esquire.com – It’s a day of the week ending in “y”, so yes, there’s another story about how fcked the American infrastructure that services our drinking water really is. This time, it’s The Guardian, which has demonstrated that Flint was not the only American city that was fudging the test results regarding how much lead was in its water supply.
Thousands of documents detailing water testing practices over the past decade reveal: Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water; officials in two major cities—Philadelphia and Chicago—asked employees to test water safety in their own homes; two states—Michigan and New Hampshire—advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels; some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming it was a security risk.
Categories: Election 2016