Nah, son; I’m talking Stephen King’s The Stand level of death and destruction, the kind of massive horror show that cannot be hidden, denied or ignored.
#“Beware the Walkin’ Dude…”
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You say that but… “smaller, chronic leaks typically fall by the wayside until the pipes can be fully replaced”
Given how certain folks (yup) have dropped their jaws and then gamely adjusted to the new normalcies, I suspect there are many millions who will feign astonishment as they’re herded last into the gas chambers. The very fact that a lot of fools will read that previous sentence and dismiss me as hysterical points to just how ignorant so many are not only of history, but of the simple fact that they’ve been living next door to Nazis for three generations. And I’m not just talking about Americans.
Hogan’s Heroes and the like reduced the memory of the largest genocide in history to a cartoonish punchline. Meanwhile the racists who admired those mass-murdering fanatics as martyrs were living next door in hip new duds.
Note: just to be clear, because I replied to your reply to him, not talking about @bibliophile20, who I know recognizes what’s going on.
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I don’t expect gas chambers. I’m expecting nuclear holocaust, or the real life equivalent of “Captain Tripps.”
Or maybe it’ll be the bees…
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Sorry, that wasn’t SF to me. Large areas of 1,212 acre Liberty State Park are fenced off and forbidden due to toxic waste, and have been since the park was created from railyards 40 years ago.
Also sorry to say, the water pipes are only half the problem, older cities across the country have sewer and waste problems that will cost trillions. Crumbling 100 year old sewers that are part of CSO’s, Combined Sewage Outflow systems. This means the wastewater and stormwater are in the same pipe, and when it rains hard, by design, raw sewage ends up in the waterways. NYC and other cities have been under EPA consent decrees for years, and nothing is ever accomplished. A not so minor to me byproduct is the sewers overfill and leak into the street fill in heavy rain and undermine my foundation and fill my basement with sewer water.
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To answer your question, mostly no. The only water pipe I’ve ever heard of getting lined is early 1960’s ductile iron. Older pipes and newer pipes are less prone to breakage, and water pipe doesn’t generally get tagged for replacement until it already has a history of breaking. The valves from the early 60’s are also unreliable. Just a bad vintage for waterworks, overall, but it unfortunately coincides with a residential building boom in the US.
Im not talking ethically. That part is a no brainier. Its more like the priorities, hey lets go fix their water and then walk away leaving the homeless and toxins and corruption and all the other things that are f’d up. Wheres the line?
So the answer to @werdnagreb’s question…
is “no and/or no.”
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I can remember watching the news in the early 80s (I would’ve been 11 or 12) and seeing ongoing reports about a Dallas neighborhood trying to shut down a nearby lead smelter. Presumably this was remedied via some sort of regulation and/or sending the lead smelting jobs to other countries*, so I fear that MAGA could mean reopening lead smelters in Dallas neighborhoods.
*(Not to sound all NIMBY about it, though… Not like China or Mexico needs that problem, either.)
ETA:
Convict and/or debtor labor! Easy-peasy.
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It’s going to go to roads, airports, and bridges, so that contractors can set up toll roads and turn a profit off our daily commutes. They don’t care about the health and safety of Americans. The cost of replacing pipes will fall to local and state governments, which will mean that many will go back into austerity since so many state governments have to balance their budgets (no deficit spending).
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Ditto. We’re lucky we have that option.
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Ethically is what matters.
Making sure that everyone has the basics, including shelter, healthcare, decent food, good education, and safe communities. Anything less is a failure on all our part. We can do better. We have decided not to, because making sure we don’t have to pay taxes and we don’t have to care about the people in our communities when it’s too much of an inconvenience on us has been deemed “true freedom” by some. When it comes to that, the only people who end up with real freedom are those who can afford it.
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And even without ethics, taking care of “the least among us” is just smart. The better off the poor are the more stable the country is. The better educated they are, the more likely we are to have geniuses able to be geniuses. The better fed everyone is, the more productive we are. The more informed we all are, the wiser we can be.
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i.e. by providing subsistence levels of basic necessities at nominal (and easily waive-able) rates, and penalising the fuck out of profligate industrial use (e.g. rice in the desert, aluminium smelting in a low-clean-power region, etc).
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An old whinge:
- There are lead pipes across America.
- The citizens of Flint were poisoned by the state government.
These are separate issues.
Lead pipes are a less-than-ideal but manageable issue in urban planning. So long as your infrastructure managers aren’t murderous idiots, it isn’t that hard to keep the lead out of the water. You still want to get the lead pipes replaced as soon as practical, but it isn’t an emergency.
That isn’t what happened in Flint.
The piping there would have been well within acceptable safety limits if the GOP governor hadn’t seized control of the city and installed an incompetent/malicious kleptocrat to run it.
The nationwide lead piping is a managable public health issue. Flint was a crime, still unpunished, directed at tens of thousands of mostly African-American families.
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Good point, People think toll money goes back into the community and goes toward improving roads, but it really doesn’t.
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