12 ms·

America Is Flint

258 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

e40 11y ago
Chelation: I've heard it is expensive and has serious side effects. How do the people who are affected by the lead, given there are so many, get well?
- HillRat 11y ago
  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.
- leonroy 11y ago
  Seems there are foods which can chelate heavy metals such as dark leafy greens, chlorella, coriander. More info here: http://www.livestrong.com/article/203988-foods-for-chelation/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/203988-foods-for-chelation... 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.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Chelation therapy is a common alternative medicine therapy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy#Use_in_alternative_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy#Use_in_alter... . 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 http://acb.sagepub.com/content/41/3/233 ).
- Spooky23 11y ago
  They don't. They suffer learning and behavioral deficits for life.
sz4kerto 11y ago
Minor point: "In Baltimore, a two-year-old boy named Malachi can’t speak, apparently because of lead poisoning." Many two year old children don't speak, and later become completely normal. (I started speaking around the age of 3.)
- bluejekyll 11y ago
  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.
  - blablablame 11y ago
    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).
- sathackr 11y ago
  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.
srameshc 11y ago
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.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Don't follow guesswork, be scientific - there are tests for water quality you can apply at your tap.
  - srameshc 11y ago
    If you could explain your statement, that would be helpful.
    - pmorici 11y ago
      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.
    - post_break 11y ago
      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.
    - cjslep 11y ago
      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]. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Sensafe-480309-SenSafe-Heavy-Metals/dp/B002AGZXYA http://www.amazon.com/Sensafe-480309-SenSafe-Heavy-Metals/dp... [1] https://www.calwater.com/waterquality/water-quality-testing-labs/ https://www.calwater.com/waterquality/water-quality-testing-...
nashashmi 11y ago
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.
ghshephard 11y ago
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.
- biot 11y ago
  As the article states: “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.
- ascorbic 11y ago
  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.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  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.
- morgante 11y ago
  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).
  - Manishearth 11y ago
    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.)
grandalf 11y ago
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.
- craigyk 11y ago
  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?
  - eatonphil 11y ago
    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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundang-gu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundang-gu
ck2 11y ago
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.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  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.
- DrScump 11y ago
  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.
clumsysmurf 11y ago
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..." http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/22/water-lead-content-tests-us-authorities-distorting-flint-crisis http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/22/water-lea...
- themartorana 11y ago
  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. I'm so very unsurprised and so very jaded.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    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.
shams93 11y ago
It would be interesting to see if the TPP hooks up the lead industry to force more exposure it would seem the lead industry could st
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mrweasel 11y ago
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.
cavisne 11y ago
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.
- yeahOkay 11y ago
  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. Thanks for the help here, guy.
pnathan 11y ago
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.
- e40 11y ago
  And if there is no clear way to test our water, then finding filters that remove lead would be the next best thing.
- JumpCrisscross 11y ago
  > how do I test my own water? If you live in New York City, you can request a free water lead test kit http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/water-lead-test-kit-request http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/water-lead-te.... Your own city may have a similar program. Call City Hall and ask.
rdl 11y ago
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?
jegoodwin3 11y ago
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." Here it is for convenience: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6213a3.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6213a3.htm (2013) 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.

258 points by pavornyoh 11y ago

e40 11y ago

Chelation: I've heard it is expensive and has serious side effects. How do the people who are affected by the lead, given there are so many, get well?

HillRat 11y ago
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.
leonroy 11y ago
Seems there are foods which can chelate heavy metals such as dark leafy greens, chlorella, coriander. More info here: http://www.livestrong.com/article/203988-foods-for-chelation/ http://www.livestrong.com/article/203988-foods-for-chelation... 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.
- dalke 11y ago
  Chelation therapy is a common alternative medicine therapy. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy#Use_in_alternative_medicine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation_therapy#Use_in_alter... . 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 http://acb.sagepub.com/content/41/3/233 ).
Spooky23 11y ago
They don't. They suffer learning and behavioral deficits for life.

sz4kerto 11y ago

Minor point: "In Baltimore, a two-year-old boy named Malachi can’t speak, apparently because of lead poisoning." Many two year old children don't speak, and later become completely normal. (I started speaking around the age of 3.)

bluejekyll 11y ago
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.
- blablablame 11y ago
  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).
sathackr 11y ago
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.

srameshc 11y ago

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.

Pxtl 11y ago
Don't follow guesswork, be scientific - there are tests for water quality you can apply at your tap.
- srameshc 11y ago
  If you could explain your statement, that would be helpful.
  - pmorici 11y ago
    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.
  - post_break 11y ago
    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.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    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]. [0] http://www.amazon.com/Sensafe-480309-SenSafe-Heavy-Metals/dp/B002AGZXYA http://www.amazon.com/Sensafe-480309-SenSafe-Heavy-Metals/dp... [1] https://www.calwater.com/waterquality/water-quality-testing-labs/ https://www.calwater.com/waterquality/water-quality-testing-...

nashashmi 11y ago

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.

ghshephard 11y ago

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.

biot 11y ago
As the article states: “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.
ascorbic 11y ago
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.
merpnderp 11y ago
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.
morgante 11y ago
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).
- Manishearth 11y ago
  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.)

grandalf 11y ago

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.

craigyk 11y ago
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?
- eatonphil 11y ago
  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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundang-gu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundang-gu

ck2 11y ago

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.

Shivetya 11y ago
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.
DrScump 11y ago
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.

clumsysmurf 11y ago

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..." http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/22/water-lead-content-tests-us-authorities-distorting-flint-crisis http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/22/water-lea...

themartorana 11y ago
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. I'm so very unsurprised and so very jaded.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  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.

shams93 11y ago

It would be interesting to see if the TPP hooks up the lead industry to force more exposure it would seem the lead industry could st

deleted 11y ago

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mrweasel 11y ago

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.

cavisne 11y ago

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.

yeahOkay 11y ago
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. Thanks for the help here, guy.

pnathan 11y ago

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.

e40 11y ago
And if there is no clear way to test our water, then finding filters that remove lead would be the next best thing.
JumpCrisscross 11y ago
> how do I test my own water? If you live in New York City, you can request a free water lead test kit http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/water-lead-test-kit-request http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/service/1266/water-lead-te.... Your own city may have a similar program. Call City Hall and ask.

rdl 11y ago

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?

jegoodwin3 11y ago

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." Here it is for convenience: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6213a3.htm http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6213a3.htm (2013) 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.