Through time, the water in the Flint River has been known to be of poor quality, and was severely degraded during the 1970s, due to "the presence of fecal coliform bacteria, low dissolved oxygen, plant nutrients, oils, and toxic substances." In 2001, the state of Michigan ordered the monitoring and cleanup of 134 polluted sites within the Flint River watershed, including industrial complexes, landfills and farms loaded with pesticides and fertilizer. According to a class-action lawsuit, the state Department of Environmental Quality was not treating the Flint River water with an anti-corrosive agent, which is in violation of federal law. The river water was found to be 19 times more corrosive than water from Detroit, which was from Lake Huron,
The water crisis in Flint Michigan began as early as was as April of 2014. The crisis is concerning a small town called Flint, located at the bottom right of michigan were the majority of the population is African American. The issue began when the town 's water supply witch in past use to come from the detroit river water supply was switched over to the Flint river water supply. People soon began to complain about the taste, smell, and color of the tap water, and of symptoms such as hair loss and rashes from bathing in the water. Even though there were many signs that the water was indeed contaminated, such as when a General Motors plant in Flint stopped using municipal water in October of 2014, claiming that it corroded car parts, the government officials stated that the water was not a threat to the public 's health and safety. However it was later revealed that the water was in fact unhealthy, and contained too much lead. The issue was brought to the eyes of the public when Lee Anne Walters, a Flint resident. This mother of four had seen her family suffer from various alarming symptoms, including abdominal pains, hair loss, and rashes; she also has a son who showed signs of developmental problems. She decided to switch her family to bottled water, and the symptoms abated. Finally, in February of 2015, she demanded that the city test the tap water. A federal investigation was launched and the results came back shocking. The water was extremely toxic containing 400 parts per billion of lead. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), there is no safe level of lead in drinking water, but the maximum allowed by law is 15 parts per billion. Virginia Tech professor and engineer Marc Edwards, an expert on municipal w...
The worker alleges that he suffered a stroke due to the pressures experienced at work, including negotiating tensions between managerial staff and other employees, increasing volume of demands due to a MYOB file being corrupted and policies and procedures requiring being written, implemented, and presented, as well as material changes to his role. The worker's case is that the stress contributed in a material way to the occurrence of the stroke such as to make it compensable pursuant to section 7 of the RTW Act.
There is also daily tasks of people trying washing fruits and vegetables. And not even being able to wash their hands. A quote from the michigan government says, “No one in Michigan or America should live that way in the 21st Century. But these generations of women, and so many more like them, do not trust the water coming out of their pipes.”(Interim Report). Many people is Flint have no trust in their government. They believe it’s all the governments fault because of this and it is. The people have to live a life of being scared of drinking their water, showering, and even washing their hands. No American in the United States should feel like this about their water system at all. For the people in Flint who have to look at brownish, stinky, funny-tasting water is just unacceptable and we need to make a change on this even though it has been out of hand for 3 years.
Most of the rivers are the one being used by large communities like drinking water supply and for the farmers in their produce. The State of Department put together a commission of knowledgeable people and carried out an investigation about the risk and consequences of this project. Some of the conclusion about the spills were, for example, that: “A million of gallons of tar soil war poured into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan… 40 miles of this river still are contaminated to this day”. Another example of spills affecting communities, is the one in 2013, caused by a twenty foot crack in a pipeline, causing a huge spill of oil, damaging the residential neighborhoods and the Lake Conway in Arkansas. This spills and oil “accidents” are affecting not only the lives of people but also the wildlife, the ecosystems and the quality of air and water
In the early 1880s, Chicago was a bustling city on its way to becoming one of great cities in the world. There was a problem though. Horrible sanitation problems plagued the city. The Chicago River was virtually an open sewer covered with visible filth. Most of the river’s worst pollution came from homes and bathroom waste thought the city. “Bubbly Creek” was one of the worst branches of the river. It was filled with enough stockyard waste to equal the pollution from a sizable city. To further the problem, all of the contents of the river flowed into Lake Michigan, polluting Chicago’s drinking water causing a sever outbreak of water born diseases.
Humans need water. In a world that is overpopulated, we use a lot of water and other natural resources. Currently, in our world, clean water is getting scarce. Recently, for example, Flint, Michigan, had a water crisis. In early 2016, the water was discovered to be tainted with lead and other toxins. Long before that, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, and Governor Rick Snyder along with his council, knew about the lead, but to save money for the city of Flint in early 2014 Snyder had changed the city’s water source to the Flint River which had corroded pipes, causing people of all ages to be sick from the high amounts of lead
Only 17% of the surveyed lakes in North Carolina are impaired for swimming and 6% are impaired for aquatic life uses. A few lakes are impacted by dioxin, metals, and excessive nutrient enrichment. The Champion Paper mill on the Pigeon River is the source of dioxin contamination in Waterville Lake. The State and the mill implemented a dioxin minimization program in the mid-1980s and completed a modernization program in 1993 that will reduce water usage and discharges.
On January 9th, 2014, it was reported that a chemical spill has occurred from a storage tank owned by Freedom Industries. The spill occurred on the banks of Elk River in West Virginia, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without tap water. The company first reported that 7500 gallons of the chemicals had spilled into the river through a one-inch whole but had found that two weeks later, there was an estimated 10000 gallons of the toxic chemical in the river. The chemicals released include 4-methylcyclohexane (MCHM) and PPH. Methylcyclohexane is a chemical that is used in coal to reduce the amount of ash it produces(Field & Catherine, 2014). The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection are still calculating the exact amount of how much of the chemicals were spilled.
Such is the condition of Texas waterways. The surging population in Texas, the numerous pharma, chemical and oil industries, landowners, farmers and other residents have been recklessly using water. Water is a limited resource and our best efforts in recycling, reusing and conserving water have not yielded the desired results. Climatic changes over the past few decades may have resulted in unpredictable rainfall in Texas. It is important to conserve water without polluting it. It is shocking to know that the drinking water has traces of arsenic, cyanide, nitrates, asbestos and mercury and lead. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Geological Survey after conducting studies have shown that water samples containing growth hormones, various antibiotics,birth control drugs, and many other chemicals end up in ground water. The Trinity River is highly polluted with bacteria from sewage. The high water pollution in Texas State by various sources causes environmental hazards and life threatening diseases like cancer and nerve damage; thus the government and community should intensify their efforts to reduce pollution and make drinking water safe.
Great Lakes Water Quality Board. (1991). Cleaning up our Great Lakes. Windsor, Ont. The Commission.
I chose to watch the Frontline episode on “Poisoned Waters”. This documentary showed the environmental issues involving case studies on the Chesapeake Bay and Puget Sound. By examining how these rising pollutants along with industrial contaminants like PCB, lead, mercury and agricultural pollution. America has kept from making many of the nation’s waterways fishable and swim able again. This was a goal set by Congress nearly four decades ago.
In the matter of seconds the people of Flint had their lives take a turn for the worse. Once what happened had finally been brought to the public’s attention, the word began to spread very quickly about the water that had been found to contain lead and was a clearly a threat to the people who had consumed it. People started talking about what could have been going wrong, and what could have caused this to happen. That is what lead me to this article that goes into the assumptions of Governor Snyder lying about what he knew about the water and when he found out. Even though this article is about the city of Flint, it has three different types of audiences. There is the direct audience which is obviously the people of flint. People who read this article and are able to help to are considered the indirect audience. Lastly the audience of people nationally hearing and reading about this situation. For that reason this article has relevant pictures, such as pictures of the discolored water. This helps it to be readable for all types of readers. It also gives the audience a glimpse at the current situation. In this article, the rhetorical devices of ethos, pathos and logos are used to make creditable, have an emotional connection and give evidence of the crisis.
The results of this experiment showed that there was little to no change in the physical properties, which include the flake surface color or cortex color. There was only a slight change to the surface luster, but that could even be from the quality of the Knife River Flint and not a result of heat-treating it. The results of the structural changes were a little more promising. There was a noticeable change in the knappability of the heat-treated Knife River Flint compared to the raw/unaltered samples. Neither the hypothesis nor the null-hypothesis that were laid out in this paper was fully proven. There were aspect of both that were correct. There was only a noticeable change in the structure of the Knife River Flint, so that part of the hypothesis is true, while there was not noticeable change in the physical properties of it, which is true for the null-hypothesis. The hypothesis and null-hypothesis where not proven or disproved fully. I think this experiment could eventually prove the hypothesis right or wrong; further steps would need to be taken. Increasing the time and temperature could potentiality yield better results. If that were the case then the use of a kiln would be need as they can reach high temperatures then a household oven can.
Water is one of the most essential non-renewable natural resources on the Earth. Technically, an un-hydrated human being can live no more than three days. In the United States, people consume water mainly from tap water and bottle water. However, the consumption between these two sources is not even but lean to one side heavily. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, people consume from 240 to over 10000 times more per gallon for bottled water than they usually do for tap water. (NRDC) In addition, according to a survey from US National Library of Medicines, only 17% of the participants prefer to drink tap water exclusively.(US National Library) Compared to the bottled water which is shining like a superstar, tap water is like a diligent worker in the shade, unpopular but useful. The extremely unbalance of bottled water consumption implies that a commonly hold conception exists: bottle water is superior to tap water. In fact, scientific evidence proves that tap water is nothing different than bottle water. More importantly, the excessive consumption of bottled water is an irrational use of resources and creates severe environmental issues.
Less than 1% of the water supply on earth can be used as drinking water.