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I would love to have been there, just to yell “NOOOOO, not THAT water!!!” after he finished the first sips. If I’d had enough notice, then a co-conspiritor could then yell “PARAMEDIC!!! On my GOD, where is the PARAMEDIC!!!”
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I fucking adore that scene.
It’s one of the best in the entire movie, which has many really well-written, well-plotted and yes -acted scenes.
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It’s a lot easier to fake drinking water from a glass than to fake eating a piece of food on a fork.
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Yeah, there’s this poorly understood territory re U.S. EPA and in this case, the Ohio EPA.
https://epa.ohio.gov/monitor-pollution/pollution-issues/east-palestine
Unless there’s a whistleblower or leaker with access to the lab results from the state testing, it’s probably the subjugated, the careerists, and hacks hewing to the party line all the way down.
“Trust, but verify” --and preferably from an independent NEPA lab close by, paid by a citizens’ group or Earthjustice, Sierra Club, et al…with a solid chain of custody on the samples.
TBH, the long love affair that the federal gummint has with railroad barons, railroad lobby money, etc., does not bode well for 100% disclosure even if the U.S. EPA were to get involved.
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Yep. The Ohio EPA’s position that the drinking water there is safe is based not on their own testing but on testing done for Norfolk Southern by an independent lab. Every page of the report has “Client: Norfolk Southern” on it. And the actual results show several compounds way above safe threahold levels.
We have a similar situation here, but with a hydroelectric energy company. They spent millions re-engineering their dams to allow salmon passage, but the change causes several months of toxic temperature and pH levels in 100 miles of river downstream. They’ve severely damaged what was a blue-ribbon trout and salmon river, and they’ve been abbetted by the state environmental department.
Oh: and it hasn’t improved salmon passage.
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Did they just really, really, fuck up; or was that a calculated message to anyone who might make expensive change requests in the future?
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The dam? They weren’t going to pass recertification without salmon passage mitigation. But instead of using proven methods, they tried something experimental: a tower that can draw water from multiple levels in the reservoir for the outlet. That is to address the stratification of water from three roughly equal input rivers with different temperature profiles.
The idea isn’t bad. The problem is execution. The tower cannot operate without drawing surface water. The surface water comes from a river that, during summer and early fall, flows at over 80 degrees F with a pH of 11. For some reason, they operate it with almost entirely surface water in July-August-September. One would almost think they were going for a complete fish kill of the native trout and steelhead in the lower river.
The only saving grace we’ve had is that the watershed of the “hot” tributary has been in a drought state for several years, reducing it’s contribution as a percentage compared to the cool tributary and the cold tributary. But whitefish have almost disappeared, the native trout have had significant increases in disease, and the steelhead have seriously declined.
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You also have to consider that besides a few folks who had a good education and/or moved to the area, some of the staff must be at a level of clueless fuck-all as their neighbors working the McDonald’s. 
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I’m not exactly willing to trust the water quality advice from our dear governor who wanted to introduce fracking at one of the state’s most popular beaches. This state has an extraordinarily bad track record of evacuations after gassing a town, allowing people to return with promises of safety, then discovering it wasn’t as safe as we thought. It happened in Miamisburg (phosphorous), Wellston (ammonia), and Willard (styrene). And in most of these terrible cases the state was trusting tests provided by the responsible party, just like now.
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… somebody could do their laundry in that river 
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Someone hand him a glass of Flint water. C’mon, DeWine. Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!
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