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A comment on Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ drinking water.

Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by rhacker on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:11PM (#21193820)
I feel like everyone thinks Flint and Erin Brockovich were the only two water incidents in the country. If you look for water pollution news - you'll find that places near garbage dumps are coming up highly toxic, all over the country. Everyone seems to think the administration has it under control. They don't. There is benzene, hexavalent chromium and thousands of pollutants found in our water all over the country. There are literally millions of properties on well water in the country that are not checked but once every 20 years (if that). The only fix is rain catchment, before it goes into the ground. Soil remediation and stopping people from contaminating!!!! In all political parties groundwater and soil contamination is going to come to a head soon.
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by adolph on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:21PM (#21193923)
The risk of getting sick from rainwater may be different depending on your location, how frequently it rains, the season, and how you collect and store the rainwater. Dust, smoke, and soot from the air can be dissolved in rainwater before it lands on your roof. Roofing materials, gutters, piping, and storage materials can introduce harmful chemicals like asbestos, lead, and copper to the water, though building standards minimize some of this. Dirt and germs can be washed into collected rainwater from the roof, especially when rain follows several days of dry weather.

https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/drinking/private/rainwater-...

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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by ramphastidae on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @04:40PM (#21196983)
Agreed. There are nearly 4,000 sites in the U.S. with double the lead levels of Flint: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-lead-map/reuters-find...
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by gurumeditations on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:06PM (#21195903)
Our future has really been stolen from us. Decades of pollution from greed and decadence and excess, as Thunberg says “fantasies of eternal economic growth”, have totally destroyed our future (speaking as a young person). Climate change robs us of a stable world, robots rob us of our livelihoods, and decades of ‘economic growth’ have poisoned our bodies and minds from birth through polluted water, air, and food.

Everything is an ecosystem. You can’t have wild growth without paying for it, and the people of the past 75 years have stolen our bright futures from us and stuck us with the bill. Your comment reminded me of just how fucked up everything is. I think the 21st century will be consumed by the efforts to clean up the giant mess the 20th century left us. Goodbye economic growth. They stripmined the timeline and left us nothing.

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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by twblalock on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:09PM (#21195926)
Cleaning all that stuff up is an opportunity for growth. Entire industries will need to be involved in order to pull it off.
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by gurumeditations on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:29PM (#21196165)
That’s like saying poisoning is good for people because the sicker people are, the more hospitals and doctors you’ll need. The money has to come from somewhere. There is no profit in cleaning up messes, just loss reduction. The money, trillions of dollars just for climate change alone, has to come from somewhere. If past generations had not been so greedy, that money would be in our pockets. Instead, it will be burned because we have to clean up the unfathomable messes older people have created.
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by ddingus on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @05:16PM (#21197359)
No, it is saying that it is worth it to clean up after ignorance and folly.

And there are eventually gains to be had.

Those clean areas are worth more, the money paid to labor means demand, growth, etc...

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[dead]
Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by ddingus on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @05:33PM (#21197519)
We can still do those things.

Perhaps we need to value things differently.

Instead of what could have been, we can and need to focus on what can be.

Longer term, that is the better play.

We all live here and are going to do that for a very long time yet.

It is worth it to make sure living here makes sense, period.

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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by christophilus on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:32PM (#21196211)
Sounds like the broken window fallacy: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa...
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by tlb on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @04:11PM (#21196631)
The fallacy is that it's good to break windows. Even though it's not good to break them, fixing windows that are already broken is worthwhile.
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by rurp on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:28PM (#21196152)
In some cases, sure, where there is a clearly identifiable problem. But widespread pollution is particularly insidious because it can cause large amounts of people to develop serious health issues that have no clear cause and no reliable treatment.
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by amiga_500 on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @06:12PM (#21197854)
Only on hacker news would your comment be ok and the parent is downvoted
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by jdkee on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @03:33PM (#21196226)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by bzbz on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @06:15PM (#21197877)
Sure. That's great. But where are the incentives to promote this "opportunity" to those who want to do so without net loss?
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Re:Firefighting foam leaves toxic legacy in Californians’ dr... by chuck8088 on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @04:26PM (#21196817)
I would also like to add Willow Grove Airforce Base to this list. There is a cancer ring around Horsham thanks to this foam.
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