Tag Archives: water crisis

The water crisis the Trump administration didn’t want you to know about

The government just released a huge study about chemicals. Mazel tov! You made it through the most boring part of this article. Now for the fun stuff: The Trump administration didn’t want you to see the results of this study.

As you go about your daily business, you’re surrounded by compounds called perfluoroalkyls, or PFAS. They’re used in carpeting, food packaging, clothing, pots and pans, and the foam firefighters use to douse flames, to name a few. That’s because PFAS are resistant to heat, water, and oil. They’re incredibly helpful! They’re also toxic.

According to a major study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday, the EPA has seriously underestimated how much of this stuff human beings can safely be exposed to. The major takeaway? PFAS have thoroughly contaminated many of the nation’s water sources, and they are associated with cancer, liver damage, fertility issues, and more — even in small doses. The study is the most fleshed-out assessment of information on PFAS to date, and it found that the EPA’s exposure limits should be 10 times lower than they are now.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the study’s findings, here’s the story behind why EPA chief Scott Pruitt and the White House wanted to block its publication in the first place.

White House emails from earlier this year show that the Trump administration was worried the study would cause a “public relations nightmare,” and Pruitt’s aides intervened to block the report. An unnamed White House aide also said, “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful,” according to a report in Politico last month.

In other words, the Trump administration headed off a study that highlighted a major public health crisis because officials didn’t want to deal with the fallout. When members of Congress got vocal about releasing the report, Pruitt decided to hold a summit at EPA headquarters about PFAS in drinking water systems at the end of May.

The saga, already pretty dramatic, started to resemble an episode of House of Cards when an AP reporter was forcibly removed from that summit. The reporter, along with journalists from CNN, Politico, and E&E News, were barred from entering the summit because of limited space, but reporters who were allowed to sit in on the meeting tweeted out pictures of empty chairs in the room.

It seems like Pruitt should have learned by now that doing something like, oh, I don’t know, forcibly ejecting a reporter from a summit, only serves to attract attention to the very thing he’s trying to downplay. Luckily for us, he’s a slow learner. It’s worth highlighting two more notable revelations from the newly published 852-page CDC report.

In studies of rats and mice, researchers found regular exposure to PFAS affected development, body weight, and brain activity. If you’re thinking, “Well, those are just rats!”, keep in mind that the CDC assumes humans are more sensitive to this stuff than other animals when it goes about setting exposure limits.
The CDC only looked at 14 PFAS compounds in its study. There are more than 4,000 kinds of PFAS chemicals out there in the world, and the chemical industry regularly switches between types. So there’s a lot to learn about these pesky and incredibly harmful little compounds.

It’s no wonder the Trump administration wanted to keep this one quiet. A Harvard study from 2016 that analyzed PFAS contamination in drinking water showed that 6 million Americans were drinking water that exceeded the EPA’s limits — and that was using the agency’s old standards. This new study indicates a lot more people are at risk than previously thought.

There’s another reason why White House officials may have hoped this report would fly under the radar. Earlier this year, the Department of Defense reported to Congress that 126 water systems at or nearby military bases in the U.S. were contaminated with PFAS. More than 600 additional sites are at risk of serious contamination, which means the federal government will have to foot a hefty cleanup bill. But if there’s one thing we know about Scott Pruitt, it’s that he hates spending money on the environment.

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The water crisis the Trump administration didn’t want you to know about

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Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the next few weeks, Detroit is set to start shutting off water to thousands of residents with unpaid bills. Since the shutoffs began four years ago, tens of thousands of Detroiters have had their water cut off, drawing sharp criticism from local anti-poverty activists as well as the United Nations.

Households are slated for shutoff once their water bill is 60 days or $150 past due. While more than 17,000 households are at risk, Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, told the Detroit Free Press that roughly 2,000 will actually be shut off as more residents enroll in repayment and assistance plans. The city’s Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP), for instance, offers up to $1,000 a year to help customers catch up on their accounts.

According to Brown, the average home slated for shutoff this year is $663 past due, and most water connections are restored within 48 hours of being turned off. City records obtained by Bridge Magazine show that the number of yearly shutoffs went from 33,000 in 2014 to 17,500 last year. Overall, there have been more than 101,000 shutoffs in the past four years.

In late March, Mayor Mike Duggan’s office touted the $7 million that has been spent in the last two years to help Detroiters facing shutoffs. Just the week before, the city council approved a $7.8 million contract to Homrich Wrecking for conducting water shutoffs.

Advocates who work with the poor black and brown Detroiters who are most vulnerable to losing their water say the city’s financial assistance programs are inadequate. They are little more than “a marketing plan being framed as a compassionate solution,” says Monica Lewis Patrick, president and CEO of We the People of Detroit, a grassroots group fighting the water shutoffs. Many Detroiters who enroll in payment plans are at risk of falling back into cycles of nonpayment, says Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. “Not because they’re lazy or just choosing to be poor,” but because “there are a whole lot of reasons why people are poor and there are lots of poor people in Detroit.”

Brown told the Free Press that the tricky part of conducting shutoffs is “separating the truly needy from those who are just not paying.” That line of thinking, says Fancher, presumes that those who aren’t paying are “deadbeats that have the money, but have chosen not to pay. This is completely contrary to the reality of most people who are dealing with these shutoffs.”

In a city that’s 80 percent black, more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty, the highest rate among the nation’s 20 largest cities. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent and the median income is around $28,000. Yet water rates have climbed as much as 400 percent in the last 20 years.

Large-scale water shutoffs began in 2014, just as the city was crawling out from the wreckage of the country’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, pegged at $18 billion. The shutoffs have been advertised as an unavoidable, if painful, treatment for restoring the city’s fiscal health. In 2014, the office of then-Emergency Manager Kevin Orr referred to the shutoffs as “a necessary part of Detroit’s restructuring.” Patrick isn’t buying it: “You can’t convince me that while you’re smiling at me and shutting my water off that this is good for me and you represent my interests. As my grandmother would say, ‘You can’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.’”

In 2014, two United Nations special rapporteurs declared the shutoff policy a “violation of the most basic human rights.” “I heard testimonies from poor African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices — to pay the water bill or to pay their rent,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the special rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, said after visiting the city. Among the findings she recounted:

Ms. de Albuquerque cited the case of a woman whose water had been cut and whose teenage daughters had to wash themselves with a bottle of water during menstruation. In other instances, she continued, she heard mothers who feared losing their children because their water was shut off; heads of household who feared losing access to water without any prior notice; others who feared receiving unaffordable and arbitrary water bills.

Activists and researchers have pointed out that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s financial woes can’t be blamed entirely on the city, since it stretches far beyond the city itself, serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population. The progressive think tank Demos has described the decision to include the department’s $6 billion debt in the city’s bankruptcy filing as an accounting trick used to negotiate more favorable terms with lenders.

We the People of Detroit and other grassroots groups have been organizing to not only stop the shutoffs, but make water more affordable. Cities like Philadelphia are experimenting with tying residents’ water bills to their incomes to ensure that families don’t become trapped in a cycle of missed payments. We the People recommends that no family living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($25,100 for a family of four) pays more than roughly 3 percent of their income for water, the rate considered affordable under UN guidelines. (The Environmental Protection Agency pegs affordability at 4.5 percent of median household income.) In 2017, Michigan State University researchers found that the median household spends about $1,620 on water bills annually, roughly 6.5 percent of a poverty-line income. More alarmingly, they found that by 2022, water rates would climb to unaffordable levels for 35 percent of households nationally.

Under an income-based plan, Fancher says, many Detroiters would not be paying market rate for water, but they would be paying something, leaving the city in better financial shape than it is under the status quo: “You replace a whole lot of people who are paying nothing with a whole lot of people who are paying something. In the long run, the utility is far better off than it would be.”

However, the city has refused to alter water rates, insisting that its hands are tied by a state constitutional amendment that requires new taxes to be approved by voters. An affordability fee, Fancher argues, would not legally be a tax. The constitutional argument, he says, has been “a convenient excuse for not doing something that makes a whole lot of sense.”

Some water rights activists see the city’s intransigence as more evidence of a quiet campaign to push poor people of color out of the city. In a recent study, We the People found that many home foreclosures concentrated in Detroit’s black communities were driven in part by overdue water bills. “It’s about using water to displace residents in order bring in a younger, whiter population to dilute black political power in Detroit,” Patrick says. They are “weaponizing water as a tool of gentrification.”

Continued:

Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

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One Obvious Way You Can Start Conserving Water

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One Obvious Way You Can Start Conserving Water

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How Our Jeans Are Damaging the Rivers Around Us

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How Our Jeans Are Damaging the Rivers Around Us

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