And not just small cities, either:
- Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water.
- Officials in two major cities – Philadelphia and Chicago – asked employees to test water safety in their own homes.
- Two states – Michigan and New Hampshire – advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels.
- Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming it was a security risk.
Straight up cheating was not uncommon:
At least 33 cities across 17 US states have used water testing “cheats” that potentially conceal dangerous levels of lead, a Guardian investigation launched in the wake of the toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has found.
Of these cities, 21 used the same water testing methods that prompted criminal charges against three government employees in Flint over their role in one of the worst public health disasters in US history.
Lead poisoning is not a minor health problem. It can chop 20 points off someone’s IQ.
Straight up, this indicates cover-your-assdom from the highest to lowest levels, including regulators. No regulator worth its salt, who is doing their job, could have missed entire States and large cities cheating, because any regulator worth its salt does its own audits and testing. Only a fool believes the results handed to them by internal testing and audits. I’ve been on the internal side of regulation (in the life insurance industry) and companies cannot be trusted. Period.
Once you start concealing, you have to keep concealing. Because if something like lead contamination comes to light, figuring out where it is and why will include figuring out how long the water has been contaminated, how long you should have known about it, and how long you’ve been concealing it.
In many of these cities I’ll bet the concealment has been going on for decades, handed down from generation to generation of bureaucrat. Someone, when it was first discovered, didn’t want to go public and didn’t want to fix it, and from that point, the bureaucracy was locked in to their decision to keep cheating.
This doesn’t mean bureaucracies can’t run such systems; they were created in spite of the great objections of private industry, who also opposed municipal sewage for all they were worth. But it does mean you need to stay on top of it, and be willing to pay and be scrupulously honest about issues which matter.
I hope that those who have covered up are charged, and in cities where this has been going on for a long time, I hope investigators look back as far as necessary to charge those who covered up in the past.
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