And in 15-20 years when there's a huge crime wave there I'm sure some brave pundits will tell us how it's all due to the horrible culture of those wicked minorities.
Elsewhere on the Internet, I saw people immediately blaming the city of Flint, even though the switch to Flint River water happened under the state-mandated emergency city manager and the poisoning of Flint's children was ineptly and briefly covered up by the state environmental regulators. I hate a) the Snyder administration b) humanity.
There seems to be a bit of a fashion for city governments declaring emergencies - they're doing that with homelessness over here, I think maybe to waive some rules about shelters.
Were they just drinking untreated river water?
You would think they would run it through a Brita or something.
According to Wiki, it was treated, but it wasn't treated correctly: "Tests showed that water leaving Flint's treatment plant was lead free, but by the time it reached the tap, it sometimes has elevated levels of lead, because the Flint river water was more corrosive to lead pipes than the previously used Lake Huron water."
Were they just drinking untreated river water?
The river water was more acidic than the water they'd been getting from the Detroit Water Authority, which destroyed the coating on the inside of the (lead) pipes that prevented metals from leaching into the water. The state Department of Environmental Quality told the Feds that this was fine, because Flint was treating the water to make it less acidic, because those kids in Flint probably won't grow up to be Republican voters. (The EPA was also apparently slow to move in taking over regulatory power from the child-poisoning MDEQ; perhaps they should have called themselves emergency managers.)
http://michiganradio.org/post/flint-ending-detroit-water-contract-dwsd-looking-its-options#stream/0
"In terms of a mistake, what I would say is, is there are probably things that were not as fully understood as when that switch was made," Snyder said.
Nicely done, but "mistakes were made" would have gotten a full 10 on style points.
That's at least slightly better than I was thinking.
Fortunately the EPA just had a bullshit scandal around clean water policy advocacy, so the Republicans are sure to cut EPA funding and protect us from the tyranny of federal water quality regulations.
How bullshitty was that scandal? I assume the ultimate responsibility was with the company that stored the waste, but was there no carelessness on the part of the EPA? (Not that I disagree with your point, obvs.)
One of the advantages of devolving power to local and state officials is that we get delightful natural experiments like this. Future economists will have plenty of data once they've sifted through the rubble.
13- No, not the thing about the mine waste, just some policy advocacy thing the GAO flagged as violating federal law on "covert" propaganda, with the NYT headline "E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds." The NYT is fluffing it because the GAO investigation was opened as a result of an earlier NYT article.
What did they actually do?
1. Used Thunderclap to simultaneously send out a message, labeled as coming from the EPA, to people who agreed to receive the message. When those people then forwarded the message or posted it to social media, the new recipients didn't know it originated with the EPA, making it "covert";
2. EPA blogger is a surfer, links to a surfing site blog post about effect of pollution, that post links to a site with a "take action, contact Congress" link which makes the original EPA post "advocacy."
Shorter GAO: Hyperlinks & email, how the fuck do they work?
Of course Inhofe's response to these severe violations is in his typical measured language:
But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.'s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week's showdown.
"G.A.O.'s finding confirms what I have long suspected, that E.P.A. will go to extreme lengths and even violate the law to promote its activist environmental agenda," Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is pressing to block the rule, said in a statement Monday. He decried "E.P.A.'s illegal attempts to manufacture public support for its Waters of the United States rule and sway congressional opinion."
The latest scandal is about supposed lobbying for the new regs. EPA says it was merely getting the word out about the Notice of Proposed Regulation and the comment period.
Oh, that thing. Fuck the NYT for inserting that into my brain cells.
Ugh. [redacted]. What a shitstorm.