Flint
gregladen | February 22, 2016One of the Great Crises we face in today's world is the stability and security of the water supply. In America, most people don't have any problems getting water, to the extent that we tend to waste it, and few people even know where there water comes from. Every now and then there emerges a startling and troubling problem with water. A river catches fire, a plume of visible pollution observable from space spreads across a lake, or an entire city worth of children are poisoned with the contents of the city water supply.
Works Progress Studio has been engaged for a while in a project called…
kkrisberg | February 19, 2016In the last few years, the residents of Flint, Michigan, and its surrounding suburbs lost five grocery stores. Today, within the city limits, there's just one large chain grocery store, about 10 small and often-pricier groceries, and 150 liquor stores, convenience stores and gas stations. People who have a car often travel out to the suburbs for more variety and better prices. Much of Flint is a food desert — a place where accessing healthy, affordable food is a very real challenge.
But thankfully, a recent study in Flint found that simply relocating an area farmers market is making a…
oracknows | February 17, 2016My state is screwed up, and the epicenter of the fallout from the dysfunctional mess that is the Michigan state government is the city of Flint. As you probably recall, around the holidays a story that had previously been mainly a Michigan story broke nationally in a big way. It is the story of how a combination of the imposition of an emergency manager on the city, epic incompetence at the level of the state and local government, and outright denial of a problem for several months by the veyr state agency (the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality) charged with making sure that things…
oracknows | January 27, 2016It's been nearly three weeks since I wrote about how an imperative to save money at all costs combined with gross incompetence to poison Flint's children with lead. In (very) brief, the city of Flint decided to switch from buying water from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) to a new water source. Unfortunately, the pipeline from that water authority, which was going to draw water from Lake Huron, wasn't scheduled to be completed until 2016. When DWSD learned that Flint was going to switch water sources, it gave a year's notice that it was going to void its long term contract…
oracknows | January 7, 2016This post will be different than my usual post. Let's just say that it has to do with quackery of a different kind than I usually write about here. It's about a public health disaster that was entirely preventable and had nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with government malpractice on an epic scale, right here in my very own state. It's a story that's huge here in Michigan but doesn't seem to be penetrating the national news very much, at least not yet. I suspect that my international readers, most of whom are likely unaware of this story, will have to pick their jaws up off the…