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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 |
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Jan 18, 2016 06:44
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Edit: Thought better of posting this.
CommanderApaul fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 02:52
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SgtScruffy posted:Someone help me understand the conservative defense of this - the right has been blaming this on the EPA not saying anything or doing anything until it was too late. To what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? The EPA is a fairly fractured agency. There's the overarching EPA based in DC, that runs the research and testing laboratories for the major program offices like the Office of Research and Development, Office of Water, Office of Air and Radiation, etc. They set national policy and respond to things like the BP Oil Spill, Superfund sites, that sort of thing. That constitutes about 60% of the agency staffing and the really large facilities in DC, RTP North Carolina, Cincinnati, etc. The rest of the agency is broken down into 10 Regional Offices that more or less have autonomy from headquarters, that work with state- and local-level environmental agencies on polices, procedures, small-scale testing protocols, and things like that. Flint was handled by Region 5, and there's some rumblings of something going on between the local, state and EPA Region 5 that culminated last week with the Region 5 Administrator resigning, followed shortly by the head of the agency putting out "if you see something that is a critical public health issue you have a duty to escalate it if you feel it is not being acted upon." The general consensus that I've heard is that the local and state agencies collected bad data and Region 5 didn't do it's due diligence at some level to verify that the data was good and just rubber stamped what they were given. The HQ-run offices are gearing up bigtime to respond to this. There are comparisons to the BP Oil Spill response being thrown around.
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Jan 27, 2016 15:46
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Radish posted:What exactly are the GOP complaints about the EPA? I mean I know they are going to blame them regardless but what's their avenue of attack? The only thing I can think of that they hosed up on was that they didn't regulate hard enough but there;s no way Republicans are going to make that argument. The EPA Region 5 leadership apparently quashed the concerns of the scientists who were raising the alarm bells about the problem and then got into an out of court legal slapfight with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality about whether the EPA actually had the authority under the relevant federal statute to mandate the testing protocols used by MDEQ. This resulted in the EPA Region 5 Administrator getting what is rumored to be a 'resign or be fired' order from EPA Headquarters, followed very shortly by a new policy from Gina McCarthy for "Elevation of Critical Public Health Issues" laying out the criteria that would allow EPA employees to go around their chain of command when they feel there's a critical public health issue that needs to be addressed. Essentially an internal whistleblower protection policy.
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Mar 25, 2016 17:44
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