3705 - Poisoned water

There was an interesting NOVA presentation on PBS last night titled "Poisoned Water". It is about how the the Flint Michigan water crisis happened and how hard it was to get it fixed. It's about government regulations failing. It's about government officials covering their own asses while poisoning kids.

It's a good show. Plus there are more clips on the NOVA website.

This is the LINK to the show. As of last night the show wasn't available yet. Hopefully by this morning it is. (54 min)

If there's no video, here is an ARTICLE.

Here is a CLIP from the video. It works.

What does lead do to the brain? (5 min video)

Another ARTICLE about what the people had to do to prove the problem.


So is this just a Flint problem? Not at all. I lived in an older neighborhood in the City of St. Louis growing up. We had lead service pipes from the street to the house. The video says there are millions of these service pipes across the country.

So what did Flint do wrong? When they switched from Detroit water to their own old water plant they didn't put anti corrosion chemicals in the water according to EPA rules. The Flint water then started leaching lead out of the pipes. But hey, they saved a few bucks.

And the really sad thing is Washington D.C. had this same problem just a few years earlier. So people knew about this.