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Apparently it's bad? Like, maybe poisonous? and the governor or mayor or some government person said that it's fine? I dunno, but it seems like a big deal. What's up with Flint, and the water there, and the government response to the water?
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 01:39 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 09:12 |
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OK, somebody linked to this article http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/16/flints-water-crisis-what-went-wrong and I think the basic deal is Flint was on Detroit water, told Detroit they were gonna switch over to a new system, Detroit said "gently caress you, pay us more for the water you're getting until the switchover happens" and the Flint government decided to use the poison river water in the interum instead, and hope nobody noticed before they switched to the new water system
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 01:48 |
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How the gently caress does something like that even happen? The federal government needs to go in and kick some rear end. People should be getting jail time over this.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 01:58 |
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boom boom boom posted:OK, somebody linked to this article It's a bit more complicated and hosed up than that. The Detroit Free Press has written about it quite a bit. http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/01/16/president-obama-declares-emergency-flint/78898604/ quote:In what's become a huge government scandal, garnering headlines across the country and around the world, Flint's drinking water became contaminated with lead after the city temporarily switched its supply source in 2014 from Lake Huron water treated by the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to more corrosive and polluted Flint River water, treated at the Flint water treatment plant. Basically, our Governor appointed an Emergency Manager to run the city because it was in bad financial straits. The appointed EM, Darnell Earley, went about slashing and cutting costs to try and resolve the financial situation. Not that he wants to admit that now, of course. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/14/in-flint-bad-tap-water-runs-politically-deep/ quote:Snyder used a state law to appoint an emergency manager, a process that began in 2011. And along with the emergency manager came a board to whom the manager could appeal to override decisions made by Flint's non-partisan, elected city council. In short, Flint has spent years under emergency manager control, a person whose primary charge appears to have been cutting costs.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 02:03 |
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Ddraig posted:How the gently caress does something like that even happen? flint's EM wanted to switch to a different water authority so they could stop paying detroit for water, and save money. unfortunately this other system isn't built yet, so they switched temporarily to the backup water supply, the flint river. turns out the flint river has a ton of chlorides in it, possibly because of road salt and other runoff sources. chlorides are not bad for the environment, in fact chlorides are an essential nutrient, so it's either not tested for or the chloride levels, while high, are not dangerous. chlorides corrode the hell out of lead pipes though, and lead of course is extremely dangerous. there's also other nasty poo poo in the water as well shortly after the switch people complain that the water is nasty. now you can't just switch back over to another water source easily, these things require lots of money and long contracts and detroit is kind of pissed now because detroit has its own infrastructure problems and flint choosing to stop buying water sucked for detroit. probably the EM and other officials were just hoping the problem wasn't that bad or would go away, and were kicking the can trying to wait three years until the new water system is finished because a bunch of complaints from citizens isn't worth the monetary cost of switching back to detroit water. except it turns out the water was way worse than the city thought, to the point of being harmful to human life, so yeah. they were hoping the problem would just go away and it blew up in their faces, and if there was a coverup instead of just plain old incompetence then someone is going to jail
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 02:16 |
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Ddraig posted:How the gently caress does something like that even happen? Republicans*. Move as much public money to private interests and gently caress over people too poor to matter in politics. * On second thought, it really is just "fiscal conservatives" playbook
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 02:22 |
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Ddraig posted:How the gently caress does something like that even happen? Michigan's governor has the ability to appoint municipal dictators if a municipality is declared in "financial emergency," and this was the municipal dictator's idea.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 02:23 |
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hallebarrysoetoro posted:Republicans*. Move as much public money to private interests and gently caress over people too poor to matter in politics. While the austerity measures implemented by the EM are the direct cause, this is a problem of government corruption and incompetence at every level—check out flintwaterstudy.org/. Essentially, once the decision was made to switch, successive levels of bureaucrats not only failed to verify that the switch would be safe, but actively suppressed all information to the contrary until the truth broke into the national news media:
If you live in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, or Wisconsin, call your representatives at every level and demand they publicly call for the removal of EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 03:26 |
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It's worth noting that, while lead is the headlining issue, the water change-over very possibly increased the number of cases of Legionnaires' Disease by more than four times and led to 10 deaths.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 04:33 |
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When people ask me why the gently caress I moved to Kansas it's because I used to live in Flint This is all continuing fallout from GMs decision to abandon the town back in the 70s and 80s, the resulting collapse of the tax base and the slow decay of the infrastructure in the city. The city has had emergency managers off and on since 2002 and efforts to spin the city into a college town have largely failed for a lack of investment.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 14:06 |
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BlackIronHeart posted:It's a bit more complicated and hosed up than that. The Detroit Free Press has written about it quite a bit. I feel like it has to be pointed out that, in the WP article here, Darnell Earley is apparently now the Emergency Manager of Detroit Public Schools, which are also in the news as of late because teachers have staged multiple sickouts over the last few months due to the absolutely atrocious conditions of the buildings they work in. In short, this dude is, at best, tremendously terrible at his job, and at worse, a horribly corrupt shithead who loves to make life harder for children.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 15:50 |
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Cugel the Clever posted:While the austerity measures implemented by the EM are the direct cause, this is a problem of government corruption and incompetence at every level—check out flintwaterstudy.org/. Huh, this is the first I'm hearing about this being a semi-bipartisan affair, is there any reason why the EPA director played ball? Yoshifan823 posted:I feel like it has to be pointed out that, in the WP article here, Darnell Earley is apparently now the Emergency Manager of Detroit Public Schools, which are also in the news as of late because teachers have staged multiple sickouts over the last few months due to the absolutely atrocious conditions of the buildings they work in. Well one issue is that the money simply isn't there; they are trying to get cash from the state but other districts have little interest in more bailouts and everyone is also trying to find hundreds of millions of dollars for the crumbling roads at the same time. The sad fact of the matter is that Detroit is just starting to recover from decades of decline and it will still be some time before there's a solid tax base to solve these problems with. Incompenent or corrupt officials are part of the blame (and unforuntatly there's lots on both sides when it comes to that) but the real issue is that: rscott posted:This is all continuing fallout from GMs decision to abandon the town back in the 70s and 80s, the resulting collapse of the tax base and the slow decay of the infrastructure in the city. The city has had emergency managers off and on since 2002 and efforts to spin the city into a college town have largely failed for a lack of investment. And a similar story played out across the state and in Detroit.
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 16:57 |
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Popular Thug Drink posted:flint's EM wanted to switch to a different water authority so they could stop paying detroit for water, and save money. technically this was the Flint city council they voted to make to form a new water authority and switch over before Snyder was even elected the EM made the swap over about a year earlier than was originally planned and before the rest of the water infrastructure was finished
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# ? Jan 17, 2016 23:07 |
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Ddraig posted:How the gently caress does something like that even happen? Republican governor and state congress. gently caress my state.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 03:22 |
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Everyone was hoping for bi-partisan cooperation but not like this.
Nckdictator fucked around with this message at 04:09 on Jan 18, 2016 |
# ? Jan 18, 2016 03:56 |
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Here's a little tidbit on how Michigan's Emergency Manager law works:quote:CURT GUYETTE: Well, one of the things about the emergency manager law is that these managers were given extreme unchecked authority. And the thinking was, the reason for doing that is they were given the ability to come in, clean up the problems and get out. And so there was an 18-month time limit put on their terms. Except that this governor is exploiting what amounts to a loophole in that law. So what happens is that these emergency managers serve for 17 months and 29 days, and the day before their term expires, they resign. A new emergency manager is put in place, and the clock starts ticking all over again. And they just shuffle them from one place to another. So Earley goes from Flint to run DPS. And it just perpetuates this control. It can go on, really, forever, if they want it to, denying people of their democratically elected representation, because the school board, which has been fighting emergency management every step of the way, gets completely marginalized. They have zero authority whatsoever. And that goes to the heart of the problem of this law. It eliminates the democratic checks and balances that make a democracy functional. Emphasis mine. What a blatant denial of democracy to poor people.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 04:53 |
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Have I walked into the China thread by mistake?
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 05:32 |
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Tigey posted:Have I walked into the China thread by mistake? No, this is the thread about Flint, Michigan's water situation.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 05:34 |
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ayn rand hand job posted:technically this was the Flint city council The fact that they moved off of Detroits water before the pipeline to Lake Huron was done is what had caused this crisis to begin with
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 05:36 |
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rscott posted:The fact that they moved off of Detroits water before the pipeline to Lake Huron was done is what had caused this crisis to begin with which isn't on its face a bad idea, they just utterly failed to do their homework re the flint river water quality
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 05:55 |
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Popular Thug Drink posted:which isn't on its face a bad idea, they just utterly failed to do their homework re the flint river water quality It wasn't even so much that they didn't do their homework. All the testing was there, and was either suppressed or ignored. Barring all of that, if they had treated the water properly, there wouldn't have been a problem at all. But they aren't treating it properly, and the compounds that are leeching the lead (and iron, and other stuff) out of the ancient rear end pipes in Flint aren't being removed like they should be. The water in the Flint river is perfectly usable, but whoever is running the water treatment operation up there hosed up bigtime. Some of the people in my office are involved in sorting out what exactly happened and how to fix it. The quote I got from one of them was "We have to go up and educate them on all the water treatment advances made in the last 50 years" or something to that general effect. CommanderApaul fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Jan 18, 2016 |
# ? Jan 18, 2016 06:44 |
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Tigey posted:Have I walked into the China thread by mistake? CommanderApaul posted:Some of the people in my office are involved in sorting out what exactly happened and how to fix it. The quote I got from one of them was "We have to go up and educate them on all the water treatment advances made in the last 50 years" or something to that general effect.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 16:25 |
This whole situation is kindof mindblowing. I expected bad poo poo to happen under the emergency manager laws, but I thought it would just be corruption, not murder.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 16:39 |
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Are there any challenges being worked on to the em law on constitutional grounds?
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 17:02 |
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Real hurthling! posted:Are there any challenges being worked on to the em law on constitutional grounds? Maybe, though isn't the position of the Scalia wing of the judiciary that there's technically no right to local government?
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 17:33 |
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The entire state is a mess. Detroit teachers have been posting to social media about what a catastrophic mess the public schools are.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 18:36 |
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Bitchkrieg posted:The entire state is a mess.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 18:58 |
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Bitchkrieg posted:The entire state is a mess. Holy poo poo. I've been to India and even the conditions there weren't this bad. And that's with squatter toilets as the cultural norm. Get your poo poo together, America!
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 20:35 |
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Bitchkrieg posted:The entire state is a mess. This is all being done by the same emergency manager who poisoned Flint's drinking water. Can nothing be done about him? Can someone actually make a career out of killing children and get away with it?
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 20:40 |
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Abilifier posted:This is all being done by the same emergency manager who poisoned Flint's drinking water. Can nothing be done about him? Can someone actually make a career out of killing children and get away with it? Technically he has the power over the district finances. He isn't in charge of building operations, at least directly.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 20:48 |
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I thought the water crisis was bad, but schools as well? Jesus... I've seen public schools in Sierra Leone that were better built/maintained.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 21:23 |
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Ladies and Gentlemen, the invisible hand of the Free Market
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 22:39 |
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At what point do you not declare the whole town a Superfund site ala Centralia and start trucking people out?
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 22:40 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:At what point do you not declare the whole town a Superfund site ala Centralia and start trucking people out? Centralia isn't a superfund site and Flint is approx 100x the population of Centralia at its peak, so probably never.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 22:49 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:At what point do you not declare the whole town a Superfund site ala Centralia and start trucking people out? when the ground itself is harmful to human life. the water is sloooowly getting better since they switched back to detroit water in october
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 22:52 |
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ayn rand hand job posted:Centralia isn't a superfund site and Flint is approx 100x the population of Centralia at its peak, so probably never. I was talking about Detroit.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 23:23 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:I was talking about Detroit. All of flyover country and the Rust Belt, you mean.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 23:27 |
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Suddenly over half a million refugees from Detroit somehow show up in Greece and Turkey.
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# ? Jan 18, 2016 23:32 |
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Copy pasting because someone asked about this in USPol and I bookmarked it. e; woops messed up, some of the links worked but here is the original post as someone found it http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3753932&perpage=40&pagenumber=187#post453893384 Blowdryer fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Feb 1, 2016 |
# ? Jan 18, 2016 23:38 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 09:12 |
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there's an interesting angle here about postindustrialism in cities. detroit especially is the crown jewel of the rust belt, but you see the same problem all over - once a city's economic base is taken away, it declines. and this is an odd position for many cities to be in, especially in america where we're used to growth growth growth all over the place. check out detroit's population over time 1820 1,422 — 1830 2,222 56.3% 1840 9,102 309.6% 1850 21,019 130.9% 1860 45,619 117.0% 1870 79,577 74.4% 1880 116,340 46.2% 1890 205,876 77.0% 1900 285,704 38.8% 1910 465,766 63.0% 1920 993,678 113.3% 1930 1,568,662 57.9% 1940 1,623,452 3.5% 1950 1,849,568 13.9% 1960 1,670,144 −9.7% 1970 1,514,063 −9.3% 1980 1,203,368 −20.5% 1990 1,027,974 −14.6% 2000 951,270 −7.5% 2010 713,777 −25.0% Est. 2014 680,250 −4.7% detroit has lost over a million residents since deindustrialization began. and the infrastructure to take care of that many people still exists. detroit has full water, sewer, and public electric provision to places that look like this: and you still have to pay for the infrastructure for all those non-houses the scale of the vacancy isn't as bad in many places as it is in detroit but still, you can see why so many cities in michigan have such dire finances that emergency managers are empowered. it's not even a question of mismanagement, structurally there's just this built-in burden of paying for infrastructure that can't move as quickly as people can flee the city here's the fun part - this can happen in any neighborhood in america, and probably will http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
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# ? Jan 19, 2016 01:14 |