Where are all those water bottles in Flint, MI going? [Archive]

lessisbest

1-21-16, 4:07pm

CathyA

1-21-16, 4:48pm

It's the old adage - give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish..... They would be better served, and money ahead, being given, or purchasing themselves, water distillers and purifying their own water at home. Ignorance isn't bliss, it's just ignorance, and so is such a stupid waste for bottled water!!! We've been distilling our drinking water since 1981.

Do you think the minerals that distilled waters has makes you a little deficient in them? Also.........what is your system for distilling? We have well water and there's too much flouride in it......and some other bad things at times. I'm tired of buying jugs of water. I DO recycle them all, but that's still not a good answer. I don't want an RO system because of all the filters you need.

KayLR

1-21-16, 5:01pm

I had the same question as I listened to the story this morning on NPR about the deliveries. Wow, that's a lot of bottles...I know it's what has to be done right now, but geez, I hope they're recycling too.

Dhiana

1-21-16, 5:08pm

SteveinMN

1-21-16, 8:42pm

There's a company near here that turns used translucent milk and water jugs and the like into lawn furniture. It's terribly expensive (considering people are throwing away most of the raw material) but it's tough stuff and likely will be furniture to will to your grandchildren. Regular clear water bottles can be recycled into polypropylene carpet and other plastic items.

The key, of course, is collecting it and getting it to the right place. I see so few people around here recycle and I can only imagine that having to recycle a few dozen bottles a day is going to get old and take up a fair amount of space in no time. I'm hopeful someone thought of what happens once the bottle is empty.

CathyA

1-21-16, 11:38pm

I recycle just about everything. On my way to day on trash day though, it appears I'm the only one. And I'm sure the poor people in Flint who are struggling, aren't too concerned with the environment. I heard Cher donated thousands of bottles of water. I would really worry about where the empties were going. We're going to drown in our trash........
I read once though that recycling makes a person feel less guilty for their over-consumption..........which I think is very true. It takes lots of energy and resources for things to be recycled into something else.

lessisbest

1-22-16, 4:38am

Do you think the minerals that distilled waters has makes you a little deficient in them? Also.........what is your system for distilling? We have well water and there's too much flouride in it......and some other bad things at times. I'm tired of buying jugs of water. I DO recycle them all, but that's still not a good answer. I don't want an RO system because of all the filters you need.

The simple fact is, humans get their minerals from plants, and animals that eat plants, not water. Example... If calcium-rich water could prevent osteoporosis, then there wouldn't be any where I live due to the high calcium content, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I had my first DEXA (bone density test) when I was 43 and I had the density of a much younger woman and at the time; and should have lost at least 1/2" of my original height by that age. Now at 63, my DEXA test hasn't changed very much and I still haven't lost any height from when I reached my peek at 17. I guess getting minerals from food has worked for me.

Here's how I understand it. The minerals (mineral salts) in water are too large for people to use effectively. Those mineral salts are what breakdown in the soil for plants to convert to minerals.

lessisbest

1-22-16, 4:52am

They were told to boil their water before and that made the problem worse! So much bad information has been given to them I can't imagine they'd trust the idea of distilling that water now.
Looked like it would take a fair amount of time, gas/electricity, equipment, which all costs money, to distill enough water for a whole family.

Build a jail for the idiots who created this problem with all those bottles!

It cost me 21-cents to distill one gallon of water (when I checked it with a Kill-A-Watt Meter). The least expensive reverse-osmosis water available is 35-cents per gallon.

Boiling water kills bacteria, I would have thought that one was easy to understand, BUT concentrates heavy metals. That's why people should only boil tap water once, not fill the kettle and repeatedly boil the same water until it's used up. I'm sure I covered the subject here not long ago. Once again, ignorance isn't bliss, it's just ignorance, especially when it comes to something like water, which everyone needs, and needs a safe supply of.

Water isn't the only source for heavy metals we experience, which is why I take a supplement, Modifilan (a brown seaweed extract), a couple times a year. This product absorbs heavy metals and detoxifies things like lead, mercury, uranium and strontium from our bodies.

Miss Cellane

1-22-16, 7:58am

IMO, this is a crisis situation. One that has been allowed to go on far too long. If the fastest and safest way to get clean, drinkable water to the residents of Flint is in plastic water bottles, I'm all for it.

It's not the water bottles in Flint that will affect the environment that much. It's the other tons of plastic crap that fill Walmarts and Targets, encapsulate food, and fill our lives with junk that will.

In a crisis, you fix the problem first. Then you worry about the repercussions. Think of how many children, who are much more vulnerable to lead than adults are, have and will continue to be affected by this. Looking for something long-term to worry about? Worry about how the residents of Flint will be able to pay for the medical care they will need, some of them for a very long time.

The plastic bottles there are a drop in the bucket, compared to the use of plastic in the US as a whole.

CathyA

1-22-16, 8:12am

I agree Cellane.........but these would be the easiest plastics to obtain and recycle. I think we can deal with (or should be able to) both problems at once. Although....considering the choices made by the officials in this area..........

Miss Cellane

1-22-16, 9:06am

It looks like Flint has curbside recycling pickup. https://www.cityofflint.com/public-works/sanitation-2/

There's no reason to think that most of the water bottles won't get recycled.

Miss Cellane

1-22-16, 9:17am

There are over 116,000,000 households in Flint. Over 300,000,000 people. Not to mention schools, businesses and restaurants.

The household distillers I saw online were $170 to $275. They can distill one gallon of water in 5 hours. Who will pay for these, get them to the families, instruct everyone on how to use them and pay for the electricity to run them? IMO, the residents of Flint have paid enough already. They certainly shouldn't have to pay for a distiller.

But my guess is that it is a lot safer for the government to provide safe water in bottles. One little thing goes wrong with a distiller, even operator error, and there's a big, fat lawsuit waiting to happen. Much safer all around, for many reasons, to provide bottled water.

Although they could use some gallon bottles in the mix--why are they all the individual serving size?

kib

1-22-16, 11:11am

I'm assuming they're relying on donations of existing bottled supplies. I think a half decent alternative would be to have RO suppliers set up and give/ let people bring in reusable containers to fill up. We already have these here (for a fee), but the subsidies and donations could be used to make the water free for residents of Flint.

https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcShZNHGkNuWfdDMgnf3whGkrhFpq4_bX NlelWFdaj6XWa6Udxfd

ApatheticNoMore

1-22-16, 12:27pm

Isn't a longer term problem even in terms of water bottles the fact that the residents may never trust the water that comes out of the tap again and may buy bottled water indefinitely from then on, if they can afford to. Now, bottle water isn't always any safer as we're told, but in the case ... uh it would have been. So for reasons based on past performance yea, but not entirely irrational ones at this point, at least without real oversight. What about all the other water needs besides drinking and cooking, water for showering and bathing, the body does absorb some of what is in that, doesn't it?

Maybe if your going to give the residence anything besides bottled water it should be some type of water testing kit, so that if they were again being poisoned at least they would know ASAP.

lessisbest

1-22-16, 3:56pm

I've never "trusted" the municipal water source, so that's why we've distilled our drinking water for so many years. They can remove bacteria successfully (and occasionally that can even be a problem), but they can't remove the agriculture chemicals and Rx drugs from the drinking water. I've had 2 friends who had drug interactions from drugs they didn't even take, and the physician said they had to start using distilled water to avoid it because they were getting it from the municipal water source.

Pick your poison.....heavy metals, agriculture chemicals, Rx drugs, groundwater chemicals!!! I've studied the issues with water for years, attended meetings on the subject for the City/County/State and know I'm the first line of defense. I'm going to do what I've done for my family for decades - not wait for the government at ANY level.

CathyA

1-22-16, 4:26pm

Lessisbest.........maybe you missed my question earlier......but what kind of a system do you have for distilling?

bae

1-22-16, 4:32pm

I help run our village's water system in my infinite spare time.

I spoke with our state regulatory guy earlier in the week about the process issues that lead to this level of contamination, and it was a horror show beyond what most people are covering. I'm pretty sure I and my co-workers would all go to jail if we did what they did over in Flint. And they positively absolutely had to have known what they were doing to people. They went well beyond negligence in their actions.

Heads. Spikes. Walls.

Miss Cellane

1-22-16, 5:11pm

It appears the residents were told to boil the water, not because of the lead, but because E. coli had been found in the water. That, of course, just made the lead problem worse.

A General Motors plant in Flint found the water was corroding metal parts, so they stopped using it.

The more I find out about this, the worse it gets.

bae

1-22-16, 5:20pm

The more I find out about this, the worse it gets.

I don't think you are going to hear the true horrors of the situation until the court cases. State Health Guy tells me most of the expert-types are oddly keeping quiet until it gets to that stage. When he showed me some of the technical info on what had happened, our operators and other tech people were truly horrified. We were talking to him in the context of "could you please double-check our processes to make sure we aren't doing anything like they did...".

One small example, for instance:

When measuring lead levels at the tap, the correct, industry-standard procedure is to collect the sample from undisturbed water that has been resting in the pipes for some time. Typically this is done by having the homeowner fill a small sample container first thing in the morning, before any toothbrushing/toilet-flushing have occurred. When we do this, we hand out little cards they can place in their bathrooms to remind them.

If you take the sample after you've run the water for even a small bit, you will have artificially-low levels in your test.

The Flint water folks were instructing their customers to run the water for 10 minutes before taking samples...

That's just criminal. The procedure is known to all operators, doing it the way they asked is clearly an attempt to game the test results and get lower levels on all sorts of substances. Not negligence, pure evil.

Mary B.

1-22-16, 6:08pm

Oh, that is absolutely appalling. Clearly they did know all about the need to test water that had been sitting in the pipes, or they wouldn't have told anyone to run it for the ten minutes. (I can't imagine someone just incompetent providing such precise instructions.)

I was visiting my parents, who then lived near a tiny town in the middle of Canada, just after the Walkerton water issue in Ontario. In that case e-coli was the problem and the health impact was serious. (I think there were deaths.) What I remember about it was meeting an old high school buddy who was responsible for the town's water supply. He was absolutely horrified by the Walkerton situation and had started testing his town's water a lot more often than he was mandated to, just because he really, really didn't want anything to happen. (Not sure what happened to the town's budget for water testing, but Oh Well!)

His is the kind of response I would expect from people mandated with keeping others safe.

Miss Cellane

1-22-16, 7:25pm

Bae, that's frightening. I've also read that they should have been doing something to flush the pipes that bring water to the houses, to lower the amount of lead in the water, and they simply were not doing it.

And meanwhile the residents were complaining, bringing bottles and jugs of brownish water to meetings--and no one did anything. For over a year.

This is the the USA I want to be living in. We should care for people more than this.

bae

1-22-16, 7:38pm

Bae, that's frightening. I've also read that they should have been doing something to flush the pipes that bring water to the houses, to lower the amount of lead in the water, and they simply were not doing it.

We do a year-round regime of flushing our mains and controlling the pH of the water to keep mineral scaling of a variety of sorts from becoming a problem and contaminating the water coming out of the faucet. This is a small member-owned water company serving ~1200 members. Even at our size, with the complexity of our multi-source system and low customer density/sq. mile, we can manage to do state-of-the-art real-time monitoring of water flow and quality at key points in the system. At prices that even in this remote location with its logistical and cost challenges that come in fairly low.

So, it's clearly not rocket science, it just requires concern for the safety of your customers/owners, and prudent use of resources. You'd think a city-run water system could manage to do this even better than our little non-profit water system, after all, isn't the government here to help us? Why heck, they even had the full help and cooperation of state-level regulatory agencies...

ctg492

1-23-16, 5:32am

Flint, the saddest city around, Ok next to Detroit. I pass through both and keep going each week. There is nothing good about any of it. How the crisis will be fixed unimaginable. Just drive on the I69 through Flint and the feeling of a forgotten city hits you.

lessisbest

1-23-16, 5:54am

Lessisbest.........maybe you missed my question earlier......but what kind of a system do you have for distilling?

Sorry Cathy, I did miss your question. I have an electric model - 1-gallon - from Nutriteam (http://www.amazon.com/Water-Distiller-Countertop-Enamel-Collection/dp/B00026F9F8/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1453545981&sr=8-3&keywords=nutriteam)

I also have a non-electric model as an emergency back-up. http://www.berkeywaterfilters.com/wa16nopowadi.html

Plus a Berkey gravity filter, and I just ordered an Alexapure Pro - https://www.mypatriotsupply.com/Articles.asp?ID=396&utm_source=1%2F20+Promo+Email+-+Alexapure&utm_campaign=1%2F19+Email+-+Alexapure&utm_medium=email

CathyA

1-23-16, 11:23am

Thanks lessisbest.........I'll check those out! You're a very interesting person! :)

Lainey

1-23-16, 1:28pm

There's a Wikipedia page on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis

Teacher Terry

1-23-16, 3:04pm

So very sad and yes all those people need to go to prison for a long time. Those kids will suffer their entire lives because of this and some people have died.

ToomuchStuff

1-23-16, 4:55pm

In Kansas City (neighboring), I know a lot of their pipes are old and last year, when I was dog sitting for a relative, the city came out and ran a liner through the sewer pipe, and then some sort of plastic material that creates a liner as it cures.
Be nice if some of the bottles could be recycled into that, because besides the problems with all the water pipes, they are also going to have problems with the sewer pipes returning contaminated supplies to any future treatment plants.

I heard them ask on the local radio station, why didn't the mayor of the city get in trouble, but I never heard a response. Does anyone know if this was completely removed from his authority?