Detroit to restore water to allow people to wash hands to avoid coronavirus | Hacker News Reader

Detroit to restore water to allow people to wash hands to avoid coronavirus

fox2detroit.com

34 pointsrmason49 comments

As someone in the UK, it seems insane that cutting off domestic water is even allowed. It's considered a basic right, and even during droughts, the water companies have to supply a basic level to everyone. (https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/water/water-suppl...)

You can cut off water to commercial premises for non payment, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

Welcome to America, where money trumps Human Rights.

What would your solution be to people not paying their water bill which helps recover the various costs of providing it? Let everyone eventually realize they don’t have to pay and go bankrupt so then nobody has access to it? Not disagreeing that water is a human right, but you need to draw a line somewhere, nothing is free.

There are a variety of mechanisms available to fund water access including taxes, and access fees, and govt re-imbursement. As the cost to the government is undoubtedly higher to provide bottled water to affected households that cannot pay or deal with the hospital bills for dehydration, it makes fiscal sense to simply keep the water on.

In Massachusetts electric companies are prohibited from cutting power 9 months out of the year for similar reasons - cutting electric heating in -20 F would introduce other costs in addition to the moral obligations.

Basic. Human. Right. You provide it no matter what, and if most people won't pay despite your best efforts, you subsidize it.

Yeah, the typical default solution is to just have the government pay for it.

From an economics standpoint I think the government has little incentive to ensure water quality because there's no competitor to take their business. Just look at Flint. Also once you start subsidizing, what stops people from abusing the water supply? If I'm not paying for the water bill, I won't care to self-regulate the amount I use which puts the amount available in the water source in danger for everyone else.

Since the government already wastes a lot of money, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Not to mention when they realize they need to increase the taxes to cover the cost of researching and drilling for additional sources. A company will make sure it's not wasting money because it needs to stay competitive.

I'm just playing devils advocate here, these are tough problems to solve. I certainly don't possess the industrial knowledge it takes to provide water for millions of people, but some people think the solution is easier than it is. That's all I'm doing in this thread, thought provoking.

> Just look at Flint

Flint happened because of leadership mistakes, and while the damage can't be undone, hopefully the legal mess that it spawned will improve the future.

Sadly, democracy is a contest of popularity, not of aptitude. This could happen again.

It's a basic human right. People need to have access to clean drinking water, and if they can't afford it they still need to get it. "Nothing is free" simply doesn't apply here.

There’s a cost to providing it, so it does apply. Human right or not. It’s a human right to eat, but I have a cost in labor and expenses to acquire food by various means to ensure that happens.

Again, not arguing whether it’s a human right or not.

The very first line of the article:

> The City of Detroit announced on Monday that it will restore water to residents in the city who have had their service cut off due to unpaid bills so those people have the ability to wash their hands.

The parent said you can cut off water from commercial properties for non-payment, not residential properties.

that's barbaric

you don't know if you want to laugh or cry when you see these headlines about fast food workers not being able to stay home because they don't have sick leave or people not having access to water in a first world country.

One would like to think at some point the message is driven home that we're first and foremost mammals living in an ecosystem and only secondary individuals participating in marketplaces and that whoever is in charge has enough instinct for self preservation to not force the diseased into work or turn their sanitation off.

The water part is more horrifying. Once that's gone, whole swathes of US would have to be evacuated.

Why would water be gone and 'large swathes' of the US have to be evacuated?

The answer to the first why is... maybe due to climate change?

The second why should be easy to figure out if you took basic human biology.

https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

What does this have to do with water getting cut off or restored to people with outstanding bills?

Probably because the top comment mentioned "ecosystem"?

You're not a conceptual kind of person, are you?

You can be as patronizing as you want, but you might want to make sure all the pieces line up first.

The first comment mentioned thinking about people living in an ecosystem before money. The second jumped to saying for some bizzare reason that "it will be horrifying when all the water goes away and large swathes of the US are evacuated" which is nonsensical in most contexts and has absolutely nothing to do with what they replied to.

Instead of realizing this, you went further off on a tangent of global climate change disrupting water supply.

Instead of recognizing that this is all a giant non sequitur to the philosophical questions of paying for fundamental human needs, you lost track of the conversation and insulted me instead. Focus up.

If people don't have access to clean drinking water it's simply not a first world country.

You can agree or disagree with cutting off water to people who haven't payed their water bill, but it is not correct to say they don't have access to water.

please explain how someone that has their water cut off still has access to water

It would be more correct to say that they don't have access to money. If someone lives next door to a grocery store you wouldn't say they don't have access to food. Likewise if someone can't pay their water bill, they are in danger of not obtaining any neccesaties like food or heat.

The problem would be more clear to say they don't have access to any free water or don't have access to money or a source of income. Saying they don't have access to water implies the infrastructure isn't there, which is not the problem that needs to be solved in this case.

there is no material difference: if your water is cutoff, the reason does not matter. it just seems incredibly shortsighted to put the entire population in danger because of a few dollars

Again, I don't know if anyone is actually critical of turning people's water back on and that isn't what is being talked about here.

All I said was that saying in a general sense that people don't have access to water implies infrastructure problems which isn't the case here.

When someone says 'infrastructure and access isn't the problem' and you say "I for one, think people deserve water" that's just nonsensical and self righteous.

It sometimes rains outside, duh.

> Duggan said that financial reasons should not be a reason for Detroiters to live without water amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Any other time is fine though, water not being essential to life if you can’t afford it but rather a luxury. The US is an insane place. What a time to be alive.

It could have been an Onion piece but nope that’s real life.

Are the stories I hear all true? From what I heard, in the US

- people are afraid to get tested because of the cost - people can’t get tested because there are no tests - people are afraid to stay home - people think corona is just slightly worse than the flu - people think it will just peter out

That’s terrifying.

Why is it terrifying? Are you acting on data or by relying on media scare?

It is only somewhat worse than typical flu, Heck lesser than Spanish Flu. Nowhere near plagues humanity weathered already. Much less terrible then wars too.

Tests have some 15% false positive rate and are not useful in a viruses that propagate this fast for any other intent than confirmation. They are getting improved.

Treatment is supportive, if you're afraid care will be overloaded, get a pulse oximeter, oxygen tanks, reduction and mask, disinfectants (esp. water treatment) and about month store of easily digestible, easy to prepare food, and certainly water to smooth over any interruptions. (Don't kid yourself, you cannot store a month of water. Maybe drinking water, but not technical. Still bulky.)

Multivitamin and extra vitamin C which maybe will help. (It is slightly effective in colds, which it is a kind of.)

If you're really rich, get some hydroquinone synthesized. Useful chemical even if you won't use it for this epidemic.

This, and quarantine, is the most anyone can do. Walking around in protective gear is a joke as operator error will kill effectiveness.

> It is only somewhat worse than typical flu

Yes, and that's why Italy is in full lockdown, and the world economy in tanking for a week now, because "it's just the flu bro".

> get a pulse oximeter, oxygen tanks, reduction and mask, disinfectants (esp. water treatment) and about month store of easily digestible, easy to prepare food, and certainly water to smooth over any interruptions.

The majority of americans are living paycheck to paychek and you're telling them to setup a basic hospital in their living room. People are dying of diabetes in that country, do you think they can afford all that and a month of supply if they can't afford insulin to literally save their life ?

Some of you are so out of touch with reality, that's the terrifying part for me. Recommending vitamin C is laughable at that point.

Yes, that is exactly why everyone is in lockdown, because there is enough panic and nothing more can be done. So anything that seems politically acceptable is being done. It won't be effective and is at best false sense of security. It is about as effective as quarantining kids after mumps outbreaks, which is not much, and this thing spreads quicker. The question is not if, but when you will be infected, and if your immune system will be able to handle it. For most, it will be a cold, for the others where it won't, unless they have their own hardware, they're screwed. As seen in Italy. Chinese were able to spin up hospitals, most everyone else does not have enough hardware.

Hospitals get overloaded with about few hundred cases, give or take.

Coronavirus tests are not effective preventative measures. (Not yet anyway.)

Good pulse oximeter costs maybe $20, an O2 tank with hardware and mask $80-100. If you cannot afford that, you're literally screwed. I bet you would pay more off a copay for a bed in the US. If that's the case, good luck.

If you cannot afford food, you're also screwed, there's no charity that will help. As a reminder, many people died from Spanish Flu due to malnutrition. And old age. This combination is also problematic for COVID-19. Strict isolation measures do not work reliably against this kind of virus. They did not work for flu nor for cold, they won't for this one. They can at best slow it down a bit and delay, which is ok if you use this time to do something meaningful - China did, others cannot.

Government could try to help with this but US is allergic to handouts. There is enough food and production capability to distribute rations if need be. I hope they're being stockpiled. Probably are not.

> It won't be effective and is at best false sense of security. It is about as effective as quarantining kids after mumps outbreaks

The whole point of slowing down (or stopping) movements is to slow down the spread enough to let hospitals handle as few sick people at once as possible. Western europeans countries have very good health systems as long as they're not overcrowded. It really isn't rocket science. If you have 2000 beds and 6000 sick people you're fucked, if you have the same amount of beds and a continuous flow of low amount of sick people spread over weeks or months it's just a bit worse than business as usual.

It's not panicking, it's taking steps to ensure the virus doesn't get more serious than it is.

Recovery takes too long for such preventative measures to matter at all. It increases the delay but does not reduce load.

The hospitals explode almost immediately with medium to hard cases.

(We know thanks to Chinese data that recovery can easily be a month for harder cases. We know how fast medical systems get overwhelmed, and how much overcapacity would be necessary.)

Well, we'll see how it develops, it's too early to tell but it'll be easy to compare France/Italy to the US.

Not op but want to comment on how similar the situation is to something ycombinator folks might have more experience with: its essentially a DDOS attack, because the time it takes to scale resources to meet demand is longer than the rate of growth of requests.

It is "terrifying" (may be bit of an exaggeration, I'd call it deeply worrying) because if people who are sick is not tested, and is afraid of staying at home due to job concern and/or not caring since the disease is mild, they'd be spreading it further.

The sickness is not very serious for the young and healthy, it is quite deadly or the elderly (21%+ for 80+ people https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se... ) - speaking as someone who live and work with elderly and/or compromised people, the long asymptomatic period is worrying enough on its own, the thought that there are people who are showing symptom but are still walking around going to work / movies / etc is scary.

Nobody is acting on “media scare”, as you and Fox News are calling it. It’s called science, and it’s driven by facts, based on data from sources such as the WHO. The information given explains the risks and precautions that should be considered. You don’t have to believe but please don’t spread misinformation.

Perhaps you should go read about what's actually happening in Italy?

For example:

https://threader.app/thread/1237142891077697538

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1236933818654896129.html

It's not about me, I'll probably survive. It's about all other people. No matter if it's 1% or 4%, I hate to see people go.

Bzzt! It pegs critical care facilities if not contained and then a lot of people die.

And a lot is approximately what number? (Including secondaries sure to lack of care including other matters.)

It might sound callous, but likely not enough to cause even a momentary pause... Because worst case here seems to be a few millions.

You seem to lack empathy.

God this post is so full of bullshit. I expect better from HN.

but then I just discovered my co-worker is antivaxx. the world seems bent on disappointing me lately.

I've seen some QAnon believers on here a few months ago so all bets are off.

What does running water usually cost in the US if $25 is a countermeasure during an epidemic? I pay less than that as a full price.

Normal water usage in the US costs more than $25 a month.

(https://www.statista.com/statistics/720418/average-monthly-c...)

If you don't have septic you have to double that cost as well to pay for sewage treatment.

This cost is most likely already subsidized by local property taxes, it doesn't take in account the total cost to provide water (Water Towers, wells, infrastructure, etc.), or the fact that Deriot has horrible water to begin with and needs more conditioning.

How is the USA considered a “developed country”?

Detroit is right next to Lake St. Clair and Detroit River. I know someone that had the bright idea of watering his garden by taking water directly from Lake St. Clair. He bought a large 3x3 foot plastic water container, put it on the back of his the truck. When he tried to fill it up, got stopped by the Police. What's the legality of taking water directly from the Lake?

Living off the land, is not really an option if its illegal to take water. And outside of the mountain regions, very little public land. Not that you could take trees from public land either.

This is the main content of the article, just in case the headline is a little misleading.

The City of Detroit announced on Monday that it will restore water to residents in the city who have had their service cut off due to unpaid bills ... for a $25 fee and then keep their water on during the crisis for $25 per month.

The state is assisting by paying the $25 fees for the first 30 days of the program.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com