Late last year, I told you about the dire situation in the small, mostly black and underprivileged Louisiana community of St. Joseph. For years, residents had complained about the brackish and discolored water that flowed from their tap. But a largely unresponsive City Hall ignored those complaints, as did mostly unaware state and federal regulators. When the city water was finally tested in...
America’s crisis over the lack of safe drinking water feels like it’s spiraling out of control these days. It was just a couple of days ago that I told you about an emergency in Corpus Christi, Texas, where shoddy practices by a local Big Oil subsidiary had caused gallons of a highly toxic, carcinogenic chemical to back up into the Gulf Coast city’s main water supply. The crisis...
It was just a year and a half ago that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came out with its first draft of a much-anticipated report about the impact that the boom in hydraulic fracking operations, or fracking, around the country was having on our drinking water. Environmentalists had encouraged such a study because the anecdotal evidence — people living near fracking rigs who...
In recent weeks, I’ve turned some of my attention north toward the deplorable situation in Flint, Michigan, where government bungling — or worse — caused citizens, including children, to be poisoned by lead-contaminated water. It’s clear that residents there will need to fight back by any means necessary. This weekend, I was delighted that the Washington Post’s new...
You’d probably agree with me that 1991 was a long time ago. George Bush was the president then — not George W. Bush but George H.W. Bush, the 41st president. It would be another 19 years until our beloved Saints would finally win a Super Bowl. A lot of today’s pop stars, like Miley Cyrus, weren’t even born yet. And 1991 was also, believe it or not, the last year that a...
