Flint, Michigan Residents Paying $200 Per Month For Lead Polluted Toxic Drinking Water

Instagram post about Flint, Michigan water crisis (Courtesy of Industry On Blast blog)

Imagine you were being forced to drink suspiciously brown colored water every day that bears a foul smell. Imagine you had to bathe in it daily as well for years. Imagine you were charged $300 per month for this offensive, toxic water and if you didn't like it, you were forced to shell out hundreds of dollars per month in bottled water.

Well, that's what the 99,000 low income residents of Flint, Michigan have endured since 2011. They've been forced to pay for poison water that has killed some residents in Flint, while making others quite ill. Despite their protests, nothing has been done. Recent bad publicity is forcing the government's hand in addressing the problem.

However, cancer rates are going to soar in Flint, Michigan. In ingesting the lead polluted water, where other toxins are also present as contaminants, particles attach to the cells damage the cellular structure (of the human body).

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The Spill At Dan River In North Carolina Included Cancerous Toxins Such As Arsenic In Drinking And Fishing Water (Video)

Profits Ahead Of People

CBS News program “60 Minutes” aired a segment on Duke Energy and the company’s poor coal ash removal practices currently contaminating drinking and fishing waters in select U.S. states. The most damage has been done in north Carolina, where toxic items such as arsenic have been discovered in drinking and fishing water adjacent to Duke’s plants and their coal ash ponds. The ponds were never lined which has resulted in the coal ash contaminating soil and nearby drinking water.

Lynn Wood of Duke Energy being interviewed by Lesley Stahl of investigative news show "60 Minutes"

It is important that drinking and fishing water be kept to the highest standards of purity, as contamination with coal ash and by products such as arsenic, is cancerous. This is a prime example of corporation putting profits ahead of people. Initial government fines Duke Energy was assessed were paltry, totaling approximately $100,000. The most recent fines are approximately $100,000,000. However, it is not enough money to clean up the environmental damage that has been done.

STORY SOURCE

The Spill at Dan River 

2015 Jun 14 - Lesley Stahl reports on how Duke Energy is handling over 100 million tons of coal ash waste in North Carolina. The following is a script from "The Spill at Dan River" which aired on Dec. 7, 2014, and was rebroadcast on June 14, 2015. Lesley Stahl is the correspondent. Shachar Bar-On, producer.

Every year coal-burning power plants generate not only electricity but a staggering amount of leftover coal ash that contains heavy metals unhealthy to humans. Yet due in part to intense industry lobbying, oversight over disposal has been largely left in the hands of state officials and employees, who are often beholden to the powerful, local utility companies.

For decades coal ash was just dumped into giant pits dug by rivers and lakes, where toxins could leach into nearby water and soil. There are over 1,000 ash pits or ponds dotting the nation, many of them old, poorly monitored, all but forgotten. But as we first reported back in December, every few years we are reminded that this can lead to disaster like the coal-ash spill in February last year into North Carolina's Dan River at a power plant owned by Duke Energy, the biggest utility company in the country.

The spill at Dan River happened when a drainage pipe that ran underneath an ash basin and dam, collapsed, sucking out six decades of waste and spewing gunk directly into the river. Lynn Good: It was an accident. It didn't work the way it should have worked. It didn't meet our standards or our expectations. Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good, then only seven months on the job, had a crisis on her hands...

http://www.cbsnews.com

Film Crew Scheduled To Dig Up Atari Landfill But Is It A Good Idea

Atari 2600

The Fuel Industries film crew of Ottawa, Canada is scheduled to do an excavation dig of a 3-year-old Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill site, where video game company Atari buried a significant number of items in cement. As much as I loved Atari, I don't think this is a good idea.

 It's hardly a time capsule and not worth the risk, as such an endeavor will be toxic and carcinogenic. You are going to be releasing toxins into the environment, especially when you start chipping away at the cement to retrieve the items contained inside. It is highly inadvisable.

STORY SOURCE 

Film crew to dig up Atari landfill site, maybe score 3.5 million copies of E.T.

A documentary crew has received approval to dig up the New Mexico desert site where Atari supposedly buried millions of unsold pieces of Atari 2600 software and hardware. The crew hopes to finally confirm or refute one of gaming's most enduring urban legends.

The city council in Alamogordo, New Mexico granted approval for the project this week. Ottawa-based multimedia and marketing firm Fuel Industries will excavate the site some time in the next six months for a documentary it's filming, local news site KRQE reports. This year marks what will be the 30 year anniversary of the assumed September 1983 burial, which came during the height of the great video game crash. That sudden market reversal supposedly left Atari with millions of unsold and unsalable cartridges and systems, which were dumped in an Alamogordo landfill and later covered in concrete...

http://arstechnica.com