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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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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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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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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
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A Buttery Pastry posted:It's clearly a solution looking for a problem. Detroit could become a refugee-to-American processing camp, home to a million and possibly more refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere. the detroit area is already a favorite of refugees, the big problem tho is that people left that area because there's no jobs and also the climate is bullshit
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Jan 20, 2016 06:45
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