Deep in the Mexican jungle, lies an underwater cave called the Angelita Cenote. The pool is 200 feet deep and even contains a separate river that runs along the bottom on the underwater cave. This is due to the different levels of salinity in the water, causing denser water to sink to the bottom.
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Alien-like chatter of the world’s deepest lake as photographer shares eerie sounds of newly-formed ice. Alexey Kolganov films himself skating on transparent ice of lake Baikal, as new cracks form under his skates
Bro that is literally nature telling you to stop
Lake Baikal is just like that
always something new with this fucking lake
An underwater graveyard in Llyn Celyn, Wales. The village it was located in was flooded in the 60’s to supply water to Liverpool.
Mum just told me that’s where we get our water from….
[Image description: mural on the way to Aberystwyth, Wales. Red with white lettering. Upper line reads COFIWCH DRYWERYN, “remember Tryweryn”, lower line reads COFIWCH ABERFAN “remember Aberfan” (a village where a whole generation of children were killed by industrial negligence when an heap of mine waste collapsed onto a primary school).
My city switched from Lake Huron water to Flint River water and like.. The Flint River is so polluted its caught on fire before. It’s so polluted that it doesn’t pass the water safety laws. It’s so polluted that parts of my city have been under boil water advisories for months. The water coming out of the tap is dirt colored and has a foul odor and the city officials said “it’s safe to drink for most people.” for most people? Flint is straight bankrupt and to save a few bucks they’re literally poisoning their residents
Beneath the lake of a once lavish Victorian estate, lies this curious “underwater ballroom,” built by mining magnate, Whitaker Wright. On the apex of the dome stands a Neptune statue. The purpose of this statue was to expel cigar smoke from inside the ballroom. The main estate was a 32 room mansion, but the ballroom was used to entertain guests. The ballroom has remained abandoned since the tragic death of it’s creator. Wright, convicted of fraud and facing a seven year prison sentence, swallowed a cyanide tablet in the courtroom.
The History of The Flint Water Crisis.
Let me start this rant off by saying I’m from Flint. I grew up there. I went to their schools. My family still lives there and so do I. I’ve known about and have been speaking out about the Flint water crisis for over two years. I know this issue like the back of my hand.
Some people are saying the Flint water crisis was caused by racism and they pull the demographic that Flint is almost 60% black. I’ve seen so many goddamn posts here that’s just a picture of Flint’s race demographics as if that was explanation enough as to why this has happened to us, and that annoys the FUCK out of me. It annoys me because the entire root of the problem, the entire issue that’s been going on for years, gets simplified by people who’ve known of Flint’s existence for less than a half an hour to just “racism”. This was never a race thing, the water crisis and Flint’s demographics have literally nothing to do with each other.
This began in the early 1990s. Flint was a factory town, much like Detroit. In the 90′s, factories started to outsource their work to other countries. Nearly every factory in Flint shut down. 90% of Flint’s jobs had disappeared in less than 20 years. Over 100,000 people left. Because of this, the entire economy destabilized. Thousands of people were laid off, including most notably, teachers and law enforcement. This became one of the reasons why Flint has one of the highest crime rates per capita in the United States.
By the year 2002, Flint was over $30 million in debt. They went to emergency managers, but to no avail. Mayors and emergency managers have been in and out of the city like you would not believe, rarely serving their full term.
Flint struggled along through the housing market crash until 2011. That’s when this all started to kick off. On September 30, 2011, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed a review team to review Flint’s financial state with a request to report back in 30 days (half the legal time for a review). On November 8, the Michigan State review panel declared Flint of to be in the state of a “local government financial emergency” recommending the state again appoint an Emergency Manager. On November 14, the City Council voted 7 to 2 to not appeal the state review with Mayor Walling concurring. Governor Snyder appointed Michael Brown as the city’s Emergency Manager on November 29, effective December 1. December 2, Brown kicked out the almost entire administration.
On March 20, 2012, days after a lawsuit was filed by labor union AFSCME ( American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), and a restraining order was issued against Brown, his appointment was found to be in violation of the Michigan Open Meetings Act and Mayor Walling and the City Council had their powers returned. The state immediately filed an emergency appeal, claiming the financial emergency still existed. On March 26, the appeal was granted, putting Brown back in power.
Michael Brown was re-appointed Emergency Manager on June 26, 2013, and returned to work on July 8. Flint had an $11.3 million projected deficit when Brown started as emergency manager in 2011. The city faced a $19.1 million deficit from 2012, with plans to borrow $12 million to cover part of it. Brown resigned from his position in early September 2013. He was succeeded by Saginaw city manager (and former Flint temporary mayor) Darnell Earley.
The Flint Water Crisis
In an attempt to save money, in early 2014, Flint began the undertaking of a water supply switch-over from reliable supplies from the City of Detroit. Initially, the drawing of water from the Flint River was viewed by the City as a temporary fix prior to the City’s ultimate switch to a permanent supply which would be provided after the Karegnondi Water Authority’s construction of a pipeline from Lake Huron, thereby eliminating Flint’s long-time dependence on Detroit City water. By doing this, Flint would no longer have to buy it’s water from Detroit, and it was hoped that it would help to lessen Flint’s deficit.
After the change in water source, the city’s drinking water had a series of issues that culminated with lead contamination, creating a serious public health danger. The corrosive Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply, causing extremely elevated levels of lead. As a result, residents had severely high levels of lead in the blood and experienced a range of serious health problems. The water may also be a possible cause of an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in the county that has killed 10 people and affected another 77.
In January 2015, a public meeting was held, where citizens complained about the bad water. Residents complained about the taste, smell and appearance of the water for 18 months before a Flint physician found highly elevated blood lead levels in the children of Flint while the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality insisted the water was safe to drink.
While the local outcry about Flint water quality was growing in early 2015, Flint’s water officials filed papers with state regulators purporting to show that “tests at Flint’s water treatment plant had detected no lead and testing in homes had registered lead at acceptable levels." The documents falsely claim that the city had tested tap water from homes with lead service lines, and therefore the highest lead-poisoning risks; in reality; the city does not know the locations of lead service lines, which city officials acknowledged in November 2015 after the Flint Journal published an article revealing the practice after obtaining documents through the Michigan Freedom of Information Act. The Journal reported that the city had "disregarded federal rules requiring it to seek out homes with lead plumbing for testing, potentially leading the city and state to underestimate for months the extent of toxic lead leaching into Flint’s tap water." Only after independent research was conducted by Marc Edwards, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, and a local physician, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, was a public-health emergency declared.
In September 2015, a team working under Edwards published a report finding that Flint water was "very corrosive” and “causing lead contamination in homes” and concluding that “Flint River water leaches more lead from plumbing than does Detroit water. This is creating a public health threat in some Flint homes that have lead pipe or lead solder." Edwards was shocked by the extent of the contamination and by authorities’ inaction in the face of their knowledge of the contamination.
On September 24, 2015, Hurley Medical Center in Flint released a study, led by Hanna-Attisha, the MPH program director for pediatric residency at the Hurley Children’s Hospital, confirming that proportion of infants and children with elevated levels of lead in their blood had nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source. Using hospital records, Hanna-Attisha found that a steep rise in blood-lead levels correlated to the city’s switch in water sources. The study was initially dismissed by Michigan Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Brad Wurfel, who stuck to the claim that: "Repeated testing indicated the water tested within acceptable levels." Later, Wurfel apologized to Hanna-Attisha.
On November 13, 2015, four families filed a federal class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit against Governor Rick Snyder and thirteen other city and state officials, and three separate people filed a similar suit in state court two months later. Separately, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan and the Michigan Attorney General’s office opened investigations. On January 5, 2016, the city was declared to be in a state of emergency by the Governor of Michigan, before President Obama declared the crisis as a federal state of emergency, authorizing additional help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security less than two weeks later.
Three government officials - one from the City of Flint and two from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality - resigned over the mishandling of the crisis, and Snyder issued an apology to citizens.
On January 13, 2016, Snyder said 87 cases of Legionnaires’ disease, a waterborne disease, were reported in Genesee County from June 2014–November 2015, resulting in 10 deaths. Although the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) said that there is no evidence of a clear link between the spike in cases and the water system change, Edwards stated the contaminated Flint water could be linked to the spike, telling reporters, "It’s very possible that, the conditions in the Flint River water contributed. We’ve actually predicted earlier this year, that the conditions present in Flint would increase the likelihood of Legionnaires’ disease. We wrote a proposal on that to the National Science Foundation that was funded and we visited Flint and did two sampling events. The first one, which was focused on single family homes or smaller businesses. We did not find detectable levels of Legionella bacteria that causes disease, in those buildings. But, during our second trip, we looked at large buildings and we found very high levels of Legionella that tends to cause the disease.”
That’s what happened in Flint. It wasn’t an act of racism, it was an act of politicians cutting corners to save money, and it’s killing us. They denied any knowledge of the water being poisoned for almost a year, they denied that we were in danger, and they knew we were being poisoned.
My horse Squidward loves the water so I took her out to a river to swim and she got so excited she shoved her whole fat dumb head underwater which I have literally never seen a horse do before
This is killing me I love her
The “The Glory Hole” at the Monticello Dam in Lake Berryessa, California, came in handy earlier this year for the first time in a decade due to the heavy rains California had. The 72-foot wide hole was put in place to handle any potential overflow, funnelling excess water down to Putah Creek on the other side of the dam. Lake Berryessa can hold about 521 billion gallons of water before needing the spillway, so as you can imagine it’s a rare sight to see in action!
Why couldn’t they have named it literally anything else
Puta creek???
Three years into the water crisis
And nobody gives a sh*t
i only heard about this 2 months ago. its been 3 years????
Remember this started because Snyder switched Flint from a freshwater mountain lake to the polluted Flint River simply to allow his wife’s company to use the lake for bottling instead.
This is a manufactured crisis of corruption and capitalism.
Also remember that the pipes corroded because they refused to pay for the chemical used to make the water less acidic.
Remember that when the first E. coli outbreak from the water popped up, the city hall was given water coolers by the state, free of charge, all while denying that the water could be unsafe to drink.
Remember that, despite having a huge budget surplus and a “rainy day fund,” set aside that could easily cover the cost of relocating the residents by buying their houses/paying their debt, or could cover a large chunk of the cost of replacing the pipes, the state has decided to continue to only put in the minimal amount of effort.
Remember that flint is majority POC, majority impoverished, and is still being faced with crippling water bills from the Detroit water supply company, where they are often charged $50 a month just to use the service, on top of the cost of their water bill.
Remember that there will now be an entire generation of children who will now be damaged by lead poisoning and damage from the multitude of neurotoxins.
Remember that this is what privatized natural resources looks like. Remember that these people are being punished for having the audacity to dare to be poor in an economy that won’t let them be anything but.
At every level, this has not been a mistake.
The State and City are most upset that people know its happening and are resisting nation-wide.
But if we lose focus they lose even the small amount of aid they’ve managed to get.
This is how they do it. It’s a siege on the public empathy. Eventually we become numb to the problem and despair. Or something bigger happens.
Then its business as usual again.
*Flint has a BLACK majority. Not a POC one. But Black.
