Plan B Forum

We all know by now the nefarious actions of Big Tobacco, Big Oil and Big Pharma resulting in widespread suffering and death, now here’s a lovely piece detailing how the lead industry set America up for a lead poisoned public water supply which we will spend multibillions to correct - while thousands of lives have been altered beyond repair.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ter-crisis

From the Guardian piece BSG posted:

In Buffalo, community groups are fighting to stop a lead poisoning epidemic that has taken a toll on several generations of the mostly black children in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods.

In 1992 I was running a water testing lab in the Buffalo area. As part training exercise - part public service - part almost free advertising - I decided to do a survey of area lead levels in city water and I got a local TV station to report the results. I didn't want a sensational 'the killer in your basement' type report and I gave a couple of interviews before and after the tests.

Proper sampling of tap water is not simple and I restricted it to employees, whom I could train to carry out the sampling safely and effectively. We had something like 40 samples and the results were interesting: all except a couple were under the then (and I think still) EPA limit of 15 parts per billion (micrograms per liter) limit. And the two positives were from two employees who lived in the older and poorer neighborhoods in Buffalo. Of course it was not a randomly selected series of samples and our employees were largely a middle class bunch living in the 'burbs in newer housing stock. I made this clear in the interview after the results were in (I still have it on a VHS tape somewhere in my basement) (I remember instructions from the interviewer such as "Don't look at the camera, look at me"). I remember saying to the reporter off camera that I wanted to see a much wider survey, we would do the testing at cost (maybe $10 a sample in those days) because of course the local water company was only interested in the lead in the water they supplied to the street and their responsibility did not include whatever happened to it in the customers' homes due to internal lead piping. (I was not aware that the lead industry had pushed for lead piping in the way described in the Guardian piece.). And I suggested that we get supermarkets involved to distribute the test kits and instructions for safe sampling. The reporter looked at me scornfully. "Did you know that there are large areas of this town with no supermarket within miles? We call them food deserts."

That was the first time I had ever heard that term. Remember the shooting at a Buffalo area Tops supermarket a few months ago? There was much celebration when that supermarket opened because it was the first within the food desert and locals - largely black and unwealthy - now had reasonable and reliable access to fresh vegetables and unprocessed food.