emergency Manager Ed Kurtz made the commitment, Emergency Manager Darnell Earley oversaw the transition, and Emergency Manager Jerry Ambrose nullified a City Council resolution to switch back to Detroit water in early 2015.
The Post should be ashamed for the way it has reported this story, and I do not say this lightly. These two so-called "bastions of liberal thought" have helped let an overwhelmingly gerrymandered and Republican-dominated state government off the hook for their role in poisoning 100,000 mostly poor, mostly black people in this city.
Shouldn't the people who polluted the river bear some of the blame?
But of course, someone made fucking boatloads of money back in the day. That is untouchable. But boy, the victims of that activity, why they're stupid and deserve what they get!
I think in the future we should just declare large corporations and wealthy people to be gods, and gratefully drink the urine as a demonstration of how they deserve absolute, permanent and infinite immunity from their wrongdoing. Indeed, we should make it an executable offence to even suggest that a large corporate interest ever did anything wrong. People should have their organs cut out for daring to attack commercial interests, and, of course, all environmentalists should be burned alive. America is for the super rich, and everyone else can go get fucked.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There's an old saying, Detroit is the asshole of Michigan and Flint is 50 miles up it.
According to this article, when the water leaves the treatment plant, it is lead-free (within an acceptable margin of error). The problem comes from old (ie, still being built in the 1980s) pipes that used lead solder to connect the copper. The older pipes are around the city and inside homes, and will take 15 years to replace.
The water from the river has higher levels of chloride, and chloride is corrosive to iron, which caused the lead to leach off into the water.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Tell us more of Flints election process. How do outsiders get to vote?
None of what you say changes basic facts on the ground. They made a mess and now the feds are picking up the tab.
Are 'rich mother fuckers' also responsible for the broken governments in DC, Detroit, Philadelphia, East St. Louis?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
After reading the friendly summary & article one might be left confused about where this lead is coming from, but according to the Wikipedia entry on the Flint River, it's due to the river's water being corrosive (presumably low pH) and degrading the lead pipes which form part of the water distribution network of the city.
The water itself is lead-free as it leaves the treatment plant, but still unsuitable for drinking due to containing high levels of carcinogenic trihalomethanes, which was the original reason that the river water was deemed unsuitable for producing potable water from.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_River_(Michigan)
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
Now you and I have have to pay to provide them all with bottled water?
That is a lot cheaper than paying for all the police and prisons that will be required if we let kids get poisoned with lead. Lead causes a significant drop in IQ and a rise in violent anti-social behavior. Getting lead out of our kids' blood is one the most cost effective public health measures imaginable.
So the locals elect a government
They probably didn't. A lot of cities in MI are ruled by Emergency Managers, and the locally elected officials have no power at all.
So what do you do if the residents decide not to go buy water, or can't afford it? Let them drink the contaminated water, I guess? Well, even if that is a bit heartless, OK...lets go with that "solution". So do we also condemn the 4 year old kids to drinking that water too, or are they supposed to get off their 4 year old asses, get a job, and go buy some safe bottled water on their own, since their parents can't or won't do it for them?
Would you feel the same way if the lead was from a natural source? We should sue mother nature, not blame ourselves for doing none of the normal water treatment done all over the rest of the US.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
True, but emergency managers are only put in after the locals make a mess of things and show they aren't even trying to fix anything.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> I say locals made their bed and now should lay in it.
Do you seriously think locals said "Hey let's elect these people so they can give us cheap tainted water!" Should a populace be held responsible to a person for the actions and effects of the decisions of their elected officials?
My guess is that you are supposed boil your water that came out of the tap cold, rather than using hot water from the tap. As per the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/tips/water.htm), hot water contains more lead, and boiling THAT water does not remove the lead. But if you do need hot water, you will need to boil cold tap water instead.
Shouldn't the people who polluted the river bear some of the blame?
The lead isn't coming from waste. The river water is acidic and leeching lead from the plumbing. The largest contributor of acid to the river is decaying plant matter; leaves and whatnot. There is a lot of that in Michigan and inland water frequently has high PH levels.
But nice corporate hate rant. You've been trained well. The city of Flint — 100% anti-business Democrat since Johnson — ruins its own water supply and it's somehow the fault of "corporations."
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Boiling isn't to remove the lead, but to kill pathogens and remove some dissolved solvents and possibly some of that corrosive stuff that caused the lead to leach into the water.
See what happens when penny pinchers dictate smaller budgets. Now the city gets free water from the federal government. And not only do they get that benefit they also don't have to pay their kids college expenses. After drinking in all that lead college is not in those kids future. Now try and figure out the total cost of saving those pennies and how many millions upon millions will be required to restore the water system. And, by the way, why did they city not know immediately that lead was in their drinking water? Don't they run tests several times every day?
So the locals elect a government, that decides to cheap out and not pay Detroit for safe treated water.
Flint elects a local government, but they have no authority. Since the city went bankrupt in 2011, all spending and managerial decisions are made by an "emergency manager" appointed by the Governor.
Well if you read the article, and the explanation of where the lead is coming from, you would know that the lead is not found in the water coming out of the treatment plants. The lead is being leached by pH imbalanced water in lead infrastructure feeder pipes and solder joints that go to homes and business.
In other words the dumbasses STILL have piss poor infrastructure, that they almost had to have known about, and didn't take into account pH treatments at their own self installed treatment plant.
So, please do tell me again about your other ravings on capitalism... when the fuck up is 100% the Flint cities fault.
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
"explain how poor people are prevented from voting "
A few ways. First, make sure the polling hours are during the work day when poor people have to make a decision between feeding their kids that night or voting. Also, make sure early voting has a short window. Then, require IDs to vote. But not just any ids, limit it to IDs that take some effort to get, like drivers licenses or state issued ID cards that can only be issued at the DMV. Close some DMVs and keep the other ones open only during those pesky business hours. Ensure the lines are long enough that it will require a three hour time commitment to get an ID. Once they reach the counter, turn them away because they're lacking some random piece of paperwork, even though they have more than enough with them to establish identity (true story: this is what happened to me last time I renewed my license in Texas - two afternoons off work and six hours in line).
That'll keep poor people from voting.
"[explain how] rich people who are non-residents can vote in local elections"
They can't, but they can flood the media with their message a strongly influence elections. They can also ensure that only topics that matter to them make it on the ballot. And after the election, they can just get their buddies who just got elected to do their bidding.
"That goes counter to every election system I've ever heard of."
My guess is that you've only read about elections systems in textbooks and never bothered to learn how they're actually implemented and commonly manipulated. As long as we've had electoral processes, people have found ways to game them.
-Chris
Again if lead is a major contributor as is acknowledged, cooking with it will not be safe. You can remove the volatiles and any bacterial contaminates yes, but the lead remains. Why say it is still safe to cook with? Even earlier when the were advising boil to drink, were they aware at all about the lead levels? Seems more like a desire to play down the hazard by giving the populace something to do, even if ineffective.
Letter To Iran
So where did the carcinogens come from?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seriously. From what I can tell what we haven't eliminated outright we've defunded to the point where it doesn't exist anymore. It's not really a law if nobody enforces it. It's like complaining to the labor board in Arizona. There isn't one. It wasn't staffed.
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Shouldn't the people who polluted the river bear some of the blame?
It's not the river water that’s polluted per se. The river water is fairly corrosive, a condition which does happen naturally, or could be the result of pollution of some kind. The river water by itself is safe to drink. The problem is that the city water infrastructure is built with a large amount of lead piping. The city’s homes also have a huge number of lead fixtures, lead fittings, and lead solder. The root cause is simply a refusal to dig up and replace all that dangerous piping in the ground and replace it. The Detroit water had hidden the problem by virtue of that fact that lake Huron water is not very corrosive, so it didn't dissolve nearly as much lead...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Hello, Erin Brockovich.
- Dan
Fuck, are you stupid? I know shouting big nasty chemical terms makes you feel justified in hating on corporations and republicans, but, even the most cursory reading of an easily-found news article explains (emphasis mine):
Source: http://www.mlive.com/news/flin...
Seriously, you fucking tard. Get your facts straight before you start shouting about how big businesses are evil poisoners of the poor folks in Flint. The treatment of the water with disinfectants is what's causing the fucking spike in trihalomethanes. It's NOT industrial pollution.
In fact, if you read this, you'll find that ALL of the shit you're shouting about here is caused by infrastructure & treatment problems - the water coming in from the river is not at the pH it needs to be - the acidity of the water is causing it to leach lead from pipes and other plumbing infrastructure at an accelerated rate, and the treatment that they're doing for microbial contamination is causing the increase in trihalomethanes - probably also because they're not buffering the water pH properly.
Clearly you aren't familiar with Michigan politics. The fuck up is not 100% the city of Flint's fault, there are a lot of factors here. There's a decent summary of the goings-on here: http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2015/10/29/flint-water-crisis-government/74736590/
In short, the state of Michigan appointed an emergency manager who had broad powers over the city of Flint, and under his watch the plan was implemented to pump the river water. At some point after water safety problems were observed, the council voted to switch back to safe Detroit water, but was not allowed by the emergency manager. The state and emergency manager have been heavily involved in the switch to the new water supply, and played a role in completely fucking it up.
Also, your criticism of the infrastructure is kinda off. Soldered copper and lead are common in pipes and because of that the treatment plant should have considered methods to prevent lead from seeping in. If they had switched back to Detroit water, their drinking water would have been fine.
Um, by definition, half the infants and children have above-average levels of lead in their blood.
I thought it was obvious that the average they're referring to is the national one.
The CDC limit for lead blood levels in children [cdc.gov] sets 10 ug/dL as the threshold when action should be taken. So while the increase in lead levels is notable, most kids should still be within the limits of what's considered safe. The authors of the study are contending that no amount of lead in the blood is safe, and their study is written under that premise.
That answers what I was wondering. There are presumably plenty of other places where the levels are similarly above national average, but below the CDC limit - and I assume they're not getting any bottled water from FEMA.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
More making stuff up. You can go read primary sources here, with pictures and everything.
In our tests, this condition was 8.6X worse than Detroit water. Assuming this rate applies to the actual city pipe system, the last 16 months on Flint River water would have aged the pipes about 138 months (138 = 8.6 X 16 months) or 11.5 years more than using Detroit water.
Leeching doesn't require concentrated acid. It's a function of time. Leave slightly high PH water in contact with lead solder for many hours and you get a pulse of dissolved lead the next time you open the tap.
GM dropped it's water contract with Flint earlier this year because of the high PH.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Flint didn't go bankrupt. It was forced into receivership by the the State of Michigan in 2011, after Governor Snyder (R-Douchebag) declared a "state of emergency".
The emergency was lifted in April of this year, and now the city's trying to dig out of the willful neglect of the hand-picked lawyer that the Good Governor Snyder put in place of the democratically elected government. But not before many of the assets that the city owned have been sold off to private entities. It's what's known as "Disaster Economics" (aka Vulture Capitalism). As another well-known corporatist once said, "Never let a disaster go to waste".
You are welcome on my lawn.
if the lead is coming from the local pipes in people's houses, then how come the lead poisoning started when they switched water sources? That sounds like bee ess.
pH changed when they switched the source of water, the now acidic water dissolved lead in solder joints and thus ends up in the water in people's houses...
http://www.mlive.com/news/flin...
Or so they say... Or it all could be bee ess of course...
"Please explain how poor people are prevented from voting and rich people who are non-residents can vote in local elections"
The Emergency Manager is not a locally elected position. The position is appointed by the governor.
Often not. A recent example I can corroborate is Detroit. Over 50% of households in Detroit are delinquent on property taxes; they're tax squatters and have been for many years. They famously don't pay their water bills either. Some large fraction of your "bazillion other taxes" are contingent on employment, which is another rare condition in these areas. Otherwise you're just deducting income taxes from benefit checks or paying sales tax with EBT credits.
Flint is just a smaller analog of Detroit.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The high pH the river water is more prone to carrying particulate lead (lead from the poor plumbing infrastructure) than the lower pH water that had been used before switching sources. That being the case, the water source switch had an indirect impact on lead concentrations in water ultimately provided to Flint's citizenry; it wasn't that the Flint River was just inundated with lead to begin with. Here's a paper to better illustrate how that indirection isn't as bullshitty as you seem to think.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
You got it backwards. Low pH is acidic, attacks the lead and forms water soluble lead compounds.
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Only after the local government is hopelessly fucked on their own.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If low IQ and poverty were related ...
Low IQ and poverty are strongly correlated. Just because the correlation isn't 1.0, doesn't mean there is no relationship. Sure, a few dumb people get rich, but most don't.
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.
So... just to be clear...
You are in favor of intentionally poisoning children with a metal that will almost certainly cause permanent brain damage, because a majority of the adults in the same city they live in might have, many decades ago (in the vast majority of cases cases being grandparents of the children concerned, or else unrelated), mistrusted the wrong people the least to manage their city's finances?
You're in favor of that?
This is why I often lose faith in humanity.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Except, the state took over the city because they passed a law saying their finances weren't in order. The governor (Snyder) appointed a "EFM" to manage the city. One of his decisions was to no longer purchase water from the metro Detroit system (rumor has it, that they wanted to punish Detroit and make it less financially solvent by removing one of the larger water purchasers), and use the very old connections to the Flint River. The EPA sent up red flags immediately, but it got tied up in court until a few months ago. In the mean time, FEMA, the Salvation Army and many others have been delivering bottled water to schools and other community centers so people wouldn't be poisoned by the water they were buying (and being provided by in the schools, etc).
The amount they saved switching to the Flint River was less than 1%.... but with this entire debacle, the city will owe so much more money because the acidic river (which, by the way was found to be heavily polluted due to run-off from neighboring cities), managed to eat many of their already crumbling infrastructure.
Do you realize what an undertaking replacing all of a city's pipes is? The small city I live in has similar problems with an outdated infrastructure and they've been replacing it for decades and will be replacing it for decades to come. It's not really a matter of replace them all and you're done. With a system that large, it's a never ending continuous replacement program. By the time you've done everything, the stuff you started with is at its end of life again.
They probably were the most modern, advanced nation with the best quality of life in the post-WW2 era, through the 50s, 60s, arguably 70s. They then rested on their laurels and have done virtually nothing 'big' for the last few decades in terms of infrastructure, reforming the tax system, education, healthcare, etc etc. Other countries have caught up and overtaken them, as evidenced by their falling rankings in HDI or any number of 'quality of life' or 'where to be born' indices.
The big problem as I see it (as someone who has lived in several countries but has lived in the US for the last 3 years or so) is that everything in the US is a patchwork. Everything is super-locally governed ... cities and counties have their own police forces, road construction funds, school curricula, etc...things that in most countries would be governed at a Federal or State/Provincial level. So you get this inconsistent, inefficient mish-mash of standards, laws and regulations. Makes it more difficult for different regions to work together or get big-picture things done. Their system of government doesn't really allow much 'top down' lawmaking - getting anything major done is hard and requires an unreasonable amount of consensus (which will never happen in the current hyper-polarised political environment). When my home country did major things - switched to the metric system, introduced universal health care, changed the coinage, completely rewrote the tax code - a political party said they'd do it as part of their election platform, they were elected, and then it actually happened. Can't see major reform like that happening in the US these days.
This 'patchwork' effect shows in the physical world too. You can be in a nice area with manicured lawns, shiny clean office blocks and nice houses ... then cross a road or some 'invisible' line (which might be some obscure town or district boundary) and be in what looks like a third-world shanty town. It really did amaze me when I first came to America - you simply don't see that in other developed/OECD countries. The very fact that you can gerrymander electoral districts in the US and that there isn't an independent body that sets the boundaries based on population/census data (and that most people don't see a problem with this) says a lot.
Don't get me wrong, it's not a BAD place to live (if you have money). But it's no longer the world-beater it was. It's 'just another country' these days.
So the locals elect a government, that decides to cheap out and not pay Detroit for safe treated water. They further device to cheap out and not treat the river water, known to be polluted, and screw up their infrastructure in the process.
Gov Snyder placed the city under an *emergency* finance manager (wtf title is that), essentially cutting out any civic control of their own city.
It's straight out of the autocrat playbook - and it got it's results - kids were poisoned to save a % or two on water (and to starve Detroit's water treatment system... because fuck them).
Starve the beast, and let the kids get poisoned ... all in a days work for a GOP governor. Hell, I'm surprised he isn't on the lineup for a 2016 presidential candidacy.
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So the locals elect a government
They probably didn't. A lot of cities in MI are ruled by Emergency Managers, and the locally elected officials have no power at all.
How many emergency managers were in place before Gov. Snyder (GOP)?
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They won't even be able to restore it to the sorry state it was in back then because the "emergency manager" sold off the city's only revenue-producing assets.
Yes, Snyder took a bad situation and made it worse. And he did it by enriching his friends.
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Everything is super-locally governed ... system of government doesn't really allow much 'top down' lawmaking"
In principle, not in practice. If that's your observation, you're seeing only the vestiges of what the system is supposed to be like. The USA was founded on the basis of the state governments being the supreme power. The federal government was granted very limited powers by The Constitution and the Tenth Amendment specifically delegates ALL other powers to the states and The People. It was supposed to be difficult to "get things done" because "top down" power was rightly seen as dangerous! The country grew and prospered into the world's economic and military super-power under this system of limited federal power.
The long-term historical trend, dating back at least to the mid 1800s, is accumulation of power by the federal government at the expense of state and local governments. The War for Southern Independence and its aftermath probably marked the biggest federal power grab. Numerous Supreme Court decisions throughout the years have continued the trend. Not to say this was 100% bad, but it is still part of the trend of undermining state sovereignty and centralizing power in the federal government. There's a good book called "Who Killed The Constitution" which documents much of this. Federal government more than tripled in size over the course of the 20th century, from ~7% of GDP to well over 20% of GDP. We have more "top down" governance right now than at any time in history and the result has been an utter disaster for the nation.
I could go on and on, but our "patchwork" system was good. If all the states reclaimed their rightful power, they could be legislative laboratories for other states to observe. People could also vote with their feet. Don't like your progressive/socialist state government? Fine, pack up and move to a state that's more to your liking. We see this to a very limited extent with people going to states where medical marijuana is legal. It would be awesome if we had similar options over a much larger spectrum of issues.
if the lead is coming from the local pipes in people's houses, then how come the lead poisoning started when they switched water sources? That sounds like bee ess.
Inside of the pipes, what is in the water has a chemical effect on the surface. In an area with so called hard water, the ph is higher due to dissolved minerals like calcium, or magnesium lime compounds.
Acidic water on the other hand, will actually corrode away the inside of the pipe, which can include any lead within it.
The hard water higher ph versus acidic lower ph is such a marked difference in reacting with pipes, that there are still some places with Actual lead pipes, that are sorta kinda safe, because the lime minerals precipitate onto the walls of the pipe, sealing off the lead - but it's not so safe it shouldn't be replaced.
What is severely surprising is that the ph of the water was either not tested, or tested then ignored.
Because in a world based on basic physics and science, you don't want acidic water in any municipal pipes. It's just going to attack the pipes and destroy the infrastructure over time.
And if there is one element with a track record of destroying lives, it is lead. You very much want as little lead going into children's bodies, with a goal of zero. It lowers intelligence, and predisposes the victims to violent behavior. Here's a link -http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
Forbes has some info as well, but they want me to disable my ad blocker.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.