Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A U.S. city is facing a public health crisis, after years of denying that it had a problem with lead in its drinking water supply. In 2016, that would have been a reference to Flint, Michigan. This week, it’s Newark, New Jersey, where city officials on Sunday resorted to handing out bottled water to affected residents.
Lead has long been recognized as a potent neurotoxin. The health effects of lead exposure in children include lowered IQ and increased risk of behavioral disorders. Exposed adults are more likely to develop a slew of health problems including nerve, kidney, and cardiovascular issues. Pregnant women and babies are especially vulnerable, as even low levels are associated with serious, irreversible damage to developing brains and nervous systems.
No amount of lead is considered “safe,” but the federal government has set a limit of 15 parts per billion in drinking water. At one point, tests in Flint revealed lead levels at over 100 ppb. In July, a test showed Newark water lead levels at 55 ppb. In both cases residents say the city’s denials and delays came at a cost to their wellbeing.
“The mayor keeps saying that this isn’t like Flint,” Newark resident Shakima Thomas told Grist way back in November. “It is the same as Flint in the way that they tried to cover it up. We were victimized by this administration. They gamble with our health. They put politics first before justice.”
And that pattern appears to be continuing. Some experts say they already have a good idea of where the “next, next Flint” might be.
The warning signs have been in Newark since 2016 — the same year Flint’s crisis hit the front pages. City officials have long denied it has a major lead problem with its drinking water, insisting the issue was limited to buildings with aging infrastructure — though they did shut water fountains down in more than 30 schools, providing bottled water instead. A city-wide water testing plan was set up in 2017 – and over the following 18 months, multiple tests showed more than 10 percent of homes in the city had lead levels exceeding the 15-parts-per-billion federal limit.
Last fall, the city began giving out water filters to some 40,000 residents. But residents complained that they were not told how necessary the filters were, or were unclear on how to properly install them. Then last week, the Environmental Protection Agency sent the city a letter citing serious concerns about drinking water safety, saying the filters Newark residents were given may never have worked properly. The EPA tested water filtered through the city-provided filters and lead levels still came out above the federal limit.
“We are unable at this time to assure Newark residents that their health is fully protected when drinking tap water filtered through these devices,” the EPA’s letter read.
When the city began handing out bottled water this weekend, some residents waited in line for water for hours, only to find out it was only being passed out to people who live in certain areas. (The National Resource Defense Council brought a federal lawsuit against the city to force Newark to deliver bottled water to expand its bottled water giveaway to residents who are pregnant or have children age 6 or younger in the eastern part of the city.) Efforts hit another snag when officials realized the bottled water had expired and had to temporarily stop the handouts.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka issued a joint statement Monday, calling on federal officials to help. “We take this very seriously,” they said. “We want to be out ahead of this.”
While Newark currently holds the dubious moniker of “the next Flint,” advocates say another city is in the running for the title: Pittsburgh. Lead concerns in the Steel City have been bubbling up for years now, culminating with a major lawsuit brought against the city by Pittsburgh United and the NRDC that was settled earlier this year.
In 2014, the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority changed which chemicals they use in the public water pipes. (Chemicals can interact with the lead pipes in different ways, and in some cases, cause corrosion of lead pipes.) By 2016, the number of resident requests for water testing had risen significantly, according to local media. The problem wasn’t publicly acknowledged until 2017, when the city made a plan to distribute water filters to some residents. (That part took through 2018.)
In February 2019, the NRDC and Pittsburgh United settled their lawsuit against the city. The terms? The city agreed to replace thousands of lead pipes, provide all low-income residents with free water filters, and to prioritize action for homes where children live. Lead levels still exceed the federal standard but have been falling over this past year.
“The time lag is extremely serious — and it has a real impact on not only the health of families, but also a huge psychological impact once they find out,” said Dimple Chaudhary, an NRDC attorney and lead counsel in cases against both Flint and Pittsburgh. “I’ve spoken to mothers who are absolutely devastated when they find out they may have fed their baby lead-tainted formula.”
So why do these lead problems take so long for cities to acknowledge?
Chaudhary, who is advising on the NRDC and Newark Education Workers Caucus’ lawsuit against Newark (filed in early 2019), says she sees a pattern with lead contamination crises. First, community members suspect there is a problem, but may not have access to all the related information due to a lack of transparency by public officials. As residents advocate their case to city officials, weak regulations, poorly presented data, and low political will can lead to belated city acknowledgment of the problem. And even when both residents and city officials agree that something must be done, finding and implementing a solution can be chaotic.
“You have confusion about the state of the water, you have mixed messages about what people should do, and then, if things go well, you may have a court or part of the government step in and try to fix it,” she said. “But you’ll see in a lot of cases that the damage has already been done, both to people’s health and the public trust.”
Experts agree that issues with collecting and accessing data are a big part of the problem. It starts with weak regulations: The EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule, part of the Safe Drinking Water Act, only requires cities to test for the two metals every three years. And officials are only required to sample about 10 percent of residences. And even that limited data can be hard to access.
“There are technical limitations in place that seem designed to frustrate access to the data,” said Laura Pangallozzi, a visiting professor of geography at Binghamton University. She explained that the publically available data sets on the EPA website are hard to use without programming skills. This can prevent people (even scientists) from being able to look at lead levels in drinking water nationally to identify outliers. And, according to Pangallozzi, some states don’t report their data at all.
Even assuming a city becomes aware of a lead contamination issue, officials do not always let the public know in a timely or efficient manner. Cities are not required to report lead levels to the public until lead levels hit 15 parts per billion — the threshold at which cities must begin corrosion control measures, like adding chlorine to the water to prevent lead seeping in through the pipes, or, if the state requires it, replace lead pipes in the city water infrastructure.
“How officials roll out the public education requirement will have a big impact on how many people know about it,” Pangallozzi said. “Officials have choices in these matters, and it is such a negative for the reputation of a place, there is going to be natural reluctance to publicize.”
Given the proper incentive though, she said, change can happen fast — like when Washington, D.C. discovered it had a lead problem back in 2004. “They got that taken care of very quickly, by comparison,” she said, “because there were members of Congress drinking the water.”
As for a future “next Flint,” Newark and Pittsburgh may only be the tip of the lead pipe. According to an investigative report commissioned by Congress, about 2 percent of public water systems across the country exceeded the federal limit on lead between 2014 and 2016 — and that was with less than half of states reporting back.
“Even Flint’s highest levels were not atypical for water systems that have problems,” Pangallozzi said.
Link:
‘The next Flint,’ and America’s problem with lead in its water
Nothing puts a damper on one’s romantic life like a Category 5 hurricane. That’s just one of the obstacles faced by 20-year-old former sex worker Dolores “Dulce” Garcia, the sugar daddy-dealing protagonist of the new book Side Chick Nation. As she tries to outrun her past by going from Miami to the Caribbean, she ultimately lands in Puerto Rico just in time for Hurricane Maria.
Climate change and colonialism don’t typically make for a sexy beach read, but Side Chick Nation, the fourth installment in UC Berkeley lecturer Aya de León’s Justice Hustlers feminist heist series, attempts to do just that — weaving action and romance into the vivid backdrop of Puerto Rico’s stilting recovery from Hurricane Maria.
Dulce, the titular “side chick,” is a world-weary pragmatist; she answers the call from a past sugar daddy looking to, well, “reconnect,” all while lying to Zavier, the man with whom she has actually fallen for after just a few dates. After Hurricane Irma slows the flow of sugar daddies in Puerto Rico to a trickle, she finds herself sleeping in a storage unit in San Juan, waiting for the next storm — Maria — to hit.
In the aftermath of the hurricane, she serves as a witness to both the heartbreaking reality of climate change and the exploitation that can ensue. She notes the international businessmen who flock to the island to manipulate the destruction for their own financial gain, making shady use of relief funds and devastating the island even more. De León draws parallels between Dulce’s experience as a “side chick” and Puerto Rico’s relationship with the mainland, which cheerfully exploits the U.S. territory in good times but abandons it when it is in need.
For me, as a Puerto Rican transplant who has reported on Puerto Rico’s recovery after Maria, I was intrigued by the novel’s premise. I talked with de León, who teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley, about Side Chick Nation and why she chose popular fiction as a means to get folks riled up about the climate crisis.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Image courtesy of Aya de León
Q.Why did you write this book? What do you hope readers get out of it?
A. The biggest takeaway that I really want for everyone has to do with Hurricane Maria and the crisis of climate and colonialism in Puerto Rico. I’m hoping people feel that intersection at a level of empathy. Part of what I was thinking of when I was writing was, in the future when this book comes out, the hurricane will have receded from the headlines and yet the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico will be ongoing. I just wanted to make sure that folks could connect to these human stories, this unprecedented level of this devastation at this intersection.
Something that was also super important to me for this book is [to reach] an audience that includes young women of color. I really like the idea of young women of color thinking of themselves as activists around issues like the climate. Being a part of the Puerto Rican diaspora and watching the island get hit made it clear to me that climate change is the top political priority. Climate is something that affects everybody and affects people of color even more. The perception of environmentalism is that it’s a white movement — and that’s not actually true. So I wanted to push back on that.
Q.Where did you get the idea to set the fourth installment of your Justice Hustlers series in a post-Maria Puerto Rico?
A. I was writing another book at the time. I had outlined it and started to work on it. Then, the hurricane hit and I was like, “Oh my god, I have to write about the hurricane!” It occurred to me that the biggest platform that I have was this Justice Hustlers series. I wasn’t sure how to make it make sense with the rest of the series, but I remembered one character from a previous book — Dulce. One of the things I was reading at the time was Salvage the Bones, a novel about Hurricane Katrina. It made me think: what does it mean for the audience to know what’s gonna happen while the characters don’t know?
Q.You went to Puerto Rico to research this book. What was that like?
A. I had not been back to Puerto Rico for a decade. I visited in 2018 about a year after Hurricane Maria hit. It was really intense to be back. One of the things that was so profound is that the whole island has signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There was some sort of emotional chill because people had been deeply impacted in a lot of ways.
I mostly was in San Juan where things looked more or less back to normal. Still, stores were closed and traffic lights were knocked out — and that was almost a year later! I rented a car and drove around the interior of the island, where I saw lots of FEMA tarps blue roofs. I definitely got a sense of the devastation. That was key for me — to just go and just bear witness. It was less about information and more about being present with the community.
Q.The book deals with a lot of really intense issues like colonialism and disaster capitalists while also telling this gripping, feminist romance storyline. Do you think popular fiction in general, might be the way to get people to understand the complex relationship between disparity and climate crisis?
A. I think popular fiction and fiction, in general, has always played that role. It’s hard to empathize with a historical event, but it’s easy to empathize with an individual. And that’s what I wanted — for people to connect. What does it mean to have your homeland devastated, your people devastated? Ultimately, I’m writing romantic suspense but I’m thinking of suspenseful situations that relate to big political situations — like Hurricane María.
Q. Can you tell me about the challenges of writing about disaster?
A. I just had to cry a lot. I had to grieve a lot. And I had to hold off feelings like being unworthy or unable or not up to the task. Here we have this thing that changed the Puerto Rican people, and here I am, this sort of west coast, mixed-heritage diaspora Puerto Rican who is like the second generation born in the U.S. How could I possibly be the person to write this book? Ultimately it’s just the reality of the disaster. Maybe I’m not the right person, but I’m the person with a book contract and I can’t write about anything else.
The hurricane changed stuff for everyone in the diaspora. We have to show up, and what I have to bring to the table is a book that is a popular fiction approach. This may be the story for people that aren’t gonna read Naomi Klein’s Battle for Paradise — although I hope everybody will read that too! I wanted the message to get to the places where I already had a platform. I can’t imagine having written about anything else. This is the story of my people right now.
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Deadly heat waves, violent downpours, wildfires that seem to get more intense every year — the climate crisis leaves no part of the globe untouched. But around the world, the media spins warming and its effects differently. The No. 1 sign of how the press in a given country talks about it? Wealth.
Richer nations tend to politicize the issue, while poorer nations more often present it as a problem of international concern, according to a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change. Researchers in Kansas and Vietnam analyzed more than 37,000 news articles from 45 countries and territories using computer algorithms and found that the strongest predictor of how a given country’s press will cover climate change is Gross Domestic Product per capita. In short: The way a country’s media reports on global warming is based on the resources available to combat it.
Coverage in affluent countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and Spain, focuses on the political debate over how to use ample national resources to address global warming — or whether to do so at all.
Rich countries also tend to frame global warming as a scientific issue — which makes sense, considering that they can devote more dollars to science research. But the study also found that science wasn’t always portrayed accurately. Outlets in richer nations often highlight the voices of people who deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by humans. (That consensus among scientists, for the record, has now likely passed 99 percent). It’s a recurring problem: A new study in the journal Nature Communications found that between 2000 and 2016, prominent climate deniers were featured in a whopping 50 percent more articles than hundreds of scientists.
The media in rich nations “really like the conflict” and tend to “portray climate change as an issue that has not been settled,” said Hong T. Vu, lead author of the study looking at rich vs poor nations and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Kansas.
In contrast, poorer countries, such as Gambia, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka, simply can’t afford to deny climate change — or adapt to it as easily as wealthier countries do. They rely on aid from richer nations to help fund their efforts to stave off warming’s effects, a trend that shows up in the news. An editorial in the Fiji Times earlier this year, for instance, says that curbing the effects of climate change demands a “global effort.” It also points to the influx of climate adaption money coming into the Pacific region from international agencies.
Asking richer nations to contribute more to climate action efforts may sound like charity, but well-to-do nations contribute way more than poorer nations to carbon dioxide emissions to begin with, and that they generally stand to fare better under warming conditions. A study from Stanford University earlier this year found that climate change is widening the economic gap between countries, simultaneously making rich ones richer and poor ones poorer.
Researchers did find some across-the-board trends when they analyzed coverage in both rich and poor nations. After looking at thousands of articles, Vu’s team determined that the most common frame in climate change coverage was international relations, followed by its effects on the economy. The least popular frame for coverage? Social progress. Only 4 percent of stories covered new lifestyle changes or societal developments related to our overheating planet.
“If we look back, climate change has been in the public discussion for 30 years, and we are not doing very well in communicating it,” Vu said. He hopes that the media can figure out how to communicate the issue as an urgent problem that requires meaningful policy action while simultaneously encouraging people to see the role they can play in remedying our planetary predicament.
He probably wouldn’t mind if it would stop sowing confusion about the science, either.
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How do countries cover climate change? Depends how rich they are.
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