Dirty
Jose Luis Rodriguez waited in line Friday to fill plastic jugs in the back of his pickup truck with water for drinking, doing the dishes and bathing.
But there is something about this water Rodriguez didn’t know: It was being pumped to him by water authorities from a federally designated hazardous-waste site, CNN learned after reviewing Superfund documents and interviewing federal and local officials.
But he has no other water source. More than 35% of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to safe water. Without water, you die.
The water comes from a Superfund site but it’s not clear that the particular well in question is contaminated. The EPA is going to test it over the weekend.
Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, the water authority, was unaware that this well site was part of the Superfund program until CNN provided maps showing that this was the case, according to Luis Melendez, sub-director for environmental compliance at the utility.
Melendez maintained the water is fit for public consumption. The well was opened on an emergency basis and is not part of the regular drinking water supply, he said.
In 2015, this well in Dorado, which is located near a shopping center, was found by the EPA to be safely within federal standards for PCE and chloroform, two industrial chemicals.
Let’s hope it still is, and let’s hope the EPA’s standards are good enough.
We have to hope Trump’s people haven’t been weakening the standards.
It’s far easier to lower the standards to meet pollution levels than to lower pollution to meet standards.
Sometimes I wonder if the depth of evil that the Trump creature, his boot-licking collaborators, and his invincibly deluded supporters have generated and will go on generating as long as the pendulum continues to swing their way would make even William Shakespeare throw up his hands in defeat if he were around to try and capture the essence of this beyond-obscene level of mass corruption and depravity, from which the US is unlikely ever to recover fully.
Michael Dempsey, I think Shakespeare actually made a stab at that. It’s called MacBeth, and even in that, he fails to catch the sheer depth to which Trump can sink.
Thing is, I grew up with people like Trump. None of this comes as a big surprise to me, I’ve sort of been expecting it, and all the garlic and rings of salt in the world were not going to be able to stave it off. I’ve known for a long time that there are people that are evil to the core, and I get very exasperated with some of my friends who insist that “they all want what we want, the best for the country, they just have different ideas about what that is”. No, they don’t. These are people who actively hate America as it really is; they love, love, love themselves America as they believe it was meant to be: white, patriarchal, Christian, and macho-aggressive. This is the world I grew up in, and as I aged, I prayed (if I may be permitted a rather non-Christian use of that awful word) that they would never, ever, ever, be able to seize power. If there were ever proof that there is no god, the fact that these folks succeeded demonstrates at least that any god that might exist either is malevolent or uncaring. I prefer just plain doesn’t exist, but I can only accept my preference because there is no real good reason to believe he does (in short, if they could demonstrate he did exist, I would have to hate him).
I’ve seen those pictures before. But in this larger version, the crucifix, and ‘god bless’ sign caught my eye for the first time. Not a coincidence that this appalling display would take place with this background.