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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."
Galvanized iron plumbing largely replaced lead plumbing in the early 1800s, so you would expect lead contamination to be a much bigger problem in cities east of the Mississippi.
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.
People mock me for distilling my drinking water before I drink it. Stories like this make me feel even more justified (though the nasty sludge that my tap water leaves behind after distillation is more than enough justification as it is).
There is a large group of people who insists that pure water is going to leach minerals from your body (which is true...in amounts so trivial so to have zero impact...eat one bite of brocolli and you are good for a month). Some insist that it is acidic (which is also true...it has a ph of 5.5 to 6, which is slightly less acidic than a banana. way less acidic than apple juice or orange juice. Nearly 10,000 times less acidic than soda pop).
They have no sense of scale.
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.
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.
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.
the nasty sludge that my tap water leaves behind after distillation is more than enough justification as it is.
If you analyse that "sludge" you will likely find that it is 99% calcium carbonate ... which is good for you.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So much for looking to the "free market" for fair value. Your claim that the market empowers consumers is delusional. Without government oversight that can of beans would have a reasonable chance of killing you, either through bacterial infection or chemical poisoning. This is what is happening in China right now, where there is no meaningful government regulation.
Given the disproportionate influence of big business on government right now, trusting corporate America is like trusting meth freaks. The free market is a tremendous piece of propaganda. What really runs the economic system are factions of monopolists and cartels that have eliminated almost all competition. This is enabled and maintained by a corrupt government.
The only way this will change is if voters use their democratic power to take back control of the government. We need a government "of the people, by the people and for the people", not a government run solely for corporate interests.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
Texas and California are two of the four states with the most "action-level" lead test results. Some Oklahoma cities have among the highest lead levels in the country.
The map shows cities in all of EPA regions 1-5, and none in regions 6-10. It seems likely that the Guardian staff simply started working their way through audit results, and stopped when they had enough material for a story.