9 ms·

Not just Flint: Poor communities across the country live with extreme polluters

115 points by privong 11y ago

fennecfoxen 11y ago
> what was particularly striking was... the highest polluting facilities were also more likely to be located in proximity to poor and minority neighborhoods. This is what's "particularly striking"? There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away. The most trivial of logic dictates that if anyone is living near extreme pollution, there's a substantial probability they're poor. Now, that said, news about this new study saying that the problem is bad that quantifies the problem, tells us why it's worse than these EJ scholars suspected, or even just a reminder that this is bad and these peoples' lives should be improved, sure, go ahead... but the above statement of shock detracts from that, I should think.
- kyllo 11y ago
  There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away Conversely, people who can afford to will use every resource at their disposal to prevent polluters from coming into their communities. NIMBYists get a lot of hate, but can you really blame them?
  - Shog9 11y ago
    You can when they block the construction of low-pollution utilities in their neighborhood at the expense of high-pollution utilities in poor communities. You can understand why they do it, but you can also (and should also) still blame them for being short-sighted and selfish.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Beijing came to mind as a counter example, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zigurd 11y ago
    It's not really a counter-example. There are regions of China with much worse pollution from heavy industry, like smelters.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      I stand corrected! I forgot that it's all relative, but within reasonable geographic limits.
      - Zigurd 11y ago
        It's a complex issue. There are no "exurbs" in China. There is no concept of clean countryside living except maybe coastal cities like Quingdao that are pleasant if not in the center of commerce. People want to live in the first tier cities. The growth of these cities was, until recently, powered by fast construction of new coal fueled power plants. The pay is higher, the public amenities are better, and, relatively, the pollution isn't as bad as living next to paper mills and aluminum smelters.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    Beijing's smog is just the tip of the iceberg. China has the same problem: https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villages https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villa... "These are entire villages where every other house contains someone dying of cancer or some sort of respiratory problem." Free trade sure is great.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Like it or not, people prefer wealth with a risk of cancer to rural poverty. If they didn't, they would remain in their remote rural villages instead of flocking into the highly polluted factory areas. Delhi is another example of this (it's 3x worse than Beijing right now). I hate the place; this month it was so polluted that I couldn't see across my office complex. But if you use violence to force the Biharis to stay home (i.e., give up free trade) you'll have a riot on your hands. Yeah, free trade is in fact better than dire poverty, which is the alternative.
ams6110 11y ago
The problem in Flint is not that the river is polluted it is that the pH of the river water is causing lead from old pipes and fittings to leach into the water. It's not really a good example of the general subject of the story.
- partiallypro 11y ago
  I too was confused why they tried to tie the two events together. The lead pipes had formed a coating (and this is true in other locations too) that made them nontoxic but when they were flushed with acidic water (as the water treatment plant did) they shed that lining and it began washing through the lead and putting it into the lines. The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels, but pH variation is common without pollution, so blaming this on pollution is a bit nonsensical. When it comes to the article, it makes sense that pollution would be in poorer areas. Pollution lowers property value, which allows poorer individuals to live there. Or the area could have already been poor and they are unable to afford to leave. I'm not sure who is to blame for the Flint crisis tbh, there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and politicizing. I have yet to find a source that wasn't biased one way or the other, which is sad. People just want answers and for it to be fixed.
  - rickdale 11y ago
    The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels Actually one of the talking points is that no one will talk about lead levels before they switched the water from Detroit to Flint river. But its not as bad as it is now obviously. . . Does building this 'coat' back up work? How long does that take?
    - partiallypro 11y ago
      I'm no expert, but I assume it takes long enough to where they are just going to have to replace all the lead pipes and fittings. That talking point you mention could be true, or it could be a way for the state level government to dish it back to the local government. Who knows. To me it seems like the municipality screwed this up more than the state, but like I said it's virtually impossible to find an unbiased news source with the whole story; they both no doubt have a role. Even this very story is politically driven, it could be misleading in its urgency to drive clicks/narrative. Happens all the time with various things in the news (like the claim of x drug use among teens, etc.) Hopefully there is a non-partisan investigation from the Federal level on the Flint fiasco.
littletimmy 11y ago
As a non-american, this is so strange. Doesn't the US have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live? That seems to me like a very fundamental responsibility of the state.
- hanniabu 11y ago
  There are pollution laws, but unfortunately companies receive only relatively minimal fines. So depending on the substance and quantity 'accidentally' leaked, it may actually be a cost saving for the company. And granted, in sure a lot of pollution actually is accidental, but even there the reasons are likely due to the company cutting costs which led to an accident. For instance, let's say there's a bake that had a high likelihood of soon failing. When you take into consideration the cost of a replacement valve, service to replace it, and down time of processes that depend on this valve and compare it to the amount you'd get fined for a spill if the valve fails, many companies will take the risk of the valve failing because the fines just aren't high enough. The other thing is that there's almost never any jail time for those that were involved in the decision making process to take that risk. Case in point, BP oil spill, nobody has served jail time even though there were numerous reports that people were aware of the risks of continuing to operate without replacing the valve that failed.
  - mc32 11y ago
    Also sometimes very poor counties, think Alabama, Kentucky, Wa Va, will attract companies who need to dispose of pollutants but at a price, in order to extract revenue for an otherwise unproductive, resource-poor county. That's to say, they provide landfill space at a relatively low price. It's unfortunate, but it happens.[1] [1]http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-toxic-sludge-areas-filled-poor-people http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-to...
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  The fines are low. The regulations are not well enforced. The organizations that are supposed to enforce the regulations keep having their funding cut. And certain political groups are trying to strip the regulations and the funding further.
jecjec 11y ago
Can I please stop seeing shit about poor people on Hacker News? I really do not care.
xufi 11y ago
Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use
xufi 11y ago
Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use
sandworm101 11y ago
But is Flint a pollution problem? From what I've been reading the real failure in Flint was that they are still using lead pipes. It was a series of decisions that sent corrosive water down old pipes, water that may have been safe in non-lead pipes. That seems more a management and/or infrastructure problem: Bad, but without the monty burns villain dumping stuff into lakes. So I'm not sure there is a direct comparison to be made between Flint and something like love canal.
ojii 11y ago
Don't worry, the free market will solve it. Keep cutting taxes and remove regulations.
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Actually, the failure of a government monopoly left all of these people without a viable alternative. The Flint water crisis was a failure of government, not the free market. It's actually what happens when the government argues that basic necessities are so important, the government needs to handle the provision of them to guarantee everyone has access, until they can't handle it anymore.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    Water provision is a natural monopoly. If you hand over natural monopolies to the private sector they raise prices and cut costs as much as the regulators will allow them to and pocket the difference as profit. State monopolies are often intentionally neglected or damaged by bought out politicians as a way to make privatization and the subsequent profit extraction more palatable to a suspicious public. That's also where all this "free markets sure are great" propaganda comes from. This is a similar process to what Russia went through in the 90s. They were encouraged to embrace the free market by Harvard "economists" (free market priests) like Larry Summers. They were told that this process would lead to a new age of prosperity for Russia. It didn't. The net result was to haemorrhage their economy and enabled the oligarchs to walk off with billions of dollars in state assets at knock down prices.
    - bsbechtel 11y ago
      Actually, it's not. The idea of a natural monopoly is something that was made up to justify state takeovers of certain key services. If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country, because it wouldn't be cost effective to do so. In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators. The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market (which thank goodness we do to provide to the citizens of Flint right now). Using Russia as an example of free market failures is like using Communist China as an example of what the free market will do to wages if we don't implement a minimum wage here in the States.
tn13 11y ago
I am in Sunnyvale and my tap water is testing positive for pesticides.

115 points by privong 11y ago

> what was particularly striking was... the highest polluting facilities were also more likely to be located in proximity to poor and minority neighborhoods. This is what's "particularly striking"? There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away. The most trivial of logic dictates that if anyone is living near extreme pollution, there's a substantial probability they're poor. Now, that said, news about this new study saying that the problem is bad that quantifies the problem, tells us why it's worse than these EJ scholars suspected, or even just a reminder that this is bad and these peoples' lives should be improved, sure, go ahead... but the above statement of shock detracts from that, I should think.

kyllo 11y ago
There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away Conversely, people who can afford to will use every resource at their disposal to prevent polluters from coming into their communities. NIMBYists get a lot of hate, but can you really blame them?
- Shog9 11y ago
  You can when they block the construction of low-pollution utilities in their neighborhood at the expense of high-pollution utilities in poor communities. You can understand why they do it, but you can also (and should also) still blame them for being short-sighted and selfish.
hkmurakami 11y ago
Beijing came to mind as a counter example, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Zigurd 11y ago
  It's not really a counter-example. There are regions of China with much worse pollution from heavy industry, like smelters.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    I stand corrected! I forgot that it's all relative, but within reasonable geographic limits.
    - Zigurd 11y ago
      It's a complex issue. There are no "exurbs" in China. There is no concept of clean countryside living except maybe coastal cities like Quingdao that are pleasant if not in the center of commerce. People want to live in the first tier cities. The growth of these cities was, until recently, powered by fast construction of new coal fueled power plants. The pay is higher, the public amenities are better, and, relatively, the pollution isn't as bad as living next to paper mills and aluminum smelters.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  Beijing's smog is just the tip of the iceberg. China has the same problem: https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villages https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villa... "These are entire villages where every other house contains someone dying of cancer or some sort of respiratory problem." Free trade sure is great.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Like it or not, people prefer wealth with a risk of cancer to rural poverty. If they didn't, they would remain in their remote rural villages instead of flocking into the highly polluted factory areas. Delhi is another example of this (it's 3x worse than Beijing right now). I hate the place; this month it was so polluted that I couldn't see across my office complex. But if you use violence to force the Biharis to stay home (i.e., give up free trade) you'll have a riot on your hands. Yeah, free trade is in fact better than dire poverty, which is the alternative.

ams6110 11y ago

The problem in Flint is not that the river is polluted it is that the pH of the river water is causing lead from old pipes and fittings to leach into the water. It's not really a good example of the general subject of the story.

partiallypro 11y ago
I too was confused why they tried to tie the two events together. The lead pipes had formed a coating (and this is true in other locations too) that made them nontoxic but when they were flushed with acidic water (as the water treatment plant did) they shed that lining and it began washing through the lead and putting it into the lines. The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels, but pH variation is common without pollution, so blaming this on pollution is a bit nonsensical. When it comes to the article, it makes sense that pollution would be in poorer areas. Pollution lowers property value, which allows poorer individuals to live there. Or the area could have already been poor and they are unable to afford to leave. I'm not sure who is to blame for the Flint crisis tbh, there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and politicizing. I have yet to find a source that wasn't biased one way or the other, which is sad. People just want answers and for it to be fixed.
- rickdale 11y ago
  The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels Actually one of the talking points is that no one will talk about lead levels before they switched the water from Detroit to Flint river. But its not as bad as it is now obviously. . . Does building this 'coat' back up work? How long does that take?
  - partiallypro 11y ago
    I'm no expert, but I assume it takes long enough to where they are just going to have to replace all the lead pipes and fittings. That talking point you mention could be true, or it could be a way for the state level government to dish it back to the local government. Who knows. To me it seems like the municipality screwed this up more than the state, but like I said it's virtually impossible to find an unbiased news source with the whole story; they both no doubt have a role. Even this very story is politically driven, it could be misleading in its urgency to drive clicks/narrative. Happens all the time with various things in the news (like the claim of x drug use among teens, etc.) Hopefully there is a non-partisan investigation from the Federal level on the Flint fiasco.

littletimmy 11y ago

As a non-american, this is so strange. Doesn't the US have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live? That seems to me like a very fundamental responsibility of the state.

hanniabu 11y ago
There are pollution laws, but unfortunately companies receive only relatively minimal fines. So depending on the substance and quantity 'accidentally' leaked, it may actually be a cost saving for the company. And granted, in sure a lot of pollution actually is accidental, but even there the reasons are likely due to the company cutting costs which led to an accident. For instance, let's say there's a bake that had a high likelihood of soon failing. When you take into consideration the cost of a replacement valve, service to replace it, and down time of processes that depend on this valve and compare it to the amount you'd get fined for a spill if the valve fails, many companies will take the risk of the valve failing because the fines just aren't high enough. The other thing is that there's almost never any jail time for those that were involved in the decision making process to take that risk. Case in point, BP oil spill, nobody has served jail time even though there were numerous reports that people were aware of the risks of continuing to operate without replacing the valve that failed.
- mc32 11y ago
  Also sometimes very poor counties, think Alabama, Kentucky, Wa Va, will attract companies who need to dispose of pollutants but at a price, in order to extract revenue for an otherwise unproductive, resource-poor county. That's to say, they provide landfill space at a relatively low price. It's unfortunate, but it happens.[1] [1]http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-toxic-sludge-areas-filled-poor-people http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-to...
JohnTHaller 11y ago
The fines are low. The regulations are not well enforced. The organizations that are supposed to enforce the regulations keep having their funding cut. And certain political groups are trying to strip the regulations and the funding further.

jecjec 11y ago

Can I please stop seeing shit about poor people on Hacker News? I really do not care.

xufi 11y ago

Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use

xufi 11y ago

Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use

sandworm101 11y ago

But is Flint a pollution problem? From what I've been reading the real failure in Flint was that they are still using lead pipes. It was a series of decisions that sent corrosive water down old pipes, water that may have been safe in non-lead pipes. That seems more a management and/or infrastructure problem: Bad, but without the monty burns villain dumping stuff into lakes. So I'm not sure there is a direct comparison to be made between Flint and something like love canal.

ojii 11y ago

Don't worry, the free market will solve it. Keep cutting taxes and remove regulations.

bsbechtel 11y ago
Actually, the failure of a government monopoly left all of these people without a viable alternative. The Flint water crisis was a failure of government, not the free market. It's actually what happens when the government argues that basic necessities are so important, the government needs to handle the provision of them to guarantee everyone has access, until they can't handle it anymore.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  Water provision is a natural monopoly. If you hand over natural monopolies to the private sector they raise prices and cut costs as much as the regulators will allow them to and pocket the difference as profit. State monopolies are often intentionally neglected or damaged by bought out politicians as a way to make privatization and the subsequent profit extraction more palatable to a suspicious public. That's also where all this "free markets sure are great" propaganda comes from. This is a similar process to what Russia went through in the 90s. They were encouraged to embrace the free market by Harvard "economists" (free market priests) like Larry Summers. They were told that this process would lead to a new age of prosperity for Russia. It didn't. The net result was to haemorrhage their economy and enabled the oligarchs to walk off with billions of dollars in state assets at knock down prices.
  - bsbechtel 11y ago
    Actually, it's not. The idea of a natural monopoly is something that was made up to justify state takeovers of certain key services. If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country, because it wouldn't be cost effective to do so. In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators. The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market (which thank goodness we do to provide to the citizens of Flint right now). Using Russia as an example of free market failures is like using Communist China as an example of what the free market will do to wages if we don't implement a minimum wage here in the States.

tn13 11y ago

I am in Sunnyvale and my tap water is testing positive for pesticides.