On 12/29/2016 01:25 AM, John Newman wrote:
>>What are some major fuckups in the year of 2016?
>The ridiculous water catastrophe in Flint, Michigan.
>If you live in Fruitvale, a San Francisco Bay area town, your water
is poison. More lead in it than Flint Michigan.
Yes, the Flint episode is "ridiculous". But the reason is that in shifting to Flint River water from Detroit water, those in charge "forgot" to add about $100/day in pH adjustors and anti-corrosion additives: Had they done that, there would simply have been no story, nothing for the media to cover. I think it can be argued (and I argue) that this can only have been explained as a deliberate attempt to sabotage these cost-savings. The lead involved isn't in the water in the Flint River: Rather, the lead which becomes the problem is leached from the (old) piping system, including in houses themselves. "Forget" to add pH adjustors, and the water itself becomes slightly corrosive, so people begin to drink lead from piping that had been around for 50 years without problems. Fortunately, there have been criminal charges, and there will be charges. We will all find out why the staff has been sabotaging the water supply system.
>If I recall correctly (and I might be wrong about this) Fruitvale
was one of the places early in the Personal Computer boom where the
silicon valley kept it's machine shops and filthy filthy wafer fab
operations... Before they found out how toxic wafer fab ops were and
moved them to third world countries where they could poison people
at will.
That sounds like nonsense to me. Wafer fabs employ some of the purest water used in any industrial used. And they recycle water, because it's actually much cheaper to remove the very small quantities of added contaminants than to start from "new" water, let's say well-water.
You are trying to mislead by using this article. It doesn't even explain from where the lead comes.