The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.
Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.
There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.
Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.
The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.
There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.
Having worked in this area, I can say that "incompetence and corruption" is an intellectually lazy explanation for the problems facing municipal water supplies. The real problem is that water is a municipal utility and municipal rate setting boards set water rates far too low. There is simply not enough money to rip out all the old lead pipe and replace it: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/clean-water-at-any-rate_b_504.... It's politically untenable for water boards to raise rates, especially since water bills are not progressive (seniors and the poor pay the same rate as rich people).
So fund the system with taxes. Issue bonds for necessary infrastructure upgrades. If raising money is politically impossible in any form, shut the system down. If the responsible people are just throwing their hands up and letting the systems collapse and poison people along the way, that's at best incompetence.
This does occasionally happen, e.g. Atlanta passed a 1% sales-tax to fund sewer-system replacement. There are lots of anti-tax voters, though. Another problem is that many states: 1) won't pay for the water-system improvements out of state revenues, but also 2) heavily constrain the ability of local governments to raise their own tax revenue, even when the local citizens support it. Atlanta had to lobby the state legislature for years to be allowed to pass its 1% sewer sales tax. That's also why a sales tax was chosen, even though they're somewhat regressive, because it was the only option they thought they could get through the very conservative state legislature.
I don't think you can call this fictional public servant incompetent and corrupt. He's just doing what the people wanted. That shortsightedness and aversion to investment is problem of the electorate.
When the people's wishes result in poisoning children, a good public servant doesn't just say "OK" and do it. "Just following orders" isn't any better just because those orders come through a democratic process. When it's that bad you fight it, you show people the consequences of what they're asking for, and if they insist then you either refuse or resign in protest.
Edit: it occurs to me that this characterization of "just doing what the people wanted" is probably completely wrong anyway. I'm sure there was never a public meeting in Flint, for example, where city officials stood up before the public and laid out the plan to switch water supplies and the subsequent poisoning of the entire city that would result.
But that's not the situation outlined in the thread. It's the public servant that see the lead pipes, the dangerous and untenable situation and takes action. Then he's sacked for taking action. What then?
Then someone new takes the position and the process repeats.
You can certainly blame the public for electing incompetent or corrupt public officials. Said officials also shoulder the blame for fucking up the water system. That they would be fired for doing the right thing does not absolve them in the least.
I'm not saying you can't blame the people for who they choose to govern, merely that the people who govern are also to blame.
The situation for Flint specifically is complicated by the fact that the city has an emergency manager appointed by the governor. The elected council approved the decision to switch as well, so the locals aren't free from responsibility either, but there's plenty of opportunity for finger-pointing in many directions.
I find the scenario believable, but I think the mechanism by which the 'good' politician is getting sacked is more complex. I think s/he is getting sacked because s/he spent a lot of political capitol on a difficult undertaking that doesn't bring much credit back to her/him. Improving decaying infrastructure doesn't insert a positive 'this politician accomplished' association into many voters minds. S/he's just doing the things that voters assume happen on their own anyway. On the other hand, the 'bad' politician that ignored the issue had a nice extra bit of political capitol to spend on flashier issues like crime, lowering taxes, etc.
So, rather than it being a "the people have spoken" situation, I think that the situation is driven by constraints on public attention for political issues. I don't think you would get many voters endorsing continued poisoning of the population when a marginal increase (or reshifting) of taxes could address the issue. Rather I think that it is rarely ever politically advantageous to spearhead these kind of issues (that is until it explodes into an attention grabbing crisis, as is now the case with Flint lead poisoning).
We can see this sort of thing in microcosm in office politics as well. How often are we complaining about always being reactionary and putting out fires instead of proactively taking care of problems before they can cause a lot of damage? Well, once a fire starts, everyone is keen to figure out what's causing it and how to deal with it. But recognizing the pre-conditions that could potentially lead to a fire, and then eliminating them sound much more boring[1], and often requires a concerted information campaign just to get people invested in supporting the mitigation. But if there's an actual [2] fire, people are immediately interested by the inherent drama of the situation, and attention is no longer a barrier to overcome.
[1] even that description of it sounded much more boring than the bit about fire!
[2] an 'actual' figurative 'fire'. I know the wording is sub-optimal, but I'm pot committed to this metaphor so...
When a certain political party actively campaigns to convince people that (a) privatizing everything and (b) cutting all taxes will help the little guy, then it's absolutely to speak of moral and ethical corruption.
When you fail to communicate the urgency of replacing dangerous pipes to your electorate, you're (at best) incompetent.
Except this specific thread is all about how the municipal system is failing because either the populace won't vote for investment or higher political bodies block it.
In that case privatisation can work because it removes short term political incentives from the equation. Corporate structures enable investment and charging what is needed - plus things like water conservation ironically are often pursued more by those with financial stake in the game.
A private water utility can be sued into oblivion or killed by regulators over lead issues - yet a public system gets some soul searching articles that still mostly manage to blame capitalists while ignoring the failures of regulators. "Better regulation" is hard to achieve, but America in many ways seems to be truly shocking in how poorly regulated many areas are.
There is no chance that government can just hand over a hard problem to a private entity, and then make the private entity accountable for screwing it up. What private company would take that deal, and how would you draw blood from the stone when they screw up?
And the town that votes this way gets lead in its pipes.
Now that we've stated the obvious, it shouldn't be too hard to agree that "privatise everything" and "cut all taxes" is an extraordinarily stupid way to vote. Flint is evidence that some things are too critical to be privatized.
Part of the problem is that Flint neither voted this way, nor is it privatized. The state took over the city government and installed a city manager who made the decisions that led to this situation.
>It's politically untenable for water boards to raise rates, especially since water bills are not progressive (seniors and the poor pay the same rate as rich people).<
Based on my experience this is a key factor...
Just maintaining an aged system--making repairs to keep the water flowing--sometimes fully stretches the yearly budget...
I have a friend, a local businessman, who serves on the board of our local rural water district...he is a good man, serving with other good men and women, and the community is lucky to have such responsible citizens...in ways that they cannot even begin to imagine...
The board meets regularly to to review appeals from citizens who cannot afford that month's water bill...in almost all cases extensions are granted...
This is an infrastructure issue just as much as it is a health issue...don't get me wrong, safety is critical, absolutely...often utilities are doing the best they can with what they have to work with...all the while fully aware of what would be required for them to do better...
1) He's not blaming the tax-system. He's blaming the rate setting system.
2) How is that intellectually lazy? It seems like a perfectly reasonable point of view to me: fixing the system to remove the lead would cost money. Since rates are too low, the money isn't available to do that.
He's not saying the status quo is acceptable. He's pointing out what is necessary to fix it.
Gee it's almost like certain things shouldn't be privatized and profit-driven...
I never was able to wrap my head around this argument. If something is both (a) not commercially viable and (b) necessary, then it should be funded by taxed and operate (gasp!) at a loss.
Capitalist economics work really well for certain problems, and abysmally for others. Public water works falls into the latter category, as evidenced by Flint.
I don't think this is a good example of what you're trying to argue. It could easily be said that if water was privately provided, rates could be set such that the economics are feasible (everyone needs water - the demand curve is highly inelastic). Competition could ensure the water is pure and fairly priced. Who would go with Company A's lead-laden water if B's is clean?
I happen to disagree with the argument I just provided, but for reasons different than the quality of service a free market would provide.
> Who would go with Company A's lead-laden water if B's is clean?
That's not a realistic scenario however as that implies that each company would set up its own plumbing infrastructure, water sources, etc. In reality, the infrastructure is shared. So I see no reason why the choice wouldn't target be between "company A who has lead-laden water, company B who does some extra purification and charges for it heavily and company C who serves the exact same water as A but has better advertisements."
What would be the incentive to actually fix the infrastructure if it benefited your competition just as much as you?
One time money influx from feds solves that beautifully. And is viable economic stimulus that creates a lot of blu-ish collar jobs. We could have done that in 2009-2010. And as a bonus it helps the poorest areas the most.
This would have been an ideal stimulus project, if the stimulus had been more about stimulus and less about pork-barrel spending for politically-favored groups.
(And now you understand why so many Americans are skeptical of calls to just raise taxes to fix the infrastructure or the social problem de jure: they believe the alternative is just as bad and more expensive)
> This would have been an ideal stimulus project, if the stimulus had been more about stimulus and less about pork-barrel spending for politically-favored groups.
Politically-favored groups like Wall Street and defense contractors? And Alaskan islands, if I recall?
Well remove the protection government employees have, sovereign immunity protects both negligent government employees as well the entire bureaucratic structure. In other words, if a privately managed water system is found deficient or worse individuals are found knowingly negligent they can be held liable criminally. When it comes to the public sector this is not true, you cannot sue the people or government organization involved. You can only make a claim against their insurance if that is allowed and they can decide if it is.
If we are going to continue to have important services be run by government we must life the sovereign immunity they enjoy. This will raise the accountability so they act in our best interest.
> In other words, if a privately managed water system is found deficient or worse individuals are found knowingly negligent they can be held liable criminally
That certainly worked well with the banking industry.
Let's not forget that banking is a government-protected industry. A big recourse that a lot of people have in the normal, private space is to switch to a competitor. This naturally leads to competitors that try out things that are different to things you don't like. That mechanism is simply not present in the banking industry precisely because it's controlled (regulated/restricted entry) by government.
That was acutely tied up in consequences for politicians and regulators - and as Flint is showing the one thing political turkeys don't vote for is Christmas jailtime for themselves.
The Federal Government actively encouraged the mortgage crash through encouraging uneconomical home ownership and destroying banking regulation.
"Big water" is not the banking industry, the disparity between regulator and regulated is much less likely to occur and the opportunities for mega profits with which to bribe politicians, and allow them to bribe us with the resultant tax take, simply aren't there.
I think a major factor is that the US hasn't been around for very long and we're coming to a point where a lot of infrastructure is coming under need of repair or replacement simultaneously. In particular instances, this infrastructure degradation has been greatly exacerbated by decisions to save money in the short-term. My personal opinion is that this is all part of a decades long rightward shift away from "big government" and willingness to pay for proper maintenance of public works. 2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.
There is no question a lot of work will need to be done over the next decade. The question is, who will do the work, and how will it get paid for?
I think I agree with you on most of this, but I completely disagree with your first sentence. The US is one of the oldest current stable governments. All of the other major countries today got to completely rebuild their infrastructure after WW2: Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore , perhaps even the UK. Some of these advanced countries weren't even politically stable until the 70s-80s.
The US on the other hand has been politically stable for at least ~150 years and the northeast has been for longer. (Most of my life I've lived in houses that were over a century old. Go to Korea and you will find /no/ living areas built more than 30 years ago.) We're building on one or two century old infrastructure at this point. The two hardest things we have to deal with that no one else does (except China perhaps, but they're not at this stage yet to care, I think) is the size of the country and the age of the current infrastructure.
As a fun fact, some cities in Korea don't even use telephone poles, it's all underground[0]. And I'm sure you've heard of similar infrastructural marvels in Japan.
Quite a bit of European infrastructure is old, e.g. much of the stuff in the Nordic countries is >100 years old. But more money has been put into maintenance and replacement.
For this issue specifically, part of the problem is that the U.S. kept installing lead pipes through much of the 20th century, and as a result is saddled with a lot of them. Flint's lead pipes aren't even particularly old, most dating to its big population/construction boom of the 1920s-40s. That is late enough that concerns were already pretty widespread by then, e.g. Helsinki decided to phase out lead pipes during the 1890s. I can't seem to find a date for when the U.S. as a whole phased out lead pipes, but I do find that NYC stopped new installations in only 1961, so it seems to have been quite late.
Apart from a handful of cities that were utterly destroyed not much of Europe got rebuilt from scratch after WWII. There are parts of water systems from Roman times still in use today, and town centres whose housing stock largely dates back to before the Declaration of Independence.
150 years ago the US had only 23 million inhabitants, most of whom lived in rural areas that didn't have much infrastructure. The government might trace a continuous line back to then, but very little of the infrastructure or housing stock does. US infrastructure might be old compared with Singapore's but it's young by Western standards.
That is some good perspective. I am most familiar (whatever that means) with the US and Asia; I should have stuck to the two.
In any case, the fact remains that the US has a huge handicap due to the size (population and land) of the country. It is much easier for infrastructural change to happen in most other countries because they are much smaller. This is obviously only my theory right now from experience in the US and Asia.
Unless I'm mistaken and in light of the fact that infrastructure is mostly publicly funded, this is pretty much (true but) completely irrelevant.
Smaller countries also often depend on and have a very close relationship with the major private companies. For instance, Samsung builds apartments and helps fund subways.
That's a really good point. I guess we'll see if Europe has its own infrastructure problems in 50 years or so when some of that "new" WWII infrastructure starts to get old. I would say, though, that not all parts of Europe had to rebuild from scratch. You still find WAY more 100+ year old structures in Europe than the US.
Well, the UK wasn't by any means completely destroyed in WW2 and there's a lot of work being done there to upgrade centuries old infrastructure.
Some examples:
1) The Thames Tideway sewer is being constructed to handle the fact that the old London sewers have run out of capacity and routinely flood sewage into the Thames when there are heavy rains. The problem is that unlike modern sewer systems, London's is used for both rainwater and household sewage. And the original system was designed to overflow into the Thames, on the assumption that would ~never happen. But population growth and lots more concreting means it now happens regularly. The Thames Tideway is a massive, very deep underground tunnel that roughly follows the path of the river.
2) The London Underground is the world's oldest underground railway. It is upgraded continuously. The Crossrail upgrade is the largest construction project in Europe (technically Crossrail is not LU, but it's all a part of an integrated somewhat underground network).
3) The UK road network costs less to maintain than is raised via fuel taxes. The roads are effectively a profit centre for the government, in a sense. They are maintained continuously.
4) The UK water pipe network has had leaks at an economically sustainable level for 15 years now (i.e. the cost to find and fix the remaining leaks is higher than the value of the water lost). It does not use lead piping:
I don't think there's actually any difference in infrastructure age between Europe and America. WW2 is a red herring. A lot of modern infrastructure runs underground and was undamaged or only lightly damaged by bombing, which was in any case, focused on the cities. The biggest impact of WW2 on the London Underground, for example, is that these days they have to do systematic searches for unexploded underground bombs before doing any work.
Thanks for the response. I really don't know much about the UK so I appreciate all those examples!
However, even if WW2 is a red herring, I don't think you can compare Europe and the US to each other because the US is a single country under one government and Europe is a group of very individualistic countries that don't always cooperate well. This is just my theory, but any single country in Europe has the ability to change their countries infrastructure much more easily than the US (or any city in it) because the entire country's resources can be more easily bent toward it.
Furthermore, those areas of many century-old buildings in Europe are /probably/ not located in the most economically advanced city/countries and therefore falls out of my initial comparison of the US versus the major economies/countries today.
The UK also has a partially privatised water system. When it first happened it was highly controversial, especially regional price disparities.
Now years later there's an interesting political storm in Scotland which has retained a public water utility. The public sector has to contract out for water supplies and a private bidder came in with a much lower bid. The Scottish Government, for various reasons not least that the private bidder was English, gave Scottish Water three opportunities to try and make a more competitive offer - they couldn't.
I can only say that you get what you pay for, private vs. public non-withstanding. I don't put it past any private company to put in an unrealistically low bid, and hope for one of three exit strategies (based on what I've seen in my short lifetime):
1) Bill the difference later, resulting in huge overruns.
2) Be out of the picture when the hits the fan.
3) Declare bankruptcy, all stakeholders walk away with their gains
Except you don't have to take the lowest bidder but the best. In this instance the Scottish Government desperately wanted to not take the Anglian Water bid - if they could have pointed out the bid was infeasibly low, or that Anglian had a track record of the behaviours you mention, or other benefits that the public sector offer might have then they could have avoided giving it to Anglian. Despite trying several times to make the Scottish Water bid better they still couldn't beat the private sector alternative.
For point 3 ... that's the case for motorways and other major roads. Local road maintenance comes from the local council, and that's why anything less than an A road is usually littered with potholes that are rarely repaired.
>2008 was a wasted opportunity to combine much needed infrastructure investment with fiscal stimulus.
Yeah, but that would raise employment and, by extension, wages, which American business elites don't want.
They'd rather keep half heartedly talking about basic income and some techno utopian magic robotic future for the next 50 years rather than support restarting the Public Works Administration and providing a decent job guarantees again to do actual needed work like this.
> Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
I think this is naive. A huge portion of the electorate's views are all about actively seeking institutional collapse - get in power, undermine the institution (through budget cuts, restrictions, demoralizing the workforce, etc), wait for the inevitable problems to discredit the institution and finally get rid of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
Holding institutions accountable takes a back seat when the real argument is whether they should exist at all. If you think the government shouldn't be in the business of providing clean water from the tap (and there many places in the world where that's the norm), then what's happening in Flint is not an issue.
This view is naive. There is an exceedingly small number of people that do not think the government should get out of the water business and even then, these are the people most critical of these kinds of institutional failures.
They seem to want us to be like Mexico, where the rich live in private enclaves with good services and everyone else lives in a slum. Mexico, last I checked, is not a world power. World powers have healthy populations and solid infrastructure.
Don't get me wrong. I do think government can be a "beast." But the other problem with starve the beast is that in practice it starves the wrong part. The healthy tissue (such as water services) atrophies and dies, but the waste and corruption finds a way to hang on. If anything the conditions of near-collapse created by these tactics are actually friendlier to corruption and waste. Look under the hood at Flint's water drama and you can see this in action.
The free market provides a great laboratory for analyzing organizational structures and pressures and their results. Perhaps we should look there to see what management tactics result in positive, good kinds of efficiency. I guarantee you that cutting the legs off your infrastructure, logistics, and core competencies is not a successful strategy. What would happen if FedEx cut back on repairs to its truck fleets in an effort to save money?
>The broader point is that incompetence and corruption plagues institutions (public and private) of all sizes.
Is it? Because it seems like it's just a funding problem. American infrastructure is in a pretty sad state. Fly into JFK and you don't get a sense you're flying into the richest nation in the world. The trains are decrepit. There's a looming bridge crisis, with ~20k bridges needing repair.
If there is incompetence it's that municipal, state and federal government don't want to pay for any of it because it would necessitate higher taxes and taxes are the devil.
Coming into the US and driving many LA highways, it feels/sounds as though the car's tyres have suddenly got a nail/bolt stuck in them. So many seemed to be in a poor state with problematic expansion joints or cracking?
Snowden exposed a vast amount of criminal activity within our government, and the governments response is "lets prosecute snowden!" ... no reforms, no groundswell for reform.
The spying isn't even a topic in the upcoming election.
Since 2001, we have only seen the government go the opposite way- gathering more power, from the creation of the TSA to NDAA they are clearly not beholden to the people. (I don't believe most people support this, if accurately educated about the scientific and legal basis of these- thousands of TSA agents have been arrested for crimes that victimize travelers, they fail tests to see if they will catch bombs, and no terrorists have been found...and this isn't just Bush's doing - NDAA and the porno scanners happened under Obama, and during the whole period we haven't been seeing congressmen of either party attempt to stop it (though Rand Paul did a filibuster at one point.))
The fundamental problem is that the US government- at all levels, and across parties- is not answerable to the people or for their crimes.
This is why I'm an anarchist- I believe no government can be kept accountable.
The anarchist position is totally self defeating. We live in a complex society so some systems are needed. You can't do without a functioning justice system, functioning infrastructure, a financial system you can trust not to steal your money and other things. The market can't provide these things without some rules.
I really wish people would start asking for government accountability instead of wanting to abolish things that don't work and thinking that there is some magic fairy that will jump in and make it work. Getting systems to work well is hard, never-ending work and there are no simple solutions. Most of us here build technology systems so we should know this first hand.
Not that I'm advocating anarchism, but you misunderstand what anarchism is if you think that it doesn't involve complex systems. The dream of anarchism is to have a stateless society, where there's no top-down control, not one without complex social institutions. In fact, an anarchist society would require more complex systems in order to function.
That's the same fantasy like extreme libertarianism. How do you build a power grid? How do you build national defense? How do conflicts get resolved? I have never heard a real answer to those questions.
>Power companies are responsible for their own infrastructure.
How exactly do you build infrastructure without government powers such as eminent domain, or without inserting easements for utility access?
A libertarian landowner could simply refuse to allow utility lines to cross their property and thus cutoff others from access, or require expensive routing around their property. Roads, power/sewer/water/gas lines, phone/cable/data - all would be at the whim of landowners large and small as to whether it would even exist.
There is no realistic way for a private company to negotiate access between them and every single landowner they'd need to in order to build infrastructure that serves a sizeable population. Hence government "coercion" is required.
In Spanish regions controlled by anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (a country which at the time had a lot of dirt poor farmers and a lot less large landowners), landowners were given the choice between working their lands collectively, or keeping only the land they could work themselves. That's not the same thing as Ayn Rand-style libertarianism.
I...don't know where you get the idea that libertarianism is about knocking everyone else down.
Perhaps if you focus entirely on removing welfare, it looks like that. And then, I (and other libertarians) believe that a Basic Income Guarantee would be extrenely useful, and a BIG would cover more people than current welfare systems.
Or perhaps you think that deregulating business will lead to massive monopolies, ignoring that the regulations you defend make it harder for new companies to enter a market (thus making it easier to hold a monopoly).
It's not like there haven't been regulations that cause more harm than good, though--for instance, regulations on pollution that only apply to new powerplants, leaving old ones untouched.
Libertarianism treats regulation like engineering: Simpler is better, and the ideal solution is the simplest; complicated solutions add more points of failure, which leads to a more broken result.
If you're not the person with either the most money or the most guns, anarchy ain't going to work out very well for you. Because once those with the largest amount of power don't have to play by any rules, well, it's game on. And I suspect almost all of us will be in the 99.99999% of the population that loses that game pretty badly...
If I understood the article, what Kristof is saying, is that as bad as Flint appears to be for children, there are a lot of places as bad, or worse, that are getting no press at all.
Testing for elevated level of lead in children:
o Flint - 4.9%
o New York State (outside of NYC): 6.7%
o Pennsylvania: 8.5%
o Westside Detroit: 20%
o Iowa: 32%
If these figures are true (and one hopes that the NYT fact checked these numbers), and are comparable, it seems like what's happening in Flint is just the tip of the iceberg.
While this is indeed pretty dire, it's worth bearing in mind that the entire generation who are currently running the world suffer from lead poisoning to one degree or another - atmospheric lead from gasoline additives was a major source of lead in humans until lead was withdrawn from petroleum. Add that to most paints being lead based until the last quarter of the 20th century, and you have an entire generation of brain damage.
The western roman empire quite likely degraded in part due to its leadership being brain damaged by lead - they added lead acetate to wine as a sweetener, and lined watercourses with lead regularly - although the former was a far greater source. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/win... for some reference.
In any case, a huge chunk of the world's population has heavy metal poisoning, be it mercury, lead, cadmium, or all of the above - and it's largely being ignored, and things like Flint are almost unhelpful, as it makes this look like a localised problem, when it's actually global.
The rundown of the scholarship and the following debate is useful, but I found that post to be immediately suspicious as it simply asserts, repeatedly, that "legitimate scholars" and "legit historians" ignored it or don't agree. I find such language to be a strong indicator that someone is about to try overstating their case, and is trying to discourage people from challenging their assertions by dismissing other views. An unfortunately common problem with historians, I've found.
I think the guy is correct that the "fall" of Rome is a complex topic and it's not entirely clear what this fall really consists of. But it's known from skeletal analysis that some Romans did indeed have very high lead levels in their bodies, we know what kinds of effects that can have, etc. Saying Rome fell exclusively because of lead piping would be perhaps overstating things, but we know that our own much more advanced society was becoming more and more violent until lead was removed from gasoline: if that connection had never been made or the solution never happened it's not hard to believe that in a hundred years or so we'd be existing in a far, far worse state.
If the Romans knew lead pipes made water unhealthy, how did we end up with so much lead piping? (I'm not asking the question as a refutation, I'm genuinely curious - was this a lesson we forgot??)
You could also ask why lead was used for gasoline when it was known that lead was toxic.
The reason is simple. People knew it was toxic and caused brain damage ('madness' in Roman terms) at high levels of exposure. What they didn't realise is that very small levels of exposure could cause an internal buildup over time and cause steady mental degradation. If someone is exposed to massive heavy metal poisoning and immediately goes crazy, the correlation is obvious. If an entire generation slowly gets more violent and crime rates go up, then it's much, much harder to spot the issue because everyone is changing at the same time.
In the USA alcohol was prohibited in the 1920s, and there was a knocking problems with gas engines going over a certain speed that needed to be fixed. They tried different additives until they found lead works.
People got sick on the exhaust but the industry covered it up. It wasn't until later that it was discovered that people got sick on the lead in the exhaust that they switched to ethanol an alcohol based on corn. Prohibition was over by decades by then and ethanol was healthier than lead and solved the knocking problem plus farmers made money growing corn to add to the gas.
Lead paint was the same way, they hid the fact that it made people sick so they could sell more of it.
Lead pipes or copper pipes with lead soldier was used the same way and the safety risks were hidden to people as well.
Lead is a neurotoxin and leads to mental illnesses and brain damage. People effected might have violent outbursts and get arrested for crimes. If there is lead in the water supplies of the poor neighborhoods that minorities live in it could be the cause of crime by those who drink the water, bathe in it, cook with it, etc. This is being hidden as well and just now is being reported on by some news media companies.
Corporations get away with stuff like that because of the ignorance of the public and their short-term memories. Lead has always been a neurotoxin but people tend to forget that and it gets covered up when it is used in products and pipes and other stuff.
> atmospheric lead from gasoline additives was a major source of lead
There's such a direct correlation with leaded gas and violent crime in USA. That it was likely a large if not the largest factor in the rise and fall of crime rates.
Absolutely. Not only is the problem global, but everybody generally acknowledges that there is a problem. Some context is direly needed here, and the story isn't that it's much worse than we thought. We already knew it was bad; that's why Flint is able to be a story.
There's a discussion to be had another day about what's "good enough" -- after all, we want to be healthy, not create a water system so pure that it's never ever existed in human history before. For now, though, the overall story worldwide is positive. We know about metal poisoning, we're able to measure it, and we have instantaneous publishing ability to share with the world what various people are drinking.
That's all good news. In addition, water quality overall continues to get better.
Nobody's making excuses for Flint, but good grief. This is a happy story. People who were suffering will not be in the future. Problems are being identified which we are able to fix.
Sometimes I think the pattern of these stories is so established in some people's minds that they're forced to follow the pattern no matter what, over and over again. A little context here won't fix Flint, but it might give a more balanced view on just where we're at globally.
He does caution that the figures may not be comparable. I don't know the details of the figures, but I can imagine they normally only test children who have been found to be exposed, so you'd expect higher rates. In Flint they've tested more widely, though of course exposure is wider too.
Notice that these percentage are the percentage of children with "elevated lead"., I'm making up numbers here but If we consider elevated to be anything more than X ug/L . first of all how was this X chosen? Secondly, if 6.7% of NY state children have (X + 0.01), this would be very different from 4.9% of children who have let's say ( X * 3 )
“Lead in Flint is the tip of the iceberg,” notes Dr. Richard J.
Jackson, former director of the National Center for Environmental
Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I have a really hard time believing these figures, if only because it would essentially render Flint a non-issue. 32% of Iowan children being poisoned would be what we'd all be hearing about (if only because it might be a convenient primary issue).
IIRC lead is only part of the issue in Flint, the water is otherwise undrinkable, too (very dirty or something).
(It's also the direct way in which it happened that makes Flint an issue; most of these other high-lead situations cannot be pinpointed to a single instance of negligence/corruption. Flint can.)
Those percentages are the number of tested children with elevated levels, the article doesn't say anything about how elevated the levels are. If 32% of the children in Iowa have mildly elevated levels but very few have highly elevated levels then it might not cause much of a health impact.
Given that the EPA wasn't going to warn anyone until the issue was outed by a private individual doing research on their own, we probably have no good idea how bad it is....but the EPA probably does.
A lot of these cases seem to be borderline, and many times the maladies are only loosely ascribed to lead poisoning. Reading the articles, you see things like "16ppb, 1ppb above the level that the CDC requires you to take action"
And, in the linked article, the line that sz4kerto quoted "In Baltimore, a two-year-old boy...can’t speak, apparently because of lead poisoning."
Hardly a smoking gun.
Many of the outrage-inducing headlines, when you read further, aren't nearly as bad as what they seem. If 15ppb requires no action, why is 16ppb an outrage? Or even 30ppb. Usually 'safe' levels of a substance are set at least an order of magnitude below the point they become a problem in most circumstances.
Obviously lead poisoning is a real thing, and the government cover-ups and selective testing are a problem, but I foresee an entire generation of Flint descendants that will start blaming any and all of their problems on this Flint issue, of course, looking for a $$ handout as well. It would be nice for the media(and the general public) to apply even the lowest evidence bar "greater weight of the evidence" -- meaning at least a 50% probability -- to the situation. It seems the current bar is "a slight chance in hell."
A two year old, exposed to an unknown amount of lead, who can't talk, does not seem to be a definitive victim of lead poisoning. He is, however, a great tool for the media to use to invoke the "won't you think of the children" hysteria, which will surely prompt a knee-jerk reaction that will waste millions of dollars.
There is no safe level of lead. That's the problem. There is a threshold because they had to draw a line somewhere, but lead causes detectable impairment of brain development in proportion to concentration, at any concentration. It's not like you can have 15ppb of lead in your blood and not suffer from it.
It's easy to see this in terms of statistics if it's not _your_ 2-year old with the speech delay. Not all individuals tolerate lead at the same level. Lead was commonly used in the middle ages and not everyone suffered from the neurological damage that lead can cause.
Statistics are the best tool we have but it's also important to realize that when the incidence rate is low enough, you need a lot of data for statistical methods to be reliable. We see this in A/B testing of conversion rates. If your base conversion rate is only 0.1% and you are looking for a 15% lift (e.g. 15% higher chance of lead poisoning), then you need a sample size of over 700,000 for each branch (i.e. 700,000 kids "exposed" to lead and 700,000 not exposed). That kind of sample size is hard to come by.
I agree -- I wasn't trying to show that there wasn't enough affected cases to indicate definitive lead poisoning, just that it's likely not nearly as widespread or causing as much damage as is currently being ascribed to it.
From the article "4.9 percent of children tested for lead turned out to have elevated levels." What is 'elevated'? Is that 30ug/dl? or 3ug/dl when the average is 2ug/dl. When specific information is absent, I generally doubt the accuracy.
But I guess that's typical news media anyways. If it's not bursting in to flames, then it isn't news.
'So the Virginia Tech researchers took 30 different readings at various flow levels. What they found shocked them: The lowest reading they obtained was around 200 ppb, already ridiculously high. But more than half of the readings came in at more than 1,000 ppb. Some came in above 5,000 -- the level at which EPA considers the water to be "toxic waste."'
As I understand, it the City of Detroit basically kicked them out (or raised the rates prohibitively high). Flint was already on track to transition to a regional water system (not the Flint river system), but it wasn't completed yet. This statement places all of the blame onto Flint for pulling out of using Detroit's water system.
The details have been posted in several earlier threads, but the TL;DR version is:
1) Detroit was gouging Flint, well into 7 figures per year, (plus the supply pipes from Detroit to Flint have lead)
2) Flint signed a new deal for a new supply direct from Lake Huron with lead-free supply lines at an 8-figure cost savings per decade (or less) -- better water, much cheaper. Construction to take ~4 years.
3) Detroit hears this, cuts off Flint at earliest opportunity (1-year notice opt-out), apparently assuming that they could later gouge even more under the assumption that Flint had no alternative;
4) Flint resorts to using Flint River in the interim (until new Huron feeds from new water system are complete), prepared for the bacterial risks but unaware of lead risks.
But we're you also testing positive for lead exposure? While anecdotal, stories like this help people connect with the numbers. Also, not talking at two can mean lots of different things. Both of my kids started talking at around 13 months, but what they said was unintelligible to anyone other than their parents.
Speculating a bit here, he's probably behind the curve in starting to try and speak.
And my kid started to talk at 2.5 years (mostly, only his mother and I understood him) and now at 4 years old, he is one of the most talkative and expressive kids in his class. He has better math skills than anyone in his class (and its a mixed 3 to 5 years class)
Up to 4-5 years old (and later of course but this time frame is where it is easier to do comparisons: kid speaks or doesn't speak vs kid knows how to multiply or doesn't) kids develop at different rates. Let it be speech or math or just general coordination (while my kid spoke gibberish at 2.5 years old, he was able to climb trees on his own and do an handstand at that age. He sucks at any kind of dramatisation or singing, but he knows a good amount of constellations and can identify them on the sky, and the composition (simplified version of course) of the earth, it's core, and how volcanoes work, etc).
In NYC, we used to install cast-iron lead joint pipes for water main distribution, up until 1985 when a law was passed banning it. To phase out old water main, the NYCDEP has a rule: All pipes older than 1975 (or thereabouts) underneath areas of road reconstruction will be replaced by ductile iron pipe. But NYC still continues to have a lot of pipe that are cast iron even now.
The question immediately for me is: how do I test my own water? If this is such an issue, it's clear public health departments are not fully trustable, which is terrible; but the starting point isn't to start the engineering project, it's to determine safety of self. Then on to the politicing, raising water prices, improving infrastructure, etc.
We live on tap water and always assumed that the water quality would be flawless here in US. But after reading such stories, I subscribe to the idea of buying bottled water or refillable purified tap water. Now I will have to research if refillable RO water shops can actually clear water or has any lead or any other contamination in it.
> No, not necessarily. NRDC conducted a four-year review of the bottled water industry and the safety standards that govern it, including a comparison of national bottled water rules with national tap water rules, and independent testing of over 1,000 bottles of water. Our conclusion is that there is no assurance that just because water comes out of a bottle it is any cleaner or safer than water from the tap. And in fact, an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle -- sometimes further treated, sometimes not.
> 2. Is bottled water actually unsafe?
> Most bottled water appears to be safe. Of the bottles we tested, the majority proved to be high quality and relatively free of contaminants. The quality of some brands was spotty, however, and such products may pose a health risk, primarily for people with weakened immune systems (such as the frail elderly, some infants, transplant and cancer patients, or people with HIV/AIDS). About 22 percent of the brands we tested contained, in at least one sample, chemical contaminants at levels above strict state health limits. If consumed over a long period of time, some of these contaminants could cause cancer or other health problems.
Don't forget also that there's a lot of plastic waste with bottled water, and the cost is enormous. The pure tap water I drink is cheap enough that I also use it to bathe in and water my plants. Even purified tap water isn't that cheap.
This price difference means there is a strong business interest to privatize water. (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_privatization ). One of these companies is Nestlé Waters. Nestlé, like other private water companies, are bringing in loads of bottled water to Flint. This has the dual purpose of humanitarian support, and getting the idea across that bottled water is a solution over untrustworthy city water.
What an amazing coincidence that Deborah Muchmore, the wife of Gov. Rick Snyder’s ex-Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore, was also spokesperson for Nestle Waters in Michigan. I think this alignment of interests is a natural consequence of believing that a (democratic) government should be run more like a(n autoritarian) business.
One point, if Nestle ran th water supply, they could be sued for damages and the EPA would have an adversarial role instead of covering for their buddies as they very likely were in Flint (by knowing the water was dangerous for months and only saying something when an independent researcher proved it was dangerous).
But the main point is they would face a jury setting damages if they pulled the same rookie corrupt BS that happened in Flint. The government won't.
> Homegrown brands, though, couldn’t boast glamorous European roots. So instead, they made Americans afraid of the tap. One ad from Royal Spring Water claimed that “tap water is poison.” Another, from Calistoga Mountain Spring Water, asked: “How can you be sure your water is safe? ... Unfortunately, you can’t.” Fiji Water infuriated Ohio with the tagline “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland.” The insinuation, of course, was that there was something wrong with local water.
If people don't trust public city water to drink, but do trust private bottled water, then more profits for those companies. (Or if the new Central Florida University stadium was built without fountains, forcing people to buy $3 bottled water instead, then profit! ... Until the water ran out and "60 attendees were treated for heat-related issues; 18 were hospitalized for heat exhaustion".)
Not having access to potable water inside a public area like that seems nearly criminal. I wonder if they faced legal action, as I assume they had a policy of no outside drinks or beverages.
> When the stadium was designed, the building codes called for either drinking fountains or "bottled water coolers." But the sole source of water for fans attending last Saturday's inaugural game was from vendors.
> "Selling bottled water out of a concession stand is not what the code meant," said Gregg Gress of the International Code Council in Washington, D.C. Water coolers "were supposed to be the equivalent of a drinking fountain."
...
> The 2001 plumbing code under which UCF's stadium was designed gave builders the option of installing water fountains or "bottled water coolers."
> But several officials who are closely involved with building codes told the Orlando Sentinel that bottled-water coolers referred to refrigerated units fed by large plastic jugs, commonly found in offices.
> The code, they said, was not meant to include refrigerators containing individual bottles of water for sale, such as those that vendors used at the stadium last Saturday.
It then says that the university "was not subject to review by another government agency. That's because the university, like school districts, has the authority to issue its own permits and can decide whether it meets most building standards."
as well as pointing to a few previous cases:
> In 2003, the new stadium for the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles opened without water fountains for the general public in what was called an oversight. In 1962, Dodger Stadium architects in Los Angeles forgot to install drinking fountains, though some suspected the team's owner wanted to boost beer and soda sales.
In general there was a lot of astonishment over the lack of water fountains.
Oh, and no, you can't bring in your own drinks. They might contain alcohol, so beer sales would go down ... err, I mean that people might get drunk and rowdy or violent.
> Rick Snyder’s ex-Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore, was also spokesperson for Nestle Waters in Michigan
While this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, I honestly can't think of any other reason why a politician would almost certainly destroy their career over something like this.
I don't think there was a conspiracy. There doesn't need to be direct collusion when those in government and business have the same long-term goals.
I think the people in office sincerely believe that governments should be run like a business. Businesses are typically organized with an authoritarian model rather than a democratic system. Hence the preference for a dictatorial emergency manager who is supposed to be able to be more effective than a democratically elected city counci.
Businesses are typically run with a profit motive, and rarely have human rights, like the right to drinkable water, in mind, much less paramount.
Finally, I'll quote from the recent Pussy Riot song, which quotes Chaika: "Be loyal to those in power, 'cause power is a gift from God, son." I don't know if it's accurate for Michigan, but it fits the general authoritarian model.
I was going on the first half of your statement "buying bottled water or refillable purified tap water".
The latter half is still a lot more expensive than municipal water. Do you also use that water for cooking? Washing your vegetables? Washing the dishes? Bathing? Brushing your teeth?
In Flint the government recommendation (if you can believe them) is to use filtered water for the first two, which means you'll need to fetch a lot of water for pasta night.
If you have kids, "Michigan’s top poison control doctor said parents should take care to limit the time children are in the bath and be sure they don’t drink any of the water" http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/01/11/do... , and they shouldn't use the water to brush their teeth.
I didn't assume it but many cities including Baltimore for example send out yearly water testing reports with the water bills. These reports always gave me the impression that the water was safe.
What is news to me and I think a lot of people after reading the Flint story is that those city level tests are deceiving because they don't account for stuff that gets into the water between the reservoir and your tap which is how all the lead is getting into the water in Flint.
What more explanation are you wanting? Thanks to that post, I found a few different heavy metal tests on Amazon [0] for a general indication of quality. It also looks like I could also ask one of quite a few local labs if I trusted them and wanted a more in depth set of results [1].
There are a bunch of water quality testing kits you can get to test the quality of water at your tap. They range in price from DIY that you can get at Home Depot or Walmart for $20 to a kit you send away to a lab that can cost in the $50 to several hundred dollar range depending on the number of things you are testing for.
Unless you live in flint or some other place with a water emergency, you have know way of knowing that your water is unsafe. You spendany tax dollars on safe tap water, and so you should exploit that... But if you don't trust the tap water, buy tests to find out if it is unsafe or not.
You can get lead testing kits on amazon. Same for chlorine, bacteria, etc. He basically said don't just follow the hive mind, test your water and get a baseline.
The city quality report will not pick up chemicals that enter the water from your service line and plumbing (these are both potential sources of lead).
Testing what comes out of a given tap is not incredibly expensive, state health and environmental departments usually have information about it.
At the very least, I would want to know if my house has a lead service pipe. Several years ago in my locale, the city identified every house with a lead pipe, and replaced all of them. This doesn't eliminate lead solder used on copper pipes within the house. I suppose one could strategically identify the portion of the plumbing used for drinking water, and replace it with lead free.
I think Flint may have been an accident waiting to happen -- hoping that nothing would ever disrupt the passivation built up inside the pipes. I think that replacing lead service pipes nationwide sounds like a public works project. Putting the people of Flint to work replacing their own pipes would bring more than just clean water to the city.
I've recently moved to the US and cannot bring myself to drink tap water. Even though I consciously know that it should be safe, it is as if I was trying to drink water from the toilet. Years of living in a country with untrustworthy tap water do that to you.
Now, the way it is usually done in the US is very wasteful. I mean, packs of bottled water at CostCo? We used returnable 5 gallon containers...
Most grocery stores have disposable gallon (and sometimes 5 gallon) containers of water, which is at least better than small bottles. There are also 5 gallon water cooler bottles which you exchange when empty.
I was interested enough to follow the link the OP entitled
"Across America, 535,000 children ages 1 through 5 suffer lead poisoning, by C.D.C. estimates."
As far as I can tell, the CDC regularly tests some children in a malnourished nutrition program (not a random sample of all children), with sample sizes in the N=1600 to 1800 range over several years. They divided that data into several cohorts, and over time the incidence of children above the threshold reported has decreased in all factor categories, so that by the 2010 cohort it was one third what the incidence was in the 2000 cohort.
Now I didn't do more than skim the article -- did I miss a smoking gun? Or am I looking at link bait by a journalist?
I do not wish to belittle whatever crisis the article is about, whatever it is, but its links backing up the alarm are not, in fact alarming.
"Lead poisoning in poor children decreased 3x over the Augties, CDC said 3 years ago"
The author seems to have done a deep dive and found some alarming numbers. I wonder if his Iowa data are from the Quad Cities area -- a region historically known for lead mining. I can well imagine that lead poisoning has a strong environmental and industrial component, and that some places are worse than others just because of the soil. That is certainly true of exposure to radon gas in the home, for example.
Mark your calendars for the same outrage with the electricity grid in 10 years or so. I.e. "Life support users die after cloudy day".
Subsidizing inefficient and unreliable energy will put us in the same hole as water infrastructure in Flint, especially as politicians have the same unwillingness to increase rates to reflect the true cost of renewable energy.
Yeah, okay. So what you're trying to tell the world right now is...
"Fear the inevitable nightmare known as solar power, because a half measure avails no one."
Is that the alarm bell you're ringing here?
You're right, we should fear for the preservation of vegetables that already are, rather than prevent the brain damage that would not have otherwise been.
Similarly, The Guardian reports "Water authorities across the US are systematically distorting water tests to downplay the amount of lead in samples, risking a dangerous spread of the toxic water crisis that has gripped Flint..."
I don't know if things were different in the 80s when I was a kid, or the 50s when my parents were, but it feels very much like 2008 set the standard for "the bigger the crime, the less accountable you will be held." From fixing LIBOR rates to HSBC laundering money for multinational crime organizations, to lying to Congress's face, to lead poisoning thousands of people - the bigger the crime, the less accountability.
GM knew the Flint river water was toxic, so it got to hook back up to the clean water supply. Poor kids did not.
GM switched because the water was corrosive, not because it was toxic.
It's a little pedantic, because the corrosiveness is why the water coming out of household taps has the high levels of lead, but GM switched because the water wasn't suitable for their process, not because of toxicity.
Unfortunately, it also hasn't been shown to be effective in repairing or preventing the effects of subacute toxicity, so even if the state were willing to pay for it, chelation wouldn't be a cure. An entire generation has been crippled in the name of a government's ledger sheet.
I don't know to what extent damage from mercury and lead is irreperable - even after chelation. Be useful to find out. Sadly with the mass poisonings in Flint we might be seeing more data on the subject.
There is very little evidence that those plants are effective. The positive studies I've seen (based on a few hours of looking in PubMed last year) are only in animal tests, and are more suggestive than conclusive.
An effective study would also need to show some response curve. Is one leaf of coriander a month good enough, or do I need to eat 200 grams per day to get a 5% decrease in blood lead levels?
Chelation therapy, like with EDTA and DMSA, can be effective for heavy metal poisoning, but they have limits and side effects. For example, "From 2003 to 2005, deaths of 3 individuals as a result of cardiac arrest caused by hypocalcemia during chelation therapy with EDTA were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention" (from Wikipedia) and "The oral chelation test using DMSA may lead to misleading diagnostic advice regarding potential mercury toxicity and can be associated with serious side effects" (from http://acb.sagepub.com/content/41/3/233 ).
Is this worse than it had been before (i.e. did lead go down in the 70s/80s/90s and back up now? Will we see a resurgence in crime in a decade or two as a result?
Could this help explain why the US is more violent that than e.g. European countries? The removal of lead from gas has been liked to a decrease in violence, so I would guess that levels could go even lower if lead was removed from other sources as well.
I knew America's infrastructure wasn't being funded so I was just watching for bridges to start collapsing.
Wasn't expecting it to be in the pipes bringing the water.
Not in 2016.
Make you wonder about violent criminals in the past decade and if lead had any help in that. We thought we eliminated that decades ago but apparently not.
America's infrastructure is being funded just fine. The numbers are coming down and have been doing so since their peaks in the 90s, an example are bridges are now half their number from before. However the Federal government cannot do all the required work on bridges or even roads as it does not have dominion over them.
What that means is that in many areas, same as with water distribution, this is wholly managed and supported by local authorities. This can be city, county, or even state level.
Funding isn't the problem. Spending wisely is the problem.
California just spent US$7 billion (thousand million in non-US terms) on a bridge that was originally going to be a $400 million project... and the $7B bridge is a piece of crap. A pretty piece of crap, mind you, but much less safe than the cheaper design would have been.
Regardless of one's politics, it's critical that we hold our institutions accountable and help them get better over time.
This includes our country, our state, our county, our city, our company, our social and professional groups, open source communities, etc.
There is a strong human tendency to want to defend organizations we are part of (or rely on) rather than trying to constructively improve them.
Flint is an example of institutional failures at multiple levels, but over all the loss of life and suffering pales in comparison to what our failed institutions did in Iraq and around the world, and what they do to our schools all across the country, etc.
The more official an organization (government, etc.), the more fancy its facilities (buildings with columns, spires, domes, etc.) the more we must realize its credibility is based on self-perpetuation rather than on tangible, auditable results.
There are so many failures happening across the board, and the biggest enemy to progress is the idea that loyalty means keeping quiet.