JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon announced during the luncheon that JP Morgan Chase will invest $100-million to help the city of Detroit with blight removal, urban development, home loans and retraining people in the work force. Obama met earlier this week with Flint Mayor Karen Weaver.
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“Michiganders need to be able to depend on state government to do what’s best for them and in the case of the DEQ that means ensuring their drinking water is safe”, Snyder said in a statement. As traffic backed up behind them, more trucks also became unable to go up the hill, backing up all vehicles and preventing emergency crews from getting heavy-duty tow trucks to the scene and road crews from being able to clear the snow, officials said. According to a source who has cropped up, “every major USA city east of the Mississippi” is distorting the levels of lead and copper in their drinking water, meaning more places than just Flint could be putting their residents at risk.
Why is Flint’s public health crisis relevant to Kansas? “If you haven’t consumed the water in 30 days, the lead can be out of your system”. For many, it echoes the lackluster federal response to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And virtually everyone agrees the governor was abysmally slow to respond.
Unequal protection is a reality. Last year, Water.org brought five years of clean water to over 290,000 women in developing countries. The cumulative environmental stresses in these neighborhoods create a toxic stew.
The federal government is chipping in $80 million to help alleviate some of the acute distress in Flint, but a long term fix – an overhaul of the pipe systems in the city – could cost between $700 million and $1 billion, if the outdated records system is even navigable enough to modify.
Flint got into trouble when the cash-strapped city tried to lower its water bills.
We still have biases toward poor people in our society.
LINDSEY SMITH, BYLINE: Lee-Ann Walters figured something was wrong with her tap water.
If you try to put industrial facilities in affluent neighborhoods, residents mobilize with lawyers and scientists, and they tell elected officials that those installations are “not a fit” for their neighborhoods.
One of your early books, “Dumping in Dixie”, described environmental racism in southern states. While boiling water might remove other contaminants, it won’t remove lead.
Environmental injustice is not unique to the South. For example, Dorceta Taylor and Paul Mohai at the University of MI have shown that African Americans and Latinos in Detroit are disproportionately impacted by polluting industries and hazards.
In another internal communication, Muchmore underscored the state’s indifference to Flint: “There folks are scared and anxious about the health impacts and they are basically getting blown off by us (as a state we’re just not sympathising with their plight)”.
Siddhartha Roy, a doctoral student in engineering at Virginia Tech who has been involved in documenting Flint’s water crisis, said economics will be a big factor in how quickly Flint replaces its pipes. “Look at all the work we’ve done in Detroit”.
While much of the blame over the crisis has been directed at Snyder and state officials, particularly the Department of Environmental Quality, some have faulted the EPA’s Region 5 office for not acting more forcefully. Susan Hedman is the federal EPA regional administrator in the Midwest.
The documents in question were obtained via FOIA by Dr. Yanna Lambrinidou, who sat on the Environment Protection Agency taskforce that recently proposed revisions on the federal rules for lead. It warns that many popular pitcher-type filters don’t meet today’s standards for lead reduction, although they may filter other contaminants.
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Even if the incidences of lead and copper are not as high as the anonymous source claims, Lambrinidou’s assertion that Flint is not an isolated case is probably right. Read the original article.
