Toledo-area water advisory – Microcystin found in samples | Hacker News Reader

Toledo-area water advisory – Microcystin found in samples

toledoblade.com

12 pointswhitehat2k97 comments

Interesting, seems rather important and big news.

Currently (22:39 EST) no mention of this on major news sites:

Let's see what they have:

* CNN: "Lt. Goldin killed in battle, Israel says" -- really CNN? Here is a major US city declaring water emergency today and they are putting in bold on the front page the name of some Israeli soldier I don't care about.

* CNBC: "Trek Bicycles has managed to hold onto some domestic production. Inside their Wisconsin headquarters." company makes something in US. Kind of good, at last US related. Still not sure if it trumps water emergency in a major city.

* Fox: "Libertarians could cause problems for Republicans in key Senate races" -- top story. But buried down below the scroll line in small font: "Ohio city tells residents not to drink the water". That that is something at least.

Meanwhile on http://www.reddit.com/r/news/ this is top story with 4600+ upvotes. Granted there are stupid comments at the start of the thread. But also plenty of discussion about what the problem is, how it started, what to do if you drank the water.

I don't know, I just kind of thought it is an interesting study in what media thinks is important for people to know and what people actually want to know.

This has been national news all day. It's been the top news story in Ohio all day. National news has moved on.

I heard about it first on cnn.com - it's not the top story, but it is on the front page.

It's not really major national news because everyone expects it to last only a short time, i.e. a non-issue for everyone else.

If it lasted a few days it would rapidly rise.

Not entirely apples-to-apples but there was water contamination in west virginia earlier this year and it was over 5 days before water drinkable again (that was due to a spill though and not algae).

This is why I get most of my news from the Internet. The other news stories are definitely important but being in the toledo area (thankfully in a town that doesn't get water from Lake erie) kind of gives this one a bit more immediate relevance.

HN always sinks the threads I find interesting, here's this same subject from earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125881

If you are affected by this, a regular carbon filter is effective in cleaning the water. Make sure it's not an old (used up) filter.

Paper/poly/string filters will do nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com