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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the chemistry-meets-neoliberalism dept.

Democracy Now! reports [democracynow.org]

In Flint, Michigan, a growing number of residents are demanding the arrest of Governor Rick Snyder over the ongoing water contamination crisis. Snyder declared a state of emergency for Flint [January 6], after learning federal prosecutors had opened an investigation into lead contamination in the drinking water. The poisoning began after an unelected emergency manager appointed by Governor Snyder switched the city's water source to the long-polluted Flint River in a bid to save money.

Lead can cause permanent health impacts including memory loss and developmental impairment. Researchers at Virginia Tech who have been testing Flint water say the city could have corrected the problem by better treating the water at a cost of as little as $100 a day. On [January 7], the mayor of Flint revealed it could now cost as much as $1.5 billion to fix the city's water infrastructure.

[...]Flint residents are now scrambling to find sources of safe water as fears of lead poisoning grow. Forty percent of Flint lives in poverty. Students at the nearby Davison Community Schools just posted a documentary [youtube.com] online called Undrinkable, looking at how the Flint water crisis grew.[...]

Less than three weeks after Flint's water was declared safe and in compliance with the Safe Water Act, [...] the water found in some homes was three times the federal limit of lead within water. Aged lead pipes and lead soldering found in pipes are common throughout the city, not only in city lines, but also in people's homes, and has been for years. But why is the lead a problem now? It's the corrosive Flint River that released the lead into the water.

[...]People knew from the beginning, as soon as the switch was made in April of '14, that the water was bad. It looked bad. It tasted bad. It smelled bad. And there was all sorts of problems throughout 2014. In 2015, one of the residents, LeeAnne Walters, had her water tested by the city, and the lead levels came back at over 100 parts per billion. Of course, there's no safe levels of lead whatsoever. The federal action level is 15 parts per billion. So it was about seven times what the federal action level was. She had it tested a second time, and it came back almost 400 parts per billion.

[...]Anybody with even a rudimentary understanding of chemistry could have looked at the situation and predicted what would happen. [...] Did they take a serious look at what was going on with that river before they decided to make the switch? And it's either they didn't do that, which I would think is gross negligence, or they did do it and ignored whatever they found.

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