
Lax oversight, dubious testing in water tanks pose health risks - oftenwrong
https://www.cityandstateny.com/articles/policy/energy-environment/new-york-city-water-tank-hazards.html
======
oneplane
Reading this gives me the creeps and a whole lot of 'no shit, sherlock'. This
is third-world kind of stuff. How can this not be solved over there by now?
Privately hosted rooftop water tanks? Really? Does health and personal
excellence mean so little?

At this point, in my area it's required by law to have a hydrofoor when your
building is 13 meters tall (or taller). No water tower allowed, and skipping
the entire thing isn't allowed either. In the USA that would probably be
regarded as 'nanny state', but this is a typical case where you cannot trust a
company or installer or building owner to do this right by default, hurting
basically everyone else. I'm not sure what hydrofoor translates to, but it's
basically a pressuriser, pump, buffer tank in one, that you have in the
technical room of your building, that is inspected by the water company which
is inspected by the 'watershap' (not sure what that translates to), which is
inspected by the government. It takes a whole lot of people doing it wrong on
purpose before that chain fails and you get bad water.

~~~
umvi
> In the USA that would probably be regarded as 'nanny state'

Maybe, but... building codes and regulations != nanny state in my opinion.
Nanny state is more like banning soda, supersize meals at restaurants, etc. to
protect people from themselves.

"Sorry, but you can't be trusted to make good choices about what you put in
your body, so we will make laws that force you to make better choices"

~~~
everdev
> "Sorry, but you can't be trusted to make good choices about what you put in
> your body, so we will make laws that force you to make better choices"

How about extending this to ending the war on drugs?

~~~
umvi
I am in favor of legalizing drugs. I should be able to buy chemically pure
substances, for example I might want to study the chemical properties of the
drug.

I'm in favor of (what I consider to be) non-nanny regulation around drugs
though - ban advertising (I actually think alcohol ads should be banned as
well) and certain drugs should only have generic labels listing chemical
information, should be age-restricted, and behind-the-counter (by request
only).

------
gerbilly
The tank with the missing roof means people in that building are drinking what
amounts to surface water.

Why on earth are they still using wood? By now I would have expected them to
have steel tanks with a steel roof on them, you know something a rodent can't
just gnaw its way into.

I'm glad I read this. Now whenever I go to NY, I won't drink any water without
having boiled it for three minutes first.

~~~
alexhutcheson
Wood is a better insulator than steel or the other materials that you might
use. This is important to keep the water from freezing in the winter or
becoming a microbial breeding ground in the summer. Historically, wooden water
tanks have also been a lot cheaper than those made of steel or other
materials.

~~~
gerbilly
Of course, the question answers itself: It's cheaper.[1]

I guess there's no price you can put on health! (It certainly doesn't seem to
count for much in this case.)

[1] The Hitch-Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopaedia
Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though
it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly
inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work [...] it is
slightly cheaper

------
bsenftner
Around 2004 I was exposed to an opportunity to become an EPA Lobbyist for a
company in the fuel and water storage tank construction and maintenance
portion of the construction industry. The ease of the job, meaning the
complete corporate capture of that portion of the EPA, was so comprehensive
the Lobbyist position was eliminated during my exposure to the opportunity.
Industry dictates any regulation, and don't really bother with any
enforcement. This was during a portion of my career when I considered leaving
tech, and the intentional disregard of any ethics or public safety is one of
the factors behind my return to tech. Needless to say, I get all household
water from a private source, and I do not trust the crops in any areas with
underground fuel storage sharing the water table with nearby farms.

~~~
mcguire
Fortunately, the free market will correct those problems. Consumers who find
water quality important will not consume it, possibly by moving elsewhere, and
force the company to fix it or go out of business.

Also fortunately, the tech industry is supremely concerned with ethics and
public safety.

~~~
bsenftner
As far as I can tell, it has become exponentially worse.

------
keeganjw
The New York Times did a great video about this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_9RLbRZJr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_9RLbRZJr0)

It's crazy that this is allowed to continue.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Get it in front of the right people and it won’t be allowed to continue. Don’t
let a crisis go to waste.

~~~
jrockway
I don't foresee much happening. Local politics in New York has very little to
do with helping your constituents and appears to be some jumping off point for
greater things. De Blasio wants to be President. Cuomo wants to be President.
You don't become President by being tough on water towers. Therefore, I
predict nothing will happen.

(Cuomo might do something if he can figure out how to name it after his dad,
though.)

~~~
ams6110
I'd be pretty surprised if this issue isn't present in any older city with
tall buildings. I see rooftop water tanks in many cities.

------
docker_up
That is absolutely disgusting, but given the horrible state the system is in,
why have we not heard of larger, more widespread disease outbreaks? You would
think it would be happening all the time with the system in such horrible
shape.

~~~
empath75
Turns out the human immune system works pretty well.

~~~
bluntfang
Ya know, I never understood why so many people today overlook the conditions
that the human body had to endure before the last 100 years or so. I have a
family member that washes avocados before eating them and doesn't want to
sleep at a KOA campground for fear of being eaten by bears. Baffling.

~~~
gerbilly
Yeah, I wouldn't overestimate how good our immune systems is at protecting us
from contaminated water.[1]

Where I grew up, at the start of the 20th century many children died in
infancy from contaminated water and milk.

Also the gut is an 'immune privileged' part of the body, meaning that the
immune system does not attempt to keep it sterile like the rest of the
body.[2]

We need a healthy micro-biome for digestion and to synthesize vitamins etc,
but this means that it's also relatively easy to get sick from contaminated
water and food.

[1] The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million
people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause
of disease and death around the world.

[2]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16972898](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16972898)

~~~
oftenwrong
New York had a big scandal related to "swill milk" in the late 19th - early
20th centuries. Distillery waste was fed to sick and dying cows kept in
overcrowded, filthy lots. The milk and whatever dirty, contaminated water that
got mixed in was adulterated with various substances to help mask the low
quality. Many children died from consuming it. A very dark chapter of human
history.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swill_milk_scandal)

------
hguant
New York City officials are lazy, corrupt, or just don't care, and are happily
committing perjury so they don't have to do their job.

This is not a new story.

~~~
reustle
> Another city agency, which is responsible for the tank, has certified year
> after year that the entire structure, including the roof, is sound and that
> the tank has no sanitary defects, dismissing its own 2015 report of E. coli
> in the water as a “clerical error.”

Would this be considered a criminal offence? Even if so, unlikely that they
would be charged I'm guessing.

------
oftenwrong
The city publishes the inspection results on their data portal:

[https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/Rooftop-Drinking-
Water-...](https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/Rooftop-Drinking-Water-Tank-
Inspection-Results/gjm4-k24g)

I found this article and data set on Data is Plural:

[https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural](https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural)

------
beamatronic
Anyone here from New York and could comment on the local reaction to this?

They say it’s something in the water that makes the bagels better, maybe it’s
the water tanks.

------
dwighttk
I wonder why they still use wood.

~~~
vonmoltke
What do you mean, "still"? The wooden tanks are decades old.

~~~
stronglikedan
Mike Row built a new one from wood relatively recently on Dirty Jobs. IIRC,
only the bands holding it together were metal.

~~~
vonmoltke
I'm not up on NYC code, since I don't live in the city, but I wonder if it was
a rebuild of an existing wooden tank under a "repair in kind" exemption. I
have seen shit like that before, such as codes that allow knocking down all
but one wall of a building and still calling it a "remodel" (and thus
preserving grandfathered code exemptions).

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
My favorite one is keeping one wall, building three, knocking down the last
wall and huraah... still a 'remodel'

~~~
vonmoltke
Code hacking like that is almost a sport in South Florida.

~~~
WrtCdEvrydy
Literally where I saw it... Wynwood in Miami.

------
cesarb
Would filtering and/or boiling the water be enough against that kind of
contamination?

(We learn from childhood that you should only drink filtered or boiled water;
I wouldn't feel comfortable drinking water directly from the plumbing,
precisely because you never know how clean the water tank and the pipes are.)

~~~
mcguire
Where are you from?

~~~
cesarb
I'm from the southeast of Brazil. Nearly every place has a water filter,
separate from the normal faucet, for the drinking water. The water tank on
buildings and houses is normally made of plastic, not wood (though in some
buildings, it's made of concrete and part of the building's structure), but
you never know if it has been left uncovered, or how recently it has been
cleaned (and the plumbing, as far as I know, is never directly cleaned).

~~~
newnewpdro
Plumbing in general is never cleaned and it isn't a problem as the water is
moving.

The main issue with water tanks is the water is stagnant and in warm/hot
climates ideal for life.

Nowadays it's very easy to add a UV light to the interior of your water tanks
to keep the interior sterile.

------
beobab
I'm pretty sure that in the game "Prototype", the water tanks were breeding
grounds for the weirdy alien looking creatures. It was fun to fly around in a
helicopter spotting them (by heat signature) and blowing them up.

I had no idea they were real features in New York.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Oh, they’re real features all right, I live right underneath one... but I had
no idea they were functional! I thought they were just odd holdovers from a
hundred years ago that landlords were too cheap or lazy to tear down...

------
johnkt
Can someone explain why water towers on each building are required in a first-
world city? I genuinely don't understand. Is the public water supply so
unreliable that you need to have a buffer?

------
hydrogenglow
Well, this is terrifying! #gettingawaterfilter

------
microcolonel
New York City is expensive, insolvent, and corrupt; it boggles the mind to
hear that people still bother to live and do business there.

If you have the income to live in a New York City high rise, you should have
the pride not to pay some scumbag to live in one with an unmitigated biohazard
on the roof.

And of course, you and I both know that you'll be the first and only person in
New York City who cared whether you were drinking clean water or not.

~~~
CPLX
> it boggles the mind to hear that people still bother to live and do business
> there

It's actually the largest city in the country, so clearly there's a demand for
it. Which might have to do with it being the most important and vibrant city
in the history of global civilization.

When reality is inconsistent with logic, it's time to check your assumptions.

~~~
insertcredit
I've been all over the US, NYC is a dump of colossal proportions, a train
wreck happening in (maybe not so) slow motion. I live in Europe and parts of
Manhattan reminded me of the third world. Hype / reality distortion have a lot
to do with NYC being perceived as "vibrant" or "most important".

~~~
someguydave
I've vacationed in new york city and I agree. Even the "nice parts" are
crowded and shabby.

------
moneytide1
Every time I hit a severe bump on the road that is supposed to be a repaired
pothole, I think of the workers who were assigned to that particular pothole.
I think of all the times I've heard workers say "That's good enough, I'm ready
to go to lunch early." Because of a few people's low standard of perfection,
now tens and thousands of people must experience a slight turmoil in that spot
over the next decade, slightly increasing wear/tear on their car.

Apply this attitude to storage of a fundamental resource: safe drinking water.
There is negligence because people are in a hurry, or because things become so
routine that the sanitation workers don't even pay attention anymore.

Personally, I drink all my water exclusively from a well. Untouched by human
"sanitation" efforts. A few weeks ago I forgot to drive out to the country to
refill my container with this well water, and had to drink from a city tap for
about a week. I started getting ulcers all over my mouth. Perhaps this was
coincidental, but it is the only time in the past few years that I have
consistently drank city water over a sustained period. Chlorine, fluoride, who
knows what else.

I will say that NYC is supposed to have some of the best water in the nation
because their reservoir is fresh snow melt. But any water kept in one place
too long will be contaminated.

“The idea is that flowing water never goes stale, so just keep on flowing.”
-Bruce Lee

~~~
lm28469
> Because of a few people's low standard of perfection

I'm sure they'd love to pursue perfection if they were paid decent wage and
not pressured to be as fast / cheap as possible.

It's easy to talk about perfection while sitting in a air conditioned office
and slightly pressing on buttons while looking at a screen and getting paid
4-10 times the minimum wage these guys are getting while busting their asses
outside no matter the weather.

> Personally, I drink all my water exclusively from a well. Untouched by human
> "sanitation" efforts.

Many things can be off with water coming from a well. Pollution, bacterias,
&c. I hope you test / treat it often, otherwise it's not much safer than
drinking tap water.

~~~
moneytide1
I used to work for road construction, albeit not pothole repair (interstate
paving). Because of my lifestyle, money is not an object (grow food, buy bulk,
only drink free water, no insurance of any kind). There is this thing in my
mind where I want to make sure the world is better for people when I'm dead,
in whatever small way I can.

That means bending over to pick trash even if no one is watching. Doing a good
job and not waste any employers time, regardless of "wage". Technically I make
more than the people that hire me because I know how to spend it more
efficiently than them.

We're talking about reputation here: Do we want to be remembered as someone
who wants to be paid more? Or who was productive at all times without any
complaints?

~~~
Jach
You're probably getting flack for saying "low standards of perfection" instead
of just "low standards"... To me having higher standards and wanting to do
(and actually doing) a good job, not just a good enough job, is primarily an
attitude problem, not a wage/job pressure problem. Indeed there's a whole
cottage industry of grumpy programmers to complain about other highly paid
programmers not even suffering under crunch mode who aren't doing good work.
Yes, you get what you incentivize on the large scale, but at the individual
level you still have choices and opportunities to leave things better than you
found them. Activity in scouting or similar when young probably correlates
with the attitude.

~~~
moneytide1
I see now, "low standards of perfection" is almost an ironic statement since
"standard" describes a minimum requirement and perfection can never be
achieved, only pursued.

I agree that only wanting to do "good-enough" is an attitude problem. My own
motivation comes from the assumption that someone is always watching. The idea
is to never put a memory into someones mind of you wasting time and resources.
Regardless of your own reputation, it is far more risky for someone to see
this attitude and find it acceptable to replicate it. Then the attitude can
spread like wildfire (until it hits a group of people with solid principles).

