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At Least 33 US Cities Used Water Testing 'Cheats' Over Lead Concerns (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In an exclusive report via The Guardian, investigators found there to be at least 33 cities across 17 U.S. states that have used water testing "cheats" in an effort to cover up potentially dangerous levels of lead. The investigation was launched after the toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and found that 21 of these cities used the same water testing methods that resulted in criminal charges against three government employees in Flint. Such cities include Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee. The Guardian reports: "The Guardian investigation concerned thousands of documents detailing water testing practices over the past decade. They include: Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water. Officials in two major cities -- Philadelphia and Chicago -- asked employees to test water safety in their own homes. Two states -- Michigan and New Hampshire -- advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels. Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing of refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming it was a security risk."
Some water is so bad the pipes aren't fit to be recycled!
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Sure. The risk to their job security, and the risk they end up in a maximum security prison. They aren't directly poisoning people, but they are facilitating the indirect poisoning of the population. I'd quit my job before following orders to do this.
So thats why Americans are so fucking stupid. I thought it was the pathetic education system, but lead makes sense.
Explains Drumpf too.
Is this to milk the topic for another story? Why not simply list all of the cities both east and west of the Mississippi? I live west of the Mississippi and would really like to know if the proper procedures are followed here. It's a really important issue because of the dangers of lead poisoning. Unfortunately I have some serious doubts about the quality of the journalism.
Never would have happened under Stalin.
The difference being that radioactivity levels are probably ridiculously low compared to what will harm you so subtracting margin of error probably has little ill effect. Nobody knows since there hasn't been any comprehensive long term testing at low levels of exposure. Instead it's all extrapolated from the effects of higher levels of exposure and assumed to be linear. Also, it's a problem with the source of the water which no amount of piping replacement will solve. Lead contamination effects are much more documented, and almost always have NOTHING to do with the water source. Instead it's because of shitty city infrastructure which is damn well the responsibility of the city in question.
Is it reasonable to extrapolate the effects of radiation exposure? The human body had mechanisms to repair damage caused by radiation. It makes sense that the damage would be too severe to be repaired at high doses. If we assume that at there's a set rate at which radiation damage can be repaired, if the rate of damage is beneath that, it will be repaired with no cumulative effects. Above that, damage will accumulate over time. This is, no doubt, an oversimplification, but one that I think gets the basic point across.
I went into the article to find a list of the cities. Couldn't find it with my brief looking. I didn't see any thing saying Florida had bad water systems, which I find strange but thankful for. They are replacing the water pipes locally where I am, so this is not an issue for me thankfully. Just concerned about when they will re-sod, it has been weeks, but there is more work to do still.
Anyways, the East / West thing likely has to do with two factors. The first is the limited number of tests done, they are going to expand their testing, so going west makes sense down the road. The second factor is that many of these water systems are quite old, which is part of the problem. West of the Mississippi has much newer lines on average I'd figure, or outside of cities well water, so that isn't their concern at all in this.
If anyone goes on about how these problems should have been fixed earlier, I hope they vote for higher taxes to pay for it all. I'm not saying that taxes aren't wasted. I am saying that a lot of things get put on the chopping block, because of the lack of funds. I'm still pissed off they reduced the funding to schools in the state, because the extra given by the state lottery is taken as granted instead as a bonus on top of the required funding.
After all, Dem's at the local level or state level are not allowed to be held accountable, only the first republican on the food chain as Snyder and W. can attest to.
I lived in a few different states growing up. In one place, the tap water was blue. In another, it was green. You couldn't see the color easily until you say, filled a whole white bathtub with the stuff, but there was a perceivable color difference. I can't imagine that both would be considered really high quality if objectively tested. I worry that both might have been objectively low quality.
If you have a child, you would be insane to rely on public tests subject to political pressures and that may not reflect your particular household's water situation. Have your household water tested (you can collect a sample and send it to a lab) and test the water at your child's school. This is doubly true if your house or school are more than forty years old, although newer buildings are not a guaranty that the water supply lacks lead because there can be old pipes under the street.
Real lawyers write in C++
In one place, the tap water was blue. In another, it was green.
Ozone and Chlorine comes to mind. Lead is not something anyone should have near children or even adults. Prisons are already too filled with violent prisoners with impulse control issues of which they are not really responsible for.
No, I'm not trolling or kidding, I'm dead serious. If this is a widespread problem in the U.S., then could it be making people dumber and less emotionally stable?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
And the Republicans will try to avert blame however possible, even after having passed a law specifically to stop the city from removing the governor-appointed special manager.
And the Libertarians will point out that this would never have been a problem with private enterprise because if a company lied to you about the lead poisoning you could easily have paid some other company to install pipe to bring you water that isn't poisonous, and the fact that you didn't means that you were ok with being secretly poisoned so it wasn't a problem.
... that such methods are prone to be exposed one day? :-)
One thing the article does not mention is the reason for pre-flushing is to ensure the sample is coming from water in distribution, not water that's been sitting in the lead pipes you have in your home or your connection to the city (which is very common in older cities). While Flint performed pre-flushing, they also made sure to test around the lead sites, it's not clear that is what is happening in these 33 cities.
So, if the testers flush when collecting samples, perform the same flush before drinking tap water, that way you know you are drinking water at the levels measured. The most common objection I hear to this suggestion is "What a waste!" However, when you consider that water may not be safe to drink, you're not actually wasting drinking water. If you really are concerned about that water, you can save the water for plants and/or cleaning purposes. Watering your lawn is huge waste of water, running some water to clean pipes is not.
What people should be worried about are endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), e.g. from birth control pills and hormones used in factory farming. To my knowledge, no city currently has the ability to test for or filter out EDCs. If the lead tests are coming back clean after flushing, that's great because it's easy to fix: just flush your lines before drinking. EDCs, not so much.
Source: I know many who work for the water department, including chemists at the testing labs at one of the 33 cities listed in the article.
Its no secret that it is, and its hardly the only thing doing it either.
Is it reasonable to extrapolate the effects of radiation exposure?
Radiation effects are probably sub-linear, but since low dose data is sparse, linear extrapolation is generally used just to be on the safe side. There is some evidence that low levels of radiation may actually be good for you.
Most radiation in drinking water is from iodine, potassium, and cesium. The iodine is not much of a problem if you use iodized salt or get enough iodine in your diet. The cesium and potassium do not bio-accumulate. You pee them out.
Lead is a much bigger problem. Lead poisoning has caused trillions of dollars of damage to our economy, mostly from lowered IQ, crime, prison building, etc. That has gone way down since leaded gasoline was banned, but even today black children average about twice the blood lead levels as white children. We have a ways to go, and the people responsible for this latest disclosure need to be held accountable. We should be proactively checking water supplies, and directly measuring the blood lead levels of kids in high risk areas. That would be way cheaper than operating more prisons.
Get a reverse osmosis filter with an alkaline mineral stage. $2-300 @300L/day. Same as bottled water.
Like this. Nothing getting through that
STRAW MAN. If a company was providing you dangerous water knowingly and intentionally tested to avoid detecting it, you could sue them for damages and people could be held criminally liable. Libertarians hold civil courts as one of the government's primary functions and thus this would be a better situation in libertarian political system because of legal accountability.
How dare you bring science into something that is fundamentally a political question? ;)
More seriously: There is a lot of questioning of the linear, no threshold, model, but it's difficult to do studies with decent statistics at low radiation levels. It would take millions of mice (if mice were what you used) and even then the increases you'd expect would be small. See, for example: Alvin Weinberg's 1972 article in Mineva http://www.andreasaltelli.eu/f...
Weinberg argue that it's an example of a question that is conceptually scientific but practically beyond scientific inquiry.
There's evidence that in some cases elevated background rates aren't correlated well with increased cancer risk, but there are many confounding factors that are difficult to sort out.
Could this possibly be why, here in Chicago, I seem to notice an above-average level of idiocy and irrationality while my friends who emigrated years ago out to the "countryside" seem to still be perfectly normal?
I haven't knowingly directly ingested unfiltered city water in over 20 years. I drink and cook with only high quality bottled water and I have a filter on my shower and dishwasher that cost me about $1k plus the monthly filter changes. When I go out, I'm usually drinking some type of brewed beverage (usually good craft beers or rarely an Old Style or 6 if I'm up at Wrigley to catch a ballgame, but sometimes the occasional latte even though that's really not my style). Even my dog drinks bottled water. I'm not rich, and it doesn't cost me a lot more, it's just something I chose to splurge on like some do new cars or flat-screen TVs every year or two. It just made sense that if the body is over 70% water, that the best quality water should be used in it.
But why? Sometime in the mid-1990s, I noticed that the water started to taste and smell foul to me. Everyone else said I was nuts and the tap water was the same clean and genuine product as it always was. Against everyone calling me a nutjob rightwinger kook, which I was already used to, I gave it up cold turkey...but never really gave it a second thought until just this second. Could it be? Lead is what's causing everyone around me to seem to be mentally unstable?
This really does give me a chuckle, as my city friends and colleagues are still calling me a rightwing nutjob, but they're much more venomous about it than they were even 5 years ago, prone to violence over these beliefs many, while my exurban and rural counterparts are asking me why I'm still in the city! It could just be coincidence, however, if you look at the old studies that correlate the use of leaded gasoline with violent crime, one has to really stop and wonder.
Thanks, slashdot, for providing me with some food for thought again after woe these many years!
If this is a widespread problem in the U.S., then could it be making people dumber and less emotionally stable?
Unlikely. Most of the lead is in Democrat leaning urban areas, but most of the stupid people are Republicans.
I have a several pound block of lead sitting here on my workbench next to me.
It's no more of a health hazard to me than the block of tungsten I have somewhere here in my shop, or the blocks of steel that I use for supporting work on the hydraulic press a couple of feet from me. Any of them can injure my foot if it falls on it (but I wear steel toe boots). Their toxic effects in that form are nil.
Lead in many forms is not a hazard.
Dissolved in water, or in the air from leaded fuel is quite a different matter.
What form, entry route to the body, and amount the element has can make large differences.
The appointed special manager is a Democrat. Actually, all of them (Flint has needed special managers multiple times due to fiscal incompetence) have been Democrats.
The city council, which fail to perform the maintenance on the city's water system, is entirely Democrats.
The EPA is supervised by Democrats, and is part of a Democratic administration.
There are no Republicans involved in the managing of the city, or of the water switchover. It just happens to be in a state with a Republican governor, so embarrassed Democrats are desperately trying to pass the blame.
Surely Republican President Calvin Coolidge is to blame. We never recovered from his mishandling of the Teapot Dome Scandal. Who can be expected to honestly follow water testing protocols in light of that injustice?
companies making money = Jobs. make lots of money, slowly kill people, cover it up, profit $.
Unlikely. The amount of lead in habitation areas has generally been decreasing due to lead paint removal and unleaded gas.
Should we be more worried about the Aluminum (ALUM) in the water than the lead?
"The map above uses CDC data to show lead poisoning rates across the country. The reason so many of the counties are light gray is that most counties simply don't report this information — nor are they required to.
Of the 3,143 counties in the United States, only 1,573 reported lead poisoning data in 2014. Forty-four percent of those counties reported no confirmed cases of lead in the bloodstream. But there are also the nine counties, largely in the south, where more than 10 percent of kids tested positive.
Twenty-one states do not regularly submit data to the CDC on lead surveillance programs in their states. Eleven of those 21 states do not submit any kind of lead surveillance data to the CDC — no state-level or county-level data. The other 10 states do submit data, but many haven't submitted anything in the past two years. For instance, North Carolina hasn't submitted its data since 2009. The states that don't submit any data include Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.
That means there are 1,570 counties we don't have any data on at all, because states are not mandated to submit their data to the CDC."
source: http://www.vox.com/2016/1/21/10811004/lead-poisoning-cities-us
Hmmm, that would explain Trump, and Hillary too! You may be onto something.
Most of the lead begins at the rust belt and either travels down the mississippi or through the great lakes out the st. lawerance seaway. That perfectly explains why Democrats are drooling violent agitators and why so many peaceful law abiding Republican's are fed up caring for the mooches.
As soon as you expose pure water to air, it absorbs carbon dioxide and the PH drops.
one source of many if you care to look.
Each ph level is 10x more acidic. So if the ph is 6, down to 5 is 10, down to 4 is 100, down to 3 is 1000, down to 2 is 10,000. The math is right given that the poster said "5.5 to 6" and "nearly 10,000 times."
So, your facts are wrong and your reading comprehension could use a bit of work.
The long standing argument is that private business and industry cannot self-regulate - and I largely agree with that.
If that is really true, why do we expect that government will self-regulate the businesses/services that it provides?
It would be best to have private industry compete to provide these services and then have government regulate those private industries. That should keep all the players honest - and the ones that aren't should end up in prison.
No, because by and large the lead has always been there. Flint is about the only exception, and that's because the amount of lead leeching out of the pipes increased with the change in water sources.
Do I even have to mention Flint? State intervention and cost cutting by appointed ideological "commissars" were the direct cause of mass lead poisoning. Just because you can find some low level chump who signed off because they were "just following orders" does not change where the responsibility lies.
So the State takes over, usurps all local power and renders local democratically elected officials impotent. They have no say in how their city is run. In Flint there was no functioning local democracy, it was directly run by a Republican governor and legislature. There is only one political faction to blame.
So your whine about being unfairly accused sounds a lot like a combination of a guilty conscience and a feeble attempt to counter attack to deflect criticism.
Another interesting point: why was this reported by a British news organization, not by anyone in the US? It's not very logical that this would be missed by journalists in the US and uncovered by people in England. Any chance that the press is so corrupt and self centered they won't look into massive failure at home? I guess that it's too easy and too much fun to report about Trump rather then stir up trouble at home. That might cause someone to complain and interfere with their cosy relationships with politicians.
Why is Snark Required?
Any system where public safety is involved should include outside checks. But that might involve accountability, which is the last thing bureaucrats want.
STRAW MAN. If a company was providing you dangerous water knowingly and intentionally tested to avoid detecting it, you could sue them for damages and people could be held criminally liable.
Really?
So when BP spilled all that oil in the gulf of Mexico a few years ago, who was held criminally liable?
Who was sent to prison for not following regulations on safeguards for drilling so deep underwater?
Truth is.. While you might THEORETICALLY be able to sue, in reality, corporations have so much plausible deniability and such long and convoluted paths to distribute responsibility, that it is essentially impossible to control, let alone punish them. So no. If a company fucked up to this level, they too would get away with it.
Libertarians hold civil courts as one of the government's primary functions and thus this would be a better situation in libertarian political system because of legal accountability.
Yet they are still full of shit.
You live in a place where almost all civil controls have been reduced to "sue someone".
And you are one of the people I presume stupid enough to imagine this to be a good idea.
I present..
The result.
I know it's troll bait, but in point of fact Republicans should be held accountable. Republicans are so obsessed by "small government" and cutting budgets that horrible outcomes are inevitable.
Yeah! How can anyone in Chicago be expected to follow water testing protocols when they had a Republican mayor as recently as 1931? That small government obsession lingers over a place for centuries! You can't expect any government employee in Chicago to do a productive day's work until at least the year 3000. After that it'll surely be a golden age.
No, I'm not trolling or kidding, I'm dead serious. If this is a widespread problem in the U.S., then could it be making people dumber and less emotionally stable?
We've allowed the education system to be corrupted by leftists who teach garbage. When 12 years of garbage collides with cold hard reality, stupidity and emotional instability are likely outcomes.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Someone argued that lead poisoning contributed to the decline of the Roman empire... as far as I can see USA are on the right path...
Oh,the irony... "Don't drink the water!" is still a favorite amongst US-tourist going abroad. Last I head that, I was in Germany.
Could be a combination of things.
Never seen any discussion here on aspartame.
of these cities. I hope the people responsible get lynched. They must not get away with it.
Please, do. In flint, high Union labor costs drove out the GM auto plant, killing the flint economy. (See rodger and me) When the democratically-controlled city of flint couldn't afford to get it's water supply from the democratically-controlled city of Detroit water system, they decided to put the old Flint municipal water system back on line, but it would take a couple years to get everything working correctly. When the democratically-controlled city of Detroit got wind of the Democratically-controlled city of Flint's plan to leave their water system, Democratically-controlled city of Detroit raised it's rates. A lot. Unable to pay the new increased rates for water from the Democratically-controlled city of Detroit's water department, democratically-controlled Flint was forced to push up the timetable on their cutover to their local water system, and corners were cut, safety was compromised, and children were poisoned. If you want to blame the republican-installed controller sent in to make sense of Flint's failing democrat government, you have to realize that one man cannot correct decades of failed economic decisions made by the decades of duly-elected democratic leadership at the state and local level. It wasn't the republican-appointed controller that forced Flint to switch over to their own local water system, it was the democrat-led city of Detroit and it's increased water rates that backed Flint into a corner. Had Democrat-led Detroit water department worked with the Democrat-led city of Flint, working out repayment plans instead of raising the water rates beyond what flint already couldn't afford, this would have never happened. Until you can show me where the republican-appointed controller knew the water was bad but forced the city to cutover AND suppressed/changed water quality reports, you'll have a hard time convincing me this was a republican-caused crisis.
Big screed. Ultimately nothing but BS though.
Unions didn't drive the plants out. Poor corporate decisions did in the face of cheaper but better made cars with better mileage from Japan and Korea, at a time that also coincided with frequent gas shortages.
The ultimate thing that killed Flint and Detroit was not liberalism or democrats, but simple white flight.
When the money moved out leaving behind mostly poor and low income people, that killed the tax revenues of the cities.
but that's ok.
facts have a hard time penetrating the republican skull.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
The companies made unions the scapegoats for their own poor decisions.
Odd how the unions are still there though.
And the auto industry recovered (following a few bailouts).
And American cars are as good as ever.
http://www.examiner.com/articl...
Odd: Portland is consistently voted as one of the top places to live in America, with a thriving downtown, high rate of entrepreneurial activity, and a great place to raise a family.
Portland is far more liberal than Detroit ever was.
And its one of the best cities in the nation.
Detroit's problems wasn't liberalism.
It was the loss of its tax base.
As a result of white flight following the migration of minorities migrated to the area for manufacturing jobs, the tax base of the city decreased beyond sustainable levels, even while the city had outstanding obligations (pensions etc) to people who no longer lived there. the result was a migration of money out of the city; city dollars weren't being respent within the city, but in the surrounding area. its a problem almost every major metropolitan area has faced and had nothing to do with liberalism or democrats. Detroit (which has been recovering steadily the past few decades btw) was simply the biggest example of a problem that struck every major manufacturing hub regardless of party affiliation. pointing out Detroit while ignoring all the other parts of the rust belt that has similarly struggled and declined is simply ignorance.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I say in the very first sentence that businesses can not self-regulate.
Next time you go on a liberal pro-big-government rant pause, then listen. The person you are lecturing may actually somewhat agree with you.
Providing water service is a perfect example of private companies supplying a service that is regulated by the government.
Here in NJ, many municipalities simply could not afford to maintain and upgrade their water infrastructure (why is a different discussion). Private operation of these municipal water systems were put out to bid.
It's the best of both worlds. Private efficiency in operations and public accountability in cost and safety. I trust neither entity to do both jobs of supply and regulation.
Are you seriously arguing that the Libertarian ideal is false by citing an example of a real-world event as it was resolved in a socioeconomic model that draws slightly from capitalism, heavily from fascism, and has a splash of aristocracy thrown in for flavor?
By the Libertarian model, everyone who makes a living on or from the Gulf of Mexico would have had standing to sue if they could show damages. By the current fascistocratic mix, only the government has standing to sue something that extends beyond an individual's property and they only press charges if the perpetrator is late with their campaign donations.
Which sounds better?
Unions didn't drive the plants out. Poor corporate decisions did in the face of cheaper but better made cars with better mileage from Japan and Korea...
My family owned 100% Detroit-built cars in the 80s through about late 90s. We're pretty much all been driving Toyotas and Hondas since then. Nothing to do with Unions, everything to do with 7-10 years of minimal repairs and better gas mileage compared to disposable cars that cost too much to keep fixing after 5-7 years.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It's happened before. There's a reason they banned tetraethyl lead from gasoline, for example.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
.and wars.
How much longer are US Citizens going to put up with this crap?
No, I'm not trolling or kidding, I'm dead serious. If this is a widespread problem in the U.S., then could it be making people dumber and less emotionally stable?
If you've been reading the comments on Slashdot for as long as I have, I think you'd know the answer to that one.
If you're concerned about the quality of your tap water, why the heck would you risk drinking it?
Just pick up a couple of gallons of purified or distilled water at the grocery store.
People make fun of Texas, but water quality is one thing they take pretty seriously. It may taste like a swimming pool, but it won't kill you or damage brain cells. My company runs its own water well, and has to submit to TCEQ Pb/Cu testing twice a year. They have strict rules about when to sample, and how to sample. You take the sample first thing in the morning from a line that hasn't been used for 8 hours. You do not remove the aerator. You use only the cold water line. Then it's straight to the lab. They charge you out the ass, and if you have one line that is .1 ppm over the limit, you have to submit to more testing. Then if you don't fix it in a year you submit to an improvement/abatement program. Fun times.