[Midnight Oil]

Thank you BOTH to r taking the bait, Plant and Adam...
I'm thinking about using you both also!
Man lawsuits really mean QUILT? In both your case certain gullibility!
You all can SUE back too!
OY!
Seems the automobile makers need to be sued also...caused a big drop in the city tax base...sue the politicians that made it easy the moved jobs overseas (sarcasm)

Nearly two years ago, the state decided to save money by switching Flint's water supply from Lake Huron (which they were paying the city of Detroit for), to the Flint River, a notorious tributary that runs through town known to locals for its filth.
The switch was made during a financial state of emergency for the ever-struggling industrial town. It was supposed to be temporary while a new state-run supply line to Lake Huron was ready for connection. The project was estimated to take about two years.
Soon after the switch, the water started to look, smell and taste funny. Residents said it often looked dirty.
"The water would come in brown and my daughter was like 'Mom ... why is the water brown?' "
Kelso thought it was sewage, but it was actually iron. The Flint River is highly corrosive: 19 times more so than the Lake Huron supply,
According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality wasn't treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, in violation of federal law. Therefore, the water was eroding the iron water mains, turning water brown.
But what residents couldn't see was far worse. About half of the service lines to homes in Flint are made of lead and because the water wasn't properly treated, lead began leaching into the water supply, in addition to the iron.
This had been the status quo for nearly two years, and until September, city and state officials told worried residents that everything was fine. Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling even drank it on local TV to make the point.
Later it became publicly known that federal law had not been followed. A 2011 study on the Flint River found it would have to be treated with an anti-corrosive agent for it to be considered as a safe source for drinking water

How tap water became toxic in Flint, Michigan
By Sara Ganim and Linh Tran, CNN
Updated 10:53 AM ET, Wed January 13, 2016
Toxic water crisis draws federal investigation

Toxic water crisis draws federal investigation 04:49
Story highlights
When Michigan officials switched water sources for Flint, it introduced iron and lead into the water supply
A class-action lawsuit alleges lead poisoning and some have called for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to resign
(CNN)Flint, Michigan, lies about 70 miles from the shores of the largest group of fresh water bodies in the world: the Great Lakes. Yet its residents can't get clean water from their taps.

A city employee flushes out a hydrant.
A city employee flushes out a hydrant.
FEMA aiding in toxic water crisis

FEMA aiding in toxic water crisis 03:15
Nearly two years ago, the state decided to save money by switching Flint's water supply from Lake Huron (which they were paying the city of Detroit for), to the Flint River, a notorious tributary that runs through town known to locals for its filth.
"We thought it was a joke," said Rhonda Kelso, a long-time Flint resident. "People my age and older, thought 'They're not going to do that.' "
The switch was made during a financial state of emergency for the ever-struggling industrial town. It was supposed to be temporary while a new state-run supply line to Lake Huron was ready for connection. The project was estimated to take about two years.
What's in the water?
Soon after the switch, the water started to look, smell and taste funny. Residents said it often looked dirty.
Rhonda Kelso and her daughter
Rhonda Kelso and her daughter
"The water would come in brown and my daughter was like 'Mom ... why is the water brown?' "
Kelso thought it was sewage, but it was actually iron. The Flint River is highly corrosive: 19 times more so than the Lake Huron supply, according to researchers from Virginia Tech.
According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality wasn't treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, in violation of federal law. Therefore, the water was eroding the iron water mains, turning water brown.
But what residents couldn't see was far worse. About half of the service lines to homes in Flint are made of lead and because the water wasn't properly treated, lead began leaching into the water supply, in addition to the iron.
This had been the status quo for nearly two years, and until September, city and state officials told worried residents that everything was fine. Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling even drank it on local TV to make the point.
The city is now issuing bottled water to Flint residents.
The city is now issuing bottled water to Flint residents.
But in August, a group of skeptical researchers from Virginia Tech came up and did in-home testing and found elevated levels of lead in the drinking water and made those findings public. State officials insisted their own research was more accurate.
"You're paying for poison. I'm paying for water that's a toxic waste," Kelso said. She and her daughter and four other families are now part of a class-action lawsuit that alleges not only lead poisoning but several medical conditions resulting from contaminated water after the switch. CNN sought responses from all the defendants, and many did not respond.
Later it became publicly known that federal law had not been followed. A 2011 study on the Flint River found it would have to be treated with an anti-corrosive agent for it to be considered as a safe source for drinking water.
Adding that agent would have cost about $100 a day, and experts say 90% of the problems with Flint's water would have been avoided.
But Flint residents say they were kept in the dark for 18 months until a local doctor took things into her own hands.
The hero doctor
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha
Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha
In the pediatric ward of Flint's Hurley Medical Center, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha was seeing more and more worried parents fretting over rashes and hair loss.
No one believed state and local officials when they said that this icky brown water was safe.
Hanna-Attisha, an animated and passionate young pediatrician with horn-rimmed glasses who everyone calls Dr. Mona, realized there was a way to determine whether the water was affecting kids. Medicare requires states to keep records of blood lead levels in toddlers. The comparison was astonishing. Lead levels doubled and even tripled in some cases.
"When (my research team and I) saw that it was getting into children and when we knew the consequences, that's when I think we began not to sleep," Hanna-Attisha said.
At first, the state publicly denounced her work, saying she was causing near hysteria. They spent a week attacking her before reversing their narrative and admitting she was right.
"Their information wasn't flawed. They had the data, but they were being told by the DEQ that there wasn't a problem, they just dismissed it," said Hanna-Attisha and confirmed by the state-appointed task force. "There was almost like blinders on," she added. CNN contacted DEQ's former director, Dan Wyant, who made the decision and later resigned over the issue. He did not respond.

The FEDERAL EPA was the one at FAULT!?

According to local officials, about 40% of residents are below the poverty rate. Fifteen percent of homes are boarded up and abandoned. Weaver says the city of 100,000 doesn't even have a grocery store. And now its residents don't have clean water either.
Suppose poor people don't count..BOO HOO
Take a walk...the both of you.

[Newfie]

A bad running EPA is better than NO EPA

He's talking about cutting, not eliminating.

Let's try to not get carried away with the matter.

[onlooker]

A bad running EPA is better than NO EPA

He's talking about cutting, not eliminating.

Let's try to not get carried away with the matter.

But a few on this thread seem to intimate that the US, would be better off without the EPA. Hence, my comment

[Midnight Oil]

A FEW don't mean it's a valid determination....see my thread by Scientific America.

[Midnight Oil]

You fellas here must have a high intake of Roundup in the brain!

Defying the recommendation of his own agency’s scientists, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has refused to ban a widely used pesticide that’s been linked to learning disabilities in children.

Pruitt’s order, signed late Wednesday, allows chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate insecticide that’s been used on crops from broccoli to cranberries since the 1960s, to remain on the market for agricultural use. The EPA proposed in November 2015 under the Obama administration to permanently ban the chemical on food crops, citing potential risks to human health. The move stemmed from a 2007 petition filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network North America.

Critics on Thursday condemned Pruitt and President Donald Trump for showing they value corporate profits over public health. The move, less than two months after Pruitt was confirmed as the nation’s top environmental officer, signals far looser regulation of harmful substances under the Trump administration.

“If the new administration is willing to support corporate interests over public safety in the face of such strong scientific evidence, then we should expect clear sailing for many other questionable pesticides in the future,” Carey Gillam, a HuffPost contributor and research director for U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, told The Huffington Post in an email.

Pruitt, a lawyer who has shown disdain for scientific research, said the Obama-era proposal to ban the pesticide relied largely on studies “whose application is novel and uncertain, to reach its conclusions.”

“We need to provide regulatory certainty to the thousands of American farms that rely on chlorpyrifos, while still protecting human health and the environment,” Pruitt, a longtime antagonist of the agency he now leads, said in a statement. “By reversing the previous Administration’s steps to ban one of the most widely used pesticides in the world, we are returning to using sound science in decision-making — rather than predetermined results

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sco ... ac7092fbd8

Make America Third World

[Midnight Oil]

Just because you think it shouldn't... Sure anything you want...LOL
Cost/benefit ...OK the panel will be chosen by ....and the determining factors by...
First you claim it should be determined at the State level and later by the Congress and "people"?
Sure thing, pstar...this site has many corporate " Plants"...LOL

[Plantagenet]

Thank you ... taking the bait, Plant...

So you're purpose in posting here is to bait people?



Sheeesh. What a waste of time.

Cheers!

[clif]

Environmental chlorpyrifos does not cross state lines

really???

Pruitt’s order, signed late Wednesday, allows chlorpyrifos, an organophosphate insecticide that’s been used on crops from broccoli to cranberries since the 1960s, to remain on the market for agricultural use.

So the chlorpyrifos was organic to the plant and NOT spread in the environment of the plants these food stocks were harvested from before they were trucked across state lines?????????

Interesting slimy attempt at a dodge to the actual problem, the food which is contaminated, not just the fields the plants grow in.

[Midnight Oil]

Seems LAW firms are already soliciting clients for a class action suit.
Cha Ching...and that ain't no City in China...LOL

[Midnight Oil]

Locally?
5 Reasons to Like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Thanks to Clean Air Act rules, the levels of many other toxic substances in our air, such as mercury, benzene, and arsenic, have also dropped substantially. A major update to the law in 1990 allowed EPA to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants, the main cause of acid rain. Life has begun to come back in acidified lakes in the Adirondacks.

Complying with EPA’s air pollution rules has been costly—they’re the biggest burden the agency imposes on the economy. But the federal Office of Management and Budget, analyzing data collected from 2004 to 2014, estimates that the health and other benefits of the rules exceeded the costs by somewhere between $113 billion and $741 billion a year.
Industry wasn’t the only problem. Before 1970, most cities and towns simply dumped their sewage directly into waterways, with little or no treatment. Intrepid bathers in Long Island Sound were routinely surrounded by bits of used toilet paper. Stinky algal blooms were common, as were fish kills.

The Clean Water Act led to tens of billions of federal dollars being invested in municipal sewage treatment plants. The law’s simple goal is to make every river, stream, and lake in the U.S. swimmable and fishable. We’re not there yet: The Cuyahoga “is not on fire anymore, but I wouldn’t swim in it,” William Suk of the National Institutes of Health told National Geographic a few years ago
In 1972, Ruckelshaus effectively banned the use of DDT in the U.S., except in limited cases where it was needed to protect public health. That same year Congress passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, giving EPA more clear authority to regulate pesticides in general based on their impact on health and the environment.


5 Reasons to Like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
It keeps a lot of dangerous stuff from being dumped in our air, water, and land.

Picture of Siemens AG wind turbines
The EPA's Clean Power Plan is designed to reduce carbon emissions from power plants, in part by encouraging the development of renewable energy sources, like these wind turbines in Iowa.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY FADEK, BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
By Brian Clark Howard
Robert Kunzig
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 9, 2016
President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican, established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970. In announcing his intent to nominate Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to be EPA administrator in December, then President-elect Donald J. Trump chose a man who has sued the EPA several times and attacked its “activist agenda.” Trump said during his election campaign he would like to abolish the agency.

In late January, Trump reportedly instructed the EPA to remove information from its website that referred to climate change.

All of which might lead you to wonder: Why do we have an EPA, anyway?

Nixon didn’t really want to create it. The first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, a third-generation Republican lawyer and politician from Indiana, later recalled that Nixon created the EPA “because of public outrage about what was happening to the environment. Not because Nixon shared that concern, but because he didn't have any choice.” That April, 20 million Americans had gone outside to participate in the first Earth Day celebrations.

Nixon had other things on his mind. Six days after Earth Day, he authorized American troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia, an action that brought more demonstrators into the streets. To Nixon, according to Ruckelshaus, antiwar protesters and environmentalists were birds of a feather—“both reflected weakness in the American character.”

After establishing the EPA, Nixon took little interest in its work. “Every time I'd meet with him, he would just lecture me about the 'crazies' in the agency and advise me not to be pushed around by them,” said Ruckelshaus. “He never once asked me, 'Is there anything wrong with the environment? Is the air really bad? Is it hurting people?'"

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In fact, it was. There were many things wrong with the environment in 1970. Here are five ways our world has changed for the better since then, thanks in part to the EPA.

The way we were: Smoke and smog cloak the sky over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in December 1936. The EPA began regulating air pollution soon after it was created in 1970.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE, THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, GETTY IMAGES
1. AIR
Before the government began to rein in pollution from smokestacks and tailpipes, dense, dark, and even choking smog was a frequent occurrence in American cities and towns. In 1948, spectators at a football game in Donora, Pennsylvania, couldn’t see the players or the ball because of smog from a nearby coal-fired zinc smelter; 20 people died. In Los Angeles in the 1960s, smog often hid the mountains.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 gave EPA the authority to regulate harmful air pollutants. One of the most dramatic success stories was lead, which was widely used in paint but also in gasoline to improve engine performance. EPA estimated that more than 5,000 Americans were dying every year from heart disease linked to lead poisoning; many children were growing up with diminished IQ.

By 1974, EPA had begun a phaseout of lead from gasoline. The gradual effort took until 1995 to completely end the practice, but the result has been a measurable 75 percent drop in blood lead levels in the public.

Thanks to Clean Air Act rules, the levels of many other toxic substances in our air, such as mercury, benzene, and arsenic, have also dropped substantially. A major update to the law in 1990 allowed EPA to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants, the main cause of acid rain. Life has begun to come back in acidified lakes in the Adirondacks.

Complying with EPA’s air pollution rules has been costly—they’re the biggest burden the agency imposes on the economy. But the federal Office of Management and Budget, analyzing data collected from 2004 to 2014, estimates that the health and other benefits of the rules exceeded the costs by somewhere between $113 billion and $741 billion a year.

1969 was not the first time: In 1952 an oil slick caught fire on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio. It destroyed three tug boats, three buildings, and the ship repair yards.
PHOTOGRAPH FROM BETTMANN, CORBIS, GETTY
2. WATER
In the early 1960s, when Ruckelshaus was a deputy attorney general in Indiana, he was assigned to the Stream Pollution Control Board. The board had rules against pollution but wasn’t enforcing them much. Ruckelshaus and a sanitary engineer “would go around the state in a panel truck and collect samples out of streams choked with dead fish,” then try to prosecute the grossest violations. In general, he recalled, states like Indiana were more worried about losing industry to other states with laxer rules than about preventing pollution.

When Cleveland's Cuyahoga River exploded into flames in June 1969, it helped change that by inspiring the nascent national environmental movement. The Clean Water Act of 1972 gave EPA the authority to set national rules and enforce them.

Industry wasn’t the only problem. Before 1970, most cities and towns simply dumped their sewage directly into waterways, with little or no treatment. Intrepid bathers in Long Island Sound were routinely surrounded by bits of used toilet paper. Stinky algal blooms were common, as were fish kills.

The Clean Water Act led to tens of billions of federal dollars being invested in municipal sewage treatment plants. The law’s simple goal is to make every river, stream, and lake in the U.S. swimmable and fishable. We’re not there yet: The Cuyahoga “is not on fire anymore, but I wouldn’t swim in it,” William Suk of the National Institutes of Health told National Geographic a few years ago. But people do swim in Boston Harbor and the Hudson River. And the toxic cesspools that literally catch on fire have largely become a thing of the past.

Before the EPA banned its use in the U.S., DDT was a popular agricultural pesticide. Here a farmer riding above the fumes is about to apply it to a corn field in an early experiment to test its effectiveness against the corn borer.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMAN, CORBIS, GETTY IMAGES
3. PESTICIDES
In her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson popularized emerging research that showed DDT was wreaking havoc on birds by making their eggs thin to the point of disintegration. Beloved birds like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon teetered toward extinction. A colorless, nearly odorless insecticide, DDT had been a valuable weapon against disease-carrying mosquitoes and also a boon to farmers. People had so little notion of its dangers they let their children play happily in the spray.

Carson’s book changed the culture, setting the country on the road toward Earth Day and the EPA. In 1972, Ruckelshaus effectively banned the use of DDT in the U.S., except in limited cases where it was needed to protect public health. That same year Congress passed the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, giving EPA more clear authority to regulate pesticides in general based on their impact on health and the environment.

These syringes washed ashore on Staten Island, New York—part of a wave of medical waste that littered beaches and caused panic on the East Coast in the late 1980s.
PHOTOGRAPH FROM BETTMAN, CORBIS, GETTY

4. HAZARDOUS WASTE
Until the 1970s, hazardous chemical waste was general disposed of like ordinary trash—at best in an unlined municipal landfill from which toxic chemicals could seep into groundwater, at worst in open dumps, where runoff from corroded barrels might contaminate streams. The country was dotted with thousands of such dumps.

In 1976 Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), giving EPA the authority to regulate hazardous waste from cradle to grave. EPA now tracks chemical waste from hundreds of thousands of facilities; it requires landfills to be lined and water leaching through them to be collected before it can contaminate drinking water. RCRA also regulates municipal waste and has given a big push to recycling
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016 ... itt/#close

You guys best do a little background search before you all waste my time here again OY

[Newfie]

Clif, my point is not the migration of the substance into the ground, but rather the appropriate jurisdiction to regulate it's sale and use across state lines.

If the effects are local, to a particular community or watershed then it is appropriate for that state's EPA to deal with toxicity issues. Why the feds? You trust the feds? Why? I think locally, just as the poison is a local problem.

So you want it controlled by the ICC?

[Midnight Oil]

No, rather be controlled by Monsanto ,(sarcasm,). Are these people for real?
Unbelievable how this site has been highjacked by corporate lackey.

[Newfie]

No, rather be controlled by Monsanto ,(sarcasm,). Are these people for real?
Unbelievable how this site has been highjacked by corporate lackey.

Midnight,

These people's le are for real, and if you want them to vote as you do then you need to convience them you have a better idea. Otherwise you are just adding to the polarization. How does that help further your goals,

[Midnight Oil]

Newfie, like ANYTHING will alter their perception?
It does not matter to me in the least about changing minds.
Not one bit! If they wish to remain in whatever realm of comfort zone, that is their problem.
I posted my research and links...if they ignore or refuse to accept, not my problem.
As far as convincing ....good luck with that brother!

[Newfie]

Then why are you posting?

[Cog]

All of the various cabinet secretaries have been tasked to come up with ways to cut their budgets and personnel. I thought this was common knowledge and its certainly something Trump campaigned on. Cutting off the heads of the hydra takes time but its worth the effort.

I would go further than Trump and request Congress change civil service rules so that federal employees can be fired at will for any reason or no reason at all. That would put them in line with how the private sector works.

[Midnight Oil]

Speaking of Corporate agents...Newbie this is a prime example...
Perhaps you need to address your post to them...
But they care not because their mission here is NOT what you suggested.
Oh, why am I posting? To counter their progrom of the corporate state takeover of the reigns of Democracy. Someone has to do it.