Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that, in a country of 330 million people, you only came up with two examples. Those things are newsworthy because they're outliers.

View on HN

There are more cases of subtler failures that are smaller in scope, eg. in the Chicago metro[1], or on the UNC campus[2].

I do agree with part of your sentiment. Those two examples are the worst case scenarios where misfortunes happened to align, and there are periods in history, as well as other countries today, where this sort of problem was/is rampant.

This is also not (exactly) a recent problem - the groundwork, no pun intended, was often laid long ago.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/21/lead-contami...

[2] https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article268...

Lead in water pipes is generally fine as long as the water is treated correctly.

With that said, we're now actually putting the money towards replacing them.

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/funding-...

Or perhaps I picked two top-of-mind examples that other readers would recognize in the name of brevity? Those are not the only examples: https://abcnews.go.com/US/map-ongoing-water-crises-happening...

And that list doesn't even include the tragedy of the commons situation that is California.

But going back to Jackson, Mississippi, it seems that elected officials refuse to properly fulfill their role in governing. Ie. serving the public. What does that say about an empire? It's not some accident that they are helpless in, more that it is in decline.

Alright, I'll moderate my argument a bit by acknowledging that I'd have to use both hands to count the number of places that ABC reported as having newsworthy municipal water problems. But that's roughly what I'd expect in a country that's doing pretty darn well at water provision! Elected officials focus on doing what will get them re-elected, and nobody gets re-elected by saying "During my time in office, I made sure the water department replaced their intake filters on the schedule recommended by the manufacturer."

When you consider the political incentives, it's an under-appreciated miracle that politicians in the US serve the public at all and that things shamble along as well as they do.

Here are almost 13 million examples for you.

https://www.nrdc.org/resources/lead-pipes-are-widespread-and...

“Lead service lines—the pipes that carry water from the water main under the street to residences—have long been recognized as the primary contributor of lead in drinking water (we’ll call them lead pipes for simplicity’s sake). After conducting a survey of these lead pipes in the United States, NRDC estimates that there is a range of 9.7 million to 12.8 million pipes that are, or may be, lead, spread across all 50 states, including those that claim to have none.”

This affects some 22 million people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com