Flint Water: Where Science Took a Backseat to the Money by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Flint Water: Where Science Took a Backseat to the Money

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, July 25, 2016 02:57
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Tuesday, July 19, 2016 5:54 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/article/2016/07/flint-water-where-s
cience-took-backseat-money

Flint Water: Where Science Took a Backseat to the Money

General Motors had a problem. The engine blocks in their Flint, Mich. plant were corroding as fast as they came off the production line. In the few months since the city had switched from Detroit water to the supply of the nearby Flint River, everything the factory produced was rusting over.

Tests quickly revealed the cause: elevated levels of chlorides were allowing the water to more-easily oxidize the metal.

The city switched to the river water in April 2014. GM reported its problems within months. After more months of inaction from the city leaders, the company alone switched back to Detroit water in December 2014.

“GM did inform the city,” said David Hand, chair of the civil and environmental engineering department at Michigan Technological University, in an interview with Laboratory Equipment. “No doubt (the city) should have realized they should evaluate the water.”

But for the rest of the homes and businesses of Flint, nothing was done. Residents of the “Vehicle City” continued to drink, bathe and cook with the water. Some complained of rashes and other health effects, but it wasn’t until outside experts showed their many alarming test results to the media and the public that something was done.

And so Flint became a cautionary tale. Experts said the lead levels in the water were just a symptom, however. The simple problem was that science took a backseat to financial and political concerns, experts said.

Caught in the middle were 99,000 citizens who took for granted that regulatory agencies would keep them safe using long-accepted sanitary standards.

Hard times for “Vehicle City”
Flint is a city struggling. Roughly 40 percent of the population lives under the poverty line. The relative affluence of post-World War II and the 1960s disappeared with the changing American economic tide. By the time native son Michael Moore, the filmmaker, made his ballyhooed film “Roger and Me” in 1989, the boomtown was fading fast. Its decline has only sped up ever since—since the mid-1990s, three-quarters of the manufacturing jobs have left the city.

The city was in such dire straits the state passed a law reserving the ability to appoint an emergency manager to straighten out the municipal finances. The first one was appointed in 2011—but the position became a revolving door, with five changes over as many years.

The emergency managers all nonetheless shared an ambitious plan—cheaper water. By building their own water system, and leaving Detroit’s, they would save money in the long run. The $270 million Karegnondi Water Authority plan is still expected to be finished by the end of this year, nearly on schedule.

But the plan came with one drawback. Flint would have to find a water source while the whole thing was being built, over the course of two or more years.

The Flint River was the easy stop-gap choice. Using the existing backup distribution system, city leaders agreed to use the river water as a fallback for two years during the new construction.

With the help of outside consultants, and with the blessing of state and local authorities, the spigot to the river was turned on April 25, 2014.

But the river water was fundamentally different than the Detroit water—and also different from the future source of Lake Huron.

The Flint River has a lower pH, and a different alkalinity. This was not a problem for much of the iron service mains in the city, which provide most of the longer-distance carrying. But many of the service lines in the city—the older and shorter pipes running from the mains to the individual buildings and residences—were made of lead.

The chemical incantation was cast. The lower pH of the river water allowed the lead scale and lead ions to become more soluble in the water running to taps all over the city, said Hand.

Essentially, the untreated water ate away at the lead pipes. The lead was carried to the taps, and people drank it unaware.

“With any major change like this, you should be looking at corrosion control—it should be standard,” said Hand, who looked into the water-quality issues for GM early on in the Flint crisis.

GM was the first to publicly note something off about the water. But residents were slowly recognizing a change in their quality of life. Within a week of General Motors’ departure from the Flint water system, the city issued a warning about the total trihalomethanes in the city’s taps. (Total triahalomethanes are disinfectant byproducts proven to cause liver and kidney problems).

But they continued to deny there was a lead problem—even when a University of Michigan team found elevated lead levels in multiple spots in the city just days afterward—and when angry residents brought jugs of their discolored tap water to city hall that same month, January 2015.

A drop in an American bucket
Most old water systems in the U.S. have some kinds of lead in the pipes. But for many established cities, they either use softer water sources, or treat the water before it goes through the system with phosphates for preventative corrosion control, experts said.

“This is 100 percent preventable,” said Qiang He, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in an interview with Laboratory Equipment. “A lot of cities are like Flint. Every city has a small proportion of lead pipes every place. What the other cities don’t have is this social and economic conditions that bring a change allowing this to happen.”

Lead does exist in American water in varying degrees. A USA Today investigation this past March found that nearly 20 percent of the country’s water systems had lead levels greater than 15 parts per billion, the EPA’s “action level.”

Washington D.C. had a lead problem in the early 2000s that lasted longer and was more severe than Flint’s. The cause was the Washington Aqueduct’s switching from chlorine to chloramine for water treatment. Water officials were reportedly trying to limit the byproducts in the disinfectant process. But instead, they ended up boosting the corrosion of the pipes throughout the nation’s capital. In that case, officials have been accused of covering up health concerns systematically over a number of years.

“Those situations prompted the Lead and Copper Rule. But sometimes it isn’t enough,” said Hand.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016 4:21 AM

SHINYGOODGUY

Here's my response.........they knew the water wasn't safe for human consumption.

They knew.

Yet, they still told the good people of Flint that it was safe.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=60352

SGG

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016 7:40 AM

REAVERFAN

Michigan's governor is to blame. Without his screwing over of so many municipalities, they'd have been able to deal.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2016 8:22 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right

http://naturalsociety.com/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right-should-be-p
rivatized/

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Monday, July 25, 2016 2:57 AM

SHINYGOODGUY

Next thing he'll be saying is that air should be privatized. Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!

SGG

Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Nestle CEO: Water Is Not A Human Right

http://naturalsociety.com/nestle-ceo-water-not-human-right-should-be-p
rivatized/

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