DON'T DRINK THE WATER -- FLINT, MICHIGAN & BEYOND

[HairOfTheDog]

There is a group of men holding a press conference who have been investigating this water crisis in Flint. These men are pissed! One of them just said he has never in his career done an investigation that has effected him the way this one has and he went on to give examples of why and he talked about the little kids who had been lead poisoned. Sad Sad Sad. Those involved in the coverup are going to pay a very high price, as they should!

Six more state employees were criminally charged this morning in connection with the Flint water crisis, bringing the total to 9.

Snip:
Charged are Michigan Department of Health and Human Services workers Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller and Robert Scott, and Michigan Department of Environmental Quality employees Leanne Smith; Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook.

In April, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette announced felony charges against two Michigan Department of Environmental Quality officials and one City of Flint official. At that time, he promised more criminal charges would be forthcoming.

The city employee, Mike Glasgow, pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor and is cooperating with the investigation as other charges were dropped. The two DEQ employees, Stephen Busch and Mike Prysby, are awaiting preliminary examinations.

Full story: http://www.wltx.com/news/6-state-employe.../284182073
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Today's press conference by the prosecutor's office made it very clear that there was a major cover-up involved.

It still really pisses me off. Those charged are officials who were working for government agencies designed to protect people from health and environmental risks.

Not only did those officials fail in that charter; they were allegedly complicit in increasing and prolonging the health risks to the people of Flint.

[Duchess]

These people still don't have clean water. How do you think you all would be feeling right about now if this were happening to you? This is bullshit.

[Duchess]

Small but important step - Today Flint announced that it had replaced lead tainted pipes in 192 homes.

[cannongal]

Small but important step - Today Flint announced that it had replaced lead tainted pipes in 192 homes.

That's cool, it's a start, anyway.

[Duchess]

People in Flint are still suffering. I don't want others to forget about this bullshit.

[SIXFOOTERsez]

That place is a mess, I do not understand why anyone lives there or drinks the water at all.
I would have built a filter Long ago if I lived within a hundred miles

[HairOfTheDog]

Most the residents of Flint don’t have anywhere to go. Those are their homes and it’s a very economically impoverished city.

This never should have happened to them. It’s extremely negligent that officials didn’t ensure that water from the new source was treated with proper anti-corrosion agents. They knew the pipes were old and contained high levels of lead. They’d been warned early on. The massive cover up and lies after-the-fact just make it worse.

Some of those officials are being charged with neglect. I read yesterday that a medical professional among them may be charged with manslaughter. She ignored and then denied warnings of an outbreak of Legionnaires disease after the water was contaminated.

[SIXFOOTERsez]

Bunch of assholes

[HairOfTheDog]

The water crisis is truly one of the biggest threats to national security here in the U.S. and elsewhere, in my opinion.

People need to start looking ahead, listening to experts, conserving, and investing in solutions (desalination, leak-free reservoirs, etc...).

There's a good article running in National Geographic on the subject. Some excerpts below.

[HairOfTheDog]

Snip:

By late spring, four million people in the city of Cape Town—one of Africa's most affluent metropolises—may have to stand in line surrounded by armed guards to collect rations of the region's most precious commodity: drinking water.

Population growth and a record drought, perhaps exacerbated by climate change, is sparking one of the world's most dramatic urban water crises, as South African leaders warn that residents are increasingly likely to face "Day Zero."

That's the day, now projected for mid-April, when the city says it will be forced to shut off taps to homes and businesses because reservoirs have gotten perilously low—a possibility officials now consider almost inevitable.

"I'm afraid we're at the 11^th hour," says South African resource-management expert Anthony Turton. "There is no more time for solutions. We need an act of God. We need divine intervention." The situation seems to be worsening by the day.

The city is prepping 200 emergency water stations outside groceries and other gathering spots. Each would have to serve almost 20,000 residents. Cape Town officials are making plans to store emergency water at military installations, and say using taps to fill pools, water gardens, or wash cars is now illegal.

Just this week, authorities stepped up water-theft patrols at natural springs where fights broke out, according to local press reports. They're being asked to crack down on "unscrupulous traders" who have driven up the price of bottled water.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

Much like southern California, South Africa is arid, but Cape Town's most recognizable land mass, Table Mountain, traps onshore breezes coming off warm ocean waters, creating local rains that power rivers and fill underground aquifers. It is an oasis surrounded by desert with a Mediterranean climate.

While conservation in South Africa has been encouraged over the last 2 decades with some success in reduced wastefulness/consumption, officials also made an increasingly common mistake: They assumed future rainfall patterns would resemble the past, or at least not change too quickly.

"It's like driving a motor car and looking in the rear-view mirror," Winter says. "They solved the old problems, but they didn't recognize the risks ahead. Now here comes the juggernaut."

Already, droughts in recent years have helped spark famine and unrest in rural nations around the Arabian Sea, from Iran to Somalia. But water crises are also threatening massive cities around the world.

Already, many of the 21 million residents of Mexico City only have running water part of the day, while one in five get just a few hours from their taps a week.

Several major cities in India don't have enough.

Water managers in Melbourne, Australia, reported last summer that they could run out of water in little more than a decade.

Jakarta, Indonesia is running so dry that the city is sinking faster than seas are rising, as residents suck up groundwater from below the surface.

Full piece: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018...er-cities/

[HairOfTheDog]

Trump Administration Undoes Water Protections

This is really concerning to me.  



Water is key to life.  The world, including many U.S. locales, is already struggling with water pollution, drought, and water delivery infrastructures that still contain old lead piping.  

This new deregulation will only add to that serious problem in order to increase profits for a select few industries, in my opinion.  Capitalism without conscience.

Snip:
The Trump administration on Tuesday initiated the biggest rollback of Clean Water Act protections since shortly after the statute became law in 1972, proposing to remove federal pollution safeguards for tens of thousands of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands.

The EPA’s proposed rule would overwrite a stricter Obama-era regulation, in yet another attack on the legacy of President Donald Trump’s predecessor. But the rollback would go much further than just erasing Barack Obama's work.

Democrats on Capitol Hill warned the proposal would undo improvements in cleaning up many waterways in recent decades — and they vowed to take a microscope to it when they take control of the House next year.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

Rep. Peter DeFazio, who's expected to chair the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee told reporters he planned on holding "extensive oversight hearings and exposing how this would harm the majority of the people and interests in this country to favor a few polluting entities and a few rapacious developers."

Sen. Ben Cardin, a longtime advocate for cleaning up the streams and rivers that feed the Cheseapeake Bay, said the effects of the weakened regulation would be far reaching.  “They put politics over public health. The public has a right to expect safe drinking water," he said. "This proposed rule puts that in jeopardy. It puts our economy in jeopardy, from tourism to agriculture, the economy so much depends upon clean water.”

In the arid West, where the majority of streams flow only after rainfall or for part of the year, entire watersheds would be left unprotected from pollution. In Arizona, for instance, as much as 94 percent of its waters could lose federal protection under the new definition, depending on the how the agencies interpret key terms. Meanwhile, Arizona state law also prevents it from regulating waterways more stringently than the federal government requires.

Full story:  https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/1...ns-1022227