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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Black town's water is more poisoned than Flint's. In a white town nearby, it's clean
Bobbie Clay first realized something was wrong a few years ago.
The water at her Benton Harbor, Michigan, home had started coming out of the tap looking bubbly and whitish. When she filled a glass with it, she could see matter floating around inside. I became very concerned, she recalled in a recent interview.
She wasnt alone. For years, residents of this small, struggling city in south-west Michigan had been having similar problems. When Carmela Patton turned on her sink to make coffee, the water came out brown. When Emma Kinnard ran hers, it came out the color of tea and sizzling like Alka-Seltzer. Rasta Smith said his water looked normal, but had a horrible taste and a smell that reminded him of rotting sewage. Its bad, man, he said. Its real bad.
Some immediately began buying bottled water and encouraging friends and family to do the same. Others would continue to use the tap water for years and, in many cases, still do. When residents raised questions and concerns, they said, officials in the city and county were unresponsive.
Finally, in 2018, they found out what was going on: tap water samples tested that summer revealed lead levels of 22 parts per billion well over the federal lead action level of 15 parts per billion and higher, even, than the 20 parts per billion nearby Flint averaged at the height of the crisis that made that city a national symbol of environmental injustice.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/benton-harbor-michigan-lead-water-poisoned
djm5971
(109 posts)And sickening. I hope the powers that be are made to pay for this.
Jilly_in_VA
(9,854 posts)Benton Harbor is one of the cities that former governor R. Ick Snyder appointed his own "city manager" to rule over because he didn't like the way it was being run, in spite of its democratically elected city government. This seemed completely unconstitutional to me (although I'm not familiar with the Michigan constitution) and very un-democratic at the very least.
Response to Jilly_in_VA (Reply #2)
MichMan This message was self-deleted by its author.
MichMan
(11,790 posts)The Emergency Managers in Michigan were appointed to cities that were having severe financial troubles and headed for bankruptcy if nothing was done. Benton Harbor's EM was actually appointed by Snyder's predecessor Gov. Jennifer Granholm in 2010.
Jilly_in_VA
(9,854 posts)Just mentioned it. I did remember that Flin't's EM was appointed by Snyder and that the whole thing was super political there. The EM program seems extremely undemocratic to me and certainly was the way Snyder implemented it.
MagickMuffin
(15,892 posts)And there you have it, make water so poisonous that you have to pay for water. Meanwhile Nestle's is allowed to drain the water from the Great Lakes and then charging us consumers to buy it.
That should be illegal, IMO!
Jilly_in_VA
(9,854 posts)This is supposed to say Nestlé and when I preview it, it does, but when I update, it doesn't.
MichMan
(11,790 posts)Dec. 2016
" Last year, the city of Flint, Michigan, burst into the world spotlight after its children were exposed to lead in drinking water and some were poisoned. In the year after Flint switched to corrosive river water that leached lead from old pipes, 5 percent of the children screened there had high blood lead levels.
Flint is no aberration. In fact, it doesnt even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America.
In all, Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that citys contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.
The poisoned places on this map stretch from Warren, Pennsylvania, a town on the Allegheny River where 36 percent of children tested had high lead levels, to a zip code on Goat Island, Texas, where a quarter of tests showed poisoning. In some pockets of Baltimore, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where lead poisoning has spanned generations, the rate of elevated tests over the last decade was 40 to 50 percent.
Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or industrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning."
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/
Jilly_in_VA
(9,854 posts)are in Louisiana, along the infamous "Cancer Corridor", where thousands of gallons of wastewater are discharged daily from chemical plants into drinking water sources. It's appalling. But because the residents of that area are poor or black or both, nobody gives a rat's hiney.
Leith
(7,802 posts)The lead problem in Flint outraged me - not because that's where I'm from. It's a majority Black city and that rat bastard Snider did it on purpose. Same for Benton Harbor.
Years ago, soon after the story about poisoned water in Flint came out, I heard that Jackson MS (also Black majority) had the same problem. This entire situation is so beyond the realm of what a country should do to or for its citizens that I feel like punching the wall.
$3.5 trillion may not be enough to fix all the infrastructure this country desperately needs.