Not just Flint: Poor communities across the country live with extreme polluters | Hacker News Reader

Not just Flint: Poor communities across the country live with extreme polluters

washingtonpost.com

115 pointsprivong60 comments

> what was particularly striking was... the highest polluting facilities were also more likely to be located in proximity to poor and minority neighborhoods.

This is what's "particularly striking"? There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away. The most trivial of logic dictates that if anyone is living near extreme pollution, there's a substantial probability they're poor.

Now, that said, news about this new study saying that the problem is bad that quantifies the problem, tells us why it's worse than these EJ scholars suspected, or even just a reminder that this is bad and these peoples' lives should be improved, sure, go ahead... but the above statement of shock detracts from that, I should think.

There's only one substantial class of people who would knowingly live near extreme pollution: people who can't afford to move away

Conversely, people who can afford to will use every resource at their disposal to prevent polluters from coming into their communities. NIMBYists get a lot of hate, but can you really blame them?

You can when they block the construction of low-pollution utilities in their neighborhood at the expense of high-pollution utilities in poor communities.

You can understand why they do it, but you can also (and should also) still blame them for being short-sighted and selfish.

Beijing came to mind as a counter example, but I'm not sure what conclusions we can draw from it.

It's not really a counter-example. There are regions of China with much worse pollution from heavy industry, like smelters.

I stand corrected! I forgot that it's all relative, but within reasonable geographic limits.

It's a complex issue. There are no "exurbs" in China. There is no concept of clean countryside living except maybe coastal cities like Quingdao that are pleasant if not in the center of commerce.

People want to live in the first tier cities. The growth of these cities was, until recently, powered by fast construction of new coal fueled power plants. The pay is higher, the public amenities are better, and, relatively, the pollution isn't as bad as living next to paper mills and aluminum smelters.

Beijing's smog is just the tip of the iceberg. China has the same problem:

https://www.vice.com/read/photographs-of-chinas-cancer-villa...

"These are entire villages where every other house contains someone dying of cancer or some sort of respiratory problem."

Free trade sure is great.

Like it or not, people prefer wealth with a risk of cancer to rural poverty. If they didn't, they would remain in their remote rural villages instead of flocking into the highly polluted factory areas.

Delhi is another example of this (it's 3x worse than Beijing right now). I hate the place; this month it was so polluted that I couldn't see across my office complex. But if you use violence to force the Biharis to stay home (i.e., give up free trade) you'll have a riot on your hands.

Yeah, free trade is in fact better than dire poverty, which is the alternative.

>Like it or not, people prefer wealth with a risk of cancer to rural poverty

"Since Guan-yin's husband died of stomach cancer two years earlier, she's been pushing for change. She says she's been harassed by authorities constantly"

How does it feel being an apologist for some of the worst forms of state oppression?

You're assuming people have perfect foresight into their risks moving to such an area - they don't. Your also ignoring that sometimes the pollution moves to where people already live. The reasonable choice is to work towards advancing standards for everyone worldwide. Sometimes the advances will come organically delivered by free markets, and sometimes they'll have to be regulatory (closing down externalities ignored/un-priced by markets). The choice certainly isn't free trade or dire poverty in the long run.

Anyone with eyes has a pretty good idea that they are walking into a toxic soup. I left Delhi on the 22nd - this picture is pretty accurate:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2343988/images/o-DELHI-AIR-POLLUTI...

Or, back in July (before things got bad) I could do maybe 10 suicide sprints in NY. Then I flew into Delhi and was down to 4 - breathing was just that hard.

I know there are lots of jokes about Biharis, but they aren't as stupid as you are making them out to be. They move to Delhi with good but imperfect information about both the pollution and the economic opportunity.

I'm all in favor of pollution taxes and internalizing externalities. I'm just saying that even in spite of that, the economic gains seem to drastically outweigh the health penalties as evidenced by millions of people moving towards the pollution.

The problem in Flint is not that the river is polluted it is that the pH of the river water is causing lead from old pipes and fittings to leach into the water. It's not really a good example of the general subject of the story.

I too was confused why they tried to tie the two events together. The lead pipes had formed a coating (and this is true in other locations too) that made them nontoxic but when they were flushed with acidic water (as the water treatment plant did) they shed that lining and it began washing through the lead and putting it into the lines. The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels, but pH variation is common without pollution, so blaming this on pollution is a bit nonsensical.

When it comes to the article, it makes sense that pollution would be in poorer areas. Pollution lowers property value, which allows poorer individuals to live there. Or the area could have already been poor and they are unable to afford to leave.

I'm not sure who is to blame for the Flint crisis tbh, there seems to be a lot of finger pointing and politicizing. I have yet to find a source that wasn't biased one way or the other, which is sad. People just want answers and for it to be fixed.

The lines had operated fine with water from a different location that had different pH levels

Actually one of the talking points is that no one will talk about lead levels before they switched the water from Detroit to Flint river. But its not as bad as it is now obviously. . . Does building this 'coat' back up work? How long does that take?

I'm no expert, but I assume it takes long enough to where they are just going to have to replace all the lead pipes and fittings.

That talking point you mention could be true, or it could be a way for the state level government to dish it back to the local government. Who knows. To me it seems like the municipality screwed this up more than the state, but like I said it's virtually impossible to find an unbiased news source with the whole story; they both no doubt have a role. Even this very story is politically driven, it could be misleading in its urgency to drive clicks/narrative. Happens all the time with various things in the news (like the claim of x drug use among teens, etc.)

Hopefully there is a non-partisan investigation from the Federal level on the Flint fiasco.

I agree. In one sense, there is no way this was an intended consequence. On the other hand, it would be tough to convince me to drink treated flint river water, and I thought that long before they switched the water. (I'm from the area). My gut feeling is the state, the local, and everyone in between is to blame. You are spot on with the politicizing too, its out of control.

They tie the two events together because there is no better way to fund the replacing of Flint water infrastructure than to blame a third part (state, federal, etc) so they feel obligated to pay for the repair and maintenance work Flint should have been doing in the first place.

So Flint didn't pollute their water, they just failed to treat it properly?

The Detroit urban area has been a disaster for a while. Flint had been getting lake water from Detroit. Detroit, bankrupt, wanted more money from Flint (also bankrupt). Flint was "forced" to switch to river water and yes they did not treat the pH.

Detroit and Flint are both under management of the State of Michigan, so it's not like the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing.

I don't really understand how this is anyone but the State's problem and why celebrities need to be donating for these people to keep living shouldn't the state be doing that?

Indeed, the state has a sizable slush fund that could be spent on rectifying the problems in both Flint and Detroit, but... Michigan. I grew up in southwest Michigan, and the prevailing view was always that Detroit's problems were its own to solve, period. It didn't help that the city government was openly hostile to the rest of the state too, and plagued with a "machine boss" type of city government.

Flint was at the end of a long term agreement with Detroit for water. It was going to go in with another municipality for their own pipe to the lake. Except that wasn't going to be completed by the time the contract with Detroit was up.

Detroit, being hard for cash, and realizing that Flint was going to be a short-term customer, had proposed higher rates in the short term. Flint thought that was too much and decided to use their river.

I don't know if Flint could have negotiated a new long-term agreement with Detroit for water rather than the construction of a new pipe to the lake.

It seems likely that purifying the water up to Lake Huron standards would have erased the cost savings. Something akin to desalination might have been necessary.

I'm no expert on water engineering, but my understanding is as follows: The Flint river water was safe to drink after treatment, but with a slightly lower pH than normal. This caused the pipes to corrode which allowed lead and iron from the pipes to contaminate the water. If Flint's water engineers had followed standard practices to control corrosion (e.g. by adding orthophosphate to the water) then there would never have been any problem. Corrosion control would have cost peanuts -- about $100 per day [0].

Of course, it's hard to find unbiased sources, and I could easily be mistaken. Do you have a source for your claim that making the water safe would be expensive, or are you just speculating?

[0] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/who-poisoned-flint...

Speculating. I was thinking of something akin to desalination, but I now realize that the pollutant doesn't need to be removed but just neutralized.

Replacement of the lead pipes would seem to be a pretty important safeguard, in any event. All of the lead was replaced in the town where I live.

It's an old city, with a lot of old infrastructure that was never updated, corrupt government, and no money. Have you seen some of the stories about the Detroit public schools? No heat, leaking roofs, infested with rodents and cockroaches, etc. The place has so many problems that it's hard to focus on any one of them.

But is Flint a pollution problem? From what I've been reading the real failure in Flint was that they are still using lead pipes. It was a series of decisions that sent corrosive water down old pipes, water that may have been safe in non-lead pipes. That seems more a management and/or infrastructure problem: Bad, but without the monty burns villain dumping stuff into lakes. So I'm not sure there is a direct comparison to be made between Flint and something like love canal.

Don't worry, the free market will solve it. Keep cutting taxes and remove regulations.

Actually, the failure of a government monopoly left all of these people without a viable alternative. The Flint water crisis was a failure of government, not the free market. It's actually what happens when the government argues that basic necessities are so important, the government needs to handle the provision of them to guarantee everyone has access, until they can't handle it anymore.

Water provision is a natural monopoly. If you hand over natural monopolies to the private sector they raise prices and cut costs as much as the regulators will allow them to and pocket the difference as profit.

State monopolies are often intentionally neglected or damaged by bought out politicians as a way to make privatization and the subsequent profit extraction more palatable to a suspicious public. That's also where all this "free markets sure are great" propaganda comes from.

This is a similar process to what Russia went through in the 90s. They were encouraged to embrace the free market by Harvard "economists" (free market priests) like Larry Summers. They were told that this process would lead to a new age of prosperity for Russia. It didn't.

The net result was to haemorrhage their economy and enabled the oligarchs to walk off with billions of dollars in state assets at knock down prices.

Actually, it's not. The idea of a natural monopoly is something that was made up to justify state takeovers of certain key services. If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country, because it wouldn't be cost effective to do so. In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators. The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market (which thank goodness we do to provide to the citizens of Flint right now). Using Russia as an example of free market failures is like using Communist China as an example of what the free market will do to wages if we don't implement a minimum wage here in the States.

>If a natural monopoly actually existed, we wouldn't have Google Fiber expanding across the country

Internet access isn't a natural monopoly, it just has very, very, very, very high barriers to entry. You actually can run multiple cables down the same pipe easily enough (unlike water).

It still approximates a monopoly, as can be seen by the fact that the barriers to entry have prevented even a company like Google with exceptionally deep pockets from muscling in.

>In fact, Google Fiber's biggest impediment to expansion has been government regulators.

Did you really think Verizon and Comcast were going to let their duopoly go without a fight?

>The same goes with water provision - if it was a natural monopoly, we wouldn't have alternatives such as bottled water available on the market

Bottled water is an entirely different market with a very limited level of substitution with tap water.

>Using Russia as an example of free market failures

Is entirely appropriate since they were advised by elite "free market economists" (the kind whom you would cite as justification for your opinions) to follow the policy course that they did.

Unlike China, which followed the advice of its own (rather smarter) economists.

Fiber internet was installed in my parent's neighborhood a few months ago. It involved multiple crews digging trenches through EVERYONE's backyard, taking more than a month to complete. I don't know where they run multiple cables down the same pipe, but it certainly isn't where my parents live.

Back to the original point, somehow or another, people managed to get water before the City of Flint decided it was something they needed to control. The City did not come into being because the City Government had started providing water.

Furthermore, the citizens of Flint right now are being forced to pay for water that they can't use, because it is part of their city utility bills. They can't refuse service, unlike a natural monopoly where the customer could still refuse to purchase the product if it wasn't sufficient to meet his or her needs. This is the worst part of a government monopoly, and the risk we all face when the government fails to provide a service it has promised us.

I was fascinated by this concept of natural monopoly as a conspiracy theory, I found this article that goes into the details:

https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

Apparently the solution to multiple gas/phone/electric companies digging up the streets is private ownership of the streets.

I'm pretty sure the gas companies he is talking about from the 19th century covered different portions of the city and had gentlemen's agreements (that occasionally broke down) not to muscle in on one another's territory - similar to gang warfare dynamics.

Thus even in the beginning they effectively had a series of mini monopolies which overlapped a little, causing 'zones' of competition.

The point that flew over mises head was that this was an unstable arrangement that provided the competition that proved beneficial for a time to consumers, but eventually such situations 'stabilize' and a clear winner emerges who can basically impose a tax on everybody and collect enormous profits in the process.

Mises just sort of pretends that the last part never happens unless a government steps in to force it to happen. Which is rubbish - you can easily use economies of scale and predatory pricing to drive smaller competitors out of business in such industries.

Sir, I understand you to be saying that you wash your dishes, your clothing, your body exclusively in bottled water?

I sometimes feel like I'm going crazy when I remember that time, and how no-one really mentions it now despite oligarchs being in the news all the time.

It was almost certainly done by true-believers, but looked at from a certain angle, it's highly effective financial sabotage, as the oligarchs work to export as much of their wealth as possible out of Russia and into safer countries. All those billions that could have stayed in the average person's pocket and invested into the economy.

Quit following the political propaganda. The are not being intentionally neglected or damaged by politicians bought out by those who want to privatize them, that is just pure stupid and political tripe designed to feed the ignorant.

The true story is they promises of many city governments far exceeded their means to support all of them so something had to give. From pushing far too many cronies and family members into "administrative jobs - look at many city airports if not schools now where teachers can be a minority" to promises for pensions. Throw in over price government buildings to celebrate some dead politician, ever expanding tax break and services cost breaks to those who support the politician and well, it all is easily found.

Hence the money to maintain the infrastructure went elsewhere. Money promised to pensioners was also shorted as much as they could, yet the bloat was kept, the new offices kept, and so on. So the political talking points memo you were reading from is just as much trash as the promises politicians make

>Quit following the political propaganda. The are not being intentionally neglected or damaged by politicians bought out by those who want to privatize them, that is just pure stupid and political tripe designed to feed the ignorant.

Oh, well now that you mention it it seems perfectly reasonable for the post office having to prefund retirement benefits for employees who are not born yet, causing massive not-actually-real accounting losses.

And nobody would use that as an excuse to... you know...

https://www.newsmax.com/Stossel/Privatize-Post-Office-Congre...

What does your comment have to do with Flint? In Flint, the state and local government screwed up and you apparently want to talk about free markets? This was a government failure.

I am in Sunnyvale and my tap water is testing positive for pesticides.

As a non-american, this is so strange. Doesn't the US have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live? That seems to me like a very fundamental responsibility of the state.

There are pollution laws, but unfortunately companies receive only relatively minimal fines. So depending on the substance and quantity 'accidentally' leaked, it may actually be a cost saving for the company. And granted, in sure a lot of pollution actually is accidental, but even there the reasons are likely due to the company cutting costs which led to an accident. For instance, let's say there's a bake that had a high likelihood of soon failing. When you take into consideration the cost of a replacement valve, service to replace it, and down time of processes that depend on this valve and compare it to the amount you'd get fined for a spill if the valve fails, many companies will take the risk of the valve failing because the fines just aren't high enough. The other thing is that there's almost never any jail time for those that were involved in the decision making process to take that risk. Case in point, BP oil spill, nobody has served jail time even though there were numerous reports that people were aware of the risks of continuing to operate without replacing the valve that failed.

Also sometimes very poor counties, think Alabama, Kentucky, Wa Va, will attract companies who need to dispose of pollutants but at a price, in order to extract revenue for an otherwise unproductive, resource-poor county. That's to say, they provide landfill space at a relatively low price. It's unfortunate, but it happens.[1]

[1]http://www.alternet.org/books/how-corporations-dump-their-to...

The fines are low. The regulations are not well enforced. The organizations that are supposed to enforce the regulations keep having their funding cut. And certain political groups are trying to strip the regulations and the funding further.

This recent article [1] is a great example of all four facts.

DuPont knew for half a century that their chemical, PFOA, was poisonous to people and to drinking water, yet kept exposing their own workers and dumping it in places where it killed livestock, leeched into the soil and contaminated water supplies.

DuPont is still fighting regulations, and fighting thousands of personal injury lawsuits in court, one by one. It settled with the EPA for $16.5m — essentially nothing. The EPA's role is to regulate, but it is basically powerless to do so.

Meanwhile, PFOA and related fluorochemicals are now apparently present in the bloodstream of almost all animals and people on Earth — including everyone on HN — as well as much of our drinking water.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-be...

Sometimes what happens is an old industry dies out or matures, say heavy manufacturing, the dumping happened long before there were strict anti-pollution regulations, but the area is otherwise nice and in an central or attractive location, so housing gets built.

Then people learn heavy metals and other chemicals which leached into the soil are unhealthy. Some times people know about it and a superfund gets declared, other times it was forgotten and people find out many years later.

New developments in Mountain View[1], for example, sit on top of superfund sites. Some of which cannot be alleviated but rather "managed".

Hunter's point in Sf is another example. That was a navy shipyard with lots of lead heavy metals and other things from WWII war effort --but people eventually built out housing there.

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/19/google-...

I'd wager you're being downvoted by the paid downvoters that exist on reddit and other sites that now seem to be on HN for asking things like that. It's a valid question and there are valid downvoted responses below.

Your posting history suggests to me that you know the answer already. At the very least, you have a much more intimate knowledge of US laws and politics than your question, which is posed as a complete outsider, implies.

For example, you post about political "ponerology (study of evil in politics)" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548272 ), and bring up economics often. You also have a non-trivial knowledge of US political history, as with this comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404379 :

> That's false, because the Democratic party today encapsulates both the old Republican and the old Democratic party. Hillary Clinton is essentially an Eisenhower Republican (if you place her into any European country she's in their conservative party), and Warren/Sanders are the left wing group.

> The republican party of today is essentially a business lobby masquerading as a party. Place it into any European country, and it will be a far right extremist group.

Did you learn American political history from going to school at Dartmouth? I think it's odd you didn't learn about any of the pollution laws during that time.

You also have pretty firm ideas on the topic already, based on your comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10142290:

> The US is a dystopia, no surprises there. What a shame that all humans are anymore are an outpost of corporate greed.

and at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440304 :

> The more I think about it, the more I believe that the United States is the worst place to live if you are poor.

> There are places that are poorer, hell I'm from a third world country. But I've never seen anyone in the third world show utter contempt for the poor. No one keeps reminding the poor that it's their fault. We call them "unfortunate", Americans call them "losers".

(I'll note that two people, one with experience from India - where you are from - and Bangladesh, and the other with experience from Islamabad, disagree.)

I see you are familiar with being downvoted, such as like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10411502 where you propose "We should engage in a culling of humans." Then again, perhaps I am simply part of the "political-myopia of tech culture" that you bemoaned about at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10516056 .

Well, no. I do not know anything about US laws. I do know stuff about US politics and history, however. I also know stuff about British history, but not British laws. What's the point of this long list you've compiled?

I don't think it takes an Ivy League education to understand the point.

I start with the observation that your question here expresses an outsider naïveté which does not match your historical comments. I give evidence. I demonstrate that you have close knowledge of American culture - enough to have made firm statements on the topic. Indeed, you have made statements which already answer the question you've asked. I also commented that others have disagreed with your views, including through downvotes and personal experience.

I also gave details so that others might be able to answer your question while taking your views in mind.

You're being ridiculous. My question was about US laws, which is non-general information and also constantly changing.

I claimed I have no knowledge about it, and asked if someone else did. What is your problem with that? You aren't even contributing to the conversation. Do you honestly have nothing better to do than to attack random people on the internet? Please get a life.

I cannot seriously believe that you think the US doesn't "have pollution laws that say you cannot pollute near where people live." The existence of those laws is general information, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_environmental_la... , and relatively constant.

Your comment history shows that you think the US is a distopia, and "the worst place to live if you are poor." If you really believe that, then why are you asking the question when you know the answer? The WaPo article title even includes "Poor communities across the country live with ‘extreme’ polluters", which is in line with your understanding of the US.

I do not see how I can contribute to the conversation when there appears to be a strong dichotomy between your question and your background understanding. But another way to contribute is to help other commenters understand where you're coming from. And of course, some conversations are not worth pursing.

Why would I think you are attacking random people? I never said that, nor is it something I believe. Though telling me to "Please get a life" does come close to being an attack, no?

Dude, you have an inordinate amount of time on your hands and you're obsessed with me. I don't want a stalker. I'm out.

Again with the personal attacks? And egocentric to boot.

FWIW, nearly every HN commenter, or at least those who post as often as you or I, has an inordinate amount of spare time.

Also, I see you've used "I'm out" before. As I mentioned earlier, you derided the 'political-myopia of tech culture' here on HN. Later in that thread, maxerickson at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10519360 wrote:

> I was pointing out that what you said about value was not an argument against economics (because economics doesn't care about what form value takes).

> You keep looking for a word other than value to describe this thing that you think should happen because then I can't point out that you can analyze it economically, but this is not a way to argue that education should not be analyzed economically, it is a misunderstanding of economics (it was really clear when stated as "Value" is not only monetary, but "we should do it just because" is still an imputation of value...).

You decided, incorrectly IMO, to describe it as "a last-word-mine argument", and ended the thread with "I'm out".

My interpretation of both exchanges is that you don't like it when people point out apparent inconsistencies in what you wrote.

(BTW, for those in the future who, like I, sometimes review someone's back history before commenting - hi!)

You got the last word in, congrats! Hope your life is more meaningful now.

The paper is linked in the article:

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/1/015...

They apparently analyzed population density near their outliers, but they don't discuss it. My general sense is that polluting industry will be located in areas with very low population density (these areas tend to be poorer than high density areas). To be clear, that's just speculation.

They also don't discuss the actual expected impact of the toxic outliers. The data they used to determine the outliers is government data about environmental release of toxic chemicals; there is at least the possibility that the releases are within sensible regulatory limits and don't pose a great deal of risk to the people nearby.

Note all the people commenting in this story that pollution of the Flint river is not a significant contributor to the problem in Flint, it's the pipes and the failure to adjust the PH of the water (here's the VTech professor that did a lot of the advocacy blaming the lack of corrosion control: http://flintwaterstudy.org/2015/09/commentary-mdeq-mistakes-... ).

Not surprised. I was reading about a town in Kentucky where they polluted the local air by having all these old facotries that were still being in use

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