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Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

nytimes.com

131–140 of 146 posts

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#131
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be broken. Every city I enter gives me no results.

Not every city makes their reports available. Might need a FOIA request to get it.

The safe drinking water act requires water supplies to not only create reports but also distribute them to their customers. My water company mails them out, thats probably par for the course. Putting them online might be optional, but they have to distribute them to their customers.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoover was a pretty amazing man and a pretty miserable president. A mining engineer who made his pile working in China. He claimed he was literally first Stanford University student (he showed up days early when the college first opened and he stayed in the dorms by himself.) He and his wife (who was also a geologist) were fluent in Chinese and would speak in it if they wanted privacy. He became known for internation…

He was also chosen to tour and report on post-Second World War Germany due to his experience from similar humanitarian missions he undertook in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Does anyone think that it's possible that there will be another career engineer as POTUS? I've heard that there remains a sort of stigma to such a thing, perhaps in part due to the Hoover administration.

I don't know why there would be a stigma on engineers and not not college professors. Wilson was a far worse president than Hoover.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#133
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's hard to imagine why the U.S. ever had a single lead water pipe, let alone huge numbers of them. I always supposed that that's where the word 'plumber' came from, or 'loodgieter' (lead caster, Dutch). Both words strongly refer to lead. Growing up in Holland in the early 80's our house had lead pipes. When I bought my first house in 2003 it too still had a lead water main. I drank a lot of that water, tap water o…

Whether or not the lead gets dissolved in the water depends on the water itself. If you have hard water lead pipes are low risk.

Yes. Lead pipes in Flint weren't a problem until the city switched from Detroit municipal water to the corrosive Flint river water.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% avoidable, yes. Motivated by greed? No, by indifference. No decision-maker here made a decision about the water supply in order to make money off of it.

If it was not to make money, then it was to save money due to increasing budget constraints. Allowing the poisoning of the water supply due to budget constraints is some third world shit.

They didn't realize what would happen. The Flint River water is safe to drink - it only becomes unsafe when you run it through lead pipes.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#135
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you think they are nuts? Hormone disrupters in certain plastics and can liners are a real problem, backed by science.

A close friend was an entrepreneur and evangelist in this space. I looked into it around 2008 and could not justify a significant level of concern relative to other risks. (Although "nuts" may be too strong...should say, "excessively worried".) If you know otherwise, please post a link.

Bisphenol-A (recently banned for some uses, removed from most drinking bottles):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A

Read the intro, "Health Effects" section, and sources.

Bisphenol-S (still in use):

http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/bisphenol-s-d...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/01/150112154606.ht...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_S

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was not to make money, then it was to save money due to increasing budget constraints. Allowing the poisoning of the water supply due to budget constraints is some third world shit.

They didn't realize what would happen. The Flint River water is safe to drink - it only becomes unsafe when you run it through lead pipes.

Then why did they choose to use lead pipes?

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't realize what would happen. The Flint River water is safe to drink - it only becomes unsafe when you run it through lead pipes.

Then why did they choose to use lead pipes?

Because it's cheap, easy to work with, and tends to deform under stress instead of breaking.

These were old pipes - they pre-date this problem by decades.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% avoidable, yes. Motivated by greed? No, by indifference. No decision-maker here made a decision about the water supply in order to make money off of it.

What? Money was literally the reason: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/what-did... > To save money, the city began drawing its water from the Flint River, rather than from Detroit’s system, which was deemed too costly. But the river’s water was high in salt, which helped corrode Flint’s aging pipes, leaching lead into the water supply.

Money being the reason and greed being the reason are two different things. The $5 million in question would have never benefited the decision-makers who elected to make the switchover to river water. They were attempting to be thrifty with money that belonged to the city, which is just doing their jobs (badly).

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was also chosen to tour and report on post-Second World War Germany due to his experience from similar humanitarian missions he undertook in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Does anyone think that it's possible that there will be another career engineer as POTUS? I've heard that there remains a sort of stigma to such a thing, perhaps in part due to the Hoover administration.

I don't know why there would be a stigma on engineers and not not college professors. Wilson was a far worse president than Hoover.

Eisenhower was the President of Columbia University. Clinton and Obama both taught in Law Schools.

I think there's a better batting average for college professors than engineers.

Re: Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

#140
post #4

Nassim Taleb taught me that the absence of known danger is not the same as safety. Repeat that to yourself the next time you read your cities water report. It's not "I know my water is safe" it's "I know I don't face these specific dangers. What else could be in the water that they don't test for?" Look into reverse osmosis.

Look at how the plastics industry handled the scientific evidence that Bisphenol-A affects development. They switched to closely related chemicals with less data available, Bisphenol-B, Bisphenol-S. Unsurprisingly, studies are now finding that exposure to these chemicals has similar effects.

I suppose we'll ban those now too, and we can see we can test some other plasticizer out on a few billion people.

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