The mayor was an idiot for not announcing this faster, but the amount of fear mongering from the viewers-with-alarm is preposterous. The level of anti-intellectualism and scientific illiteracy in this country is frightening. The anti-vaxxers have been getting a fair amount of notice lately because of the measles outbreaks, a disease considered all but eradicated 20 years ago. This situation looks to me like another case of misinterpreting of misrepresenting the evidence.
I remember enough high school chemistry that I knew "100 times more acid than normal" is barely a blip on the pH scale. I asked of wikipedia, who giveth knowledge to all people liberally, and upbraideth not. I was surprised to find out that the pH scale is a 20th century development. I thought it would have gone back farther than that. Here's what I gleaned:
pH is a decimal logarithmic scale where each integer represents a factor of 10 change in the concentration of hydrogen ions (the "H" in pH) in a solution. By convention, the pH of pure water at room temperature is designated as neutral, and assigned a pH of 7. Bases have higher numbers. Fourteen is the nominal top of the scale (lye is an example), though it is possible to make bases with pH above 14 (or acids below 0).
Numbers lower than 7 are acidic. For the person cited in the OP to say that the Sandy tap water is 100 times more acidic than normal is to say that the pH is 2 points lower than normal.
OK, fine, so what are some comparable pH solutions?
7 - distilled water
7.5 or so, Utah tap water, which is slightly alkaline (hard)
So, 100 times more acidic than normal would be about 5.5
For comparison:
pH 6.3 to 6.6 - milk
pH 5 - coffee (note that would be roughy 300 times more acidic than Utah tap water, though if you made the coffee with Utah tap water, that would raise the pH a bit, so let's say coffee is about the same acidic as Sandy tap water after the accident)
pH 3.5 give or take - grapefruit and tomato juice (5,000 to 6,000 times more acid than tap water)
pH 3 give or take - an apple (10,000 times more acid than tap water)
pH 2 - straight lemon juice. 100,000 times more acidic than tap water. Good chaser for a tequila shot. Too much will make your lips and tongue sore.
pH 1 - battery acid. One million times more acidic than tap water, and dangerous stuff. Stomach acid is also in this category, and can also be dangerous if it gets out of your stomach, e.g. acid reflux.
So, the Sandy water apparently had a pH for a few days of somewhere between that of milk and coffee, and a thousand times less acid than an apple.
Saying the water is 100 times more acidic than normal sounds scary. Saying that drinking 20 gallons of this acidic water would give you the same number of hydrogen ions as a single apple sounds a lot less scary.
Now, about the lead. I'm not sure where the lead would be coming from. I suppose there is old lead solder that was used to seal pipe joints back before lead was banned from plumbing solder, but it can't be very much.
There was a fairly detailed discussion in a thread here several months back where Hie pointed out that the phrase "no safe level" does not mean what most people think it means. There is, for example, no safe level of driving. Every time you get into a vehicle, you are risking injury or death in a traffic accident. For that matter, there is no safe level of taking a bath. Accidental falls in bathrooms are a major source of injury and death.
We still take baths and drive to the store. Even though the risk level is never zero, we can make it low enough that we are willing to take the risk because of the benefit of driving to the store or taking a bath.
Two epidemiologists/toxicologists (one from U Mich, one from U Cincinnati) did an op-ed last year in the NYTimes asking people to dial back the hysteria about Flint Mich water supply. Yes, the lead levels were a problem, yes something needed to be done about them, but Flint is hardly the only city with lead levels that high, we just hear about that one for various reasons. They pointed out that the safe "reference level" for lead is 5 micrograms per deciliter, and some of the Flint water exceeds that amount. Five micrograms/dL is to some extent pulled out of the air. We are pretty sure that a lifetime exposure to that level won't cause nerve damage. That limit may be too low, it may be too high. It is our current best guess. BTW, all water except for maybe carefully distilled water has some lead in it.
Again, as reference, from the early 20th century into the 1970s, auto gasoline contained tetraethyl lead. The average lead concentration of US children in the 1970s was 14 micrograms/dL, give or take. That's right, virtually every single Baby Boomer had and presumably still has lead levels comparable or higher than the kids in Flint and triple our current safety standard. For Boomers in places with lots of cars (think NYC or the entire LA basin), they were likely well above the average US levels. [insert snide remark here about "I always thought those LA/NY people were brain-damaged" :) ]
The reason the epidemiologists wrote the article was a plea to stop talking about the kids of Flint like they are all irretrievably brain damaged. They are going to grow up and have to look for jobs, and they are not brain damaged. They do not need this "brain damaged" stigma hung around their necks - it simply isn't true.
They said people (I believe "celebrities" was the word they used) have shown up at the Flint hospitals asking to visit the wards with the lead poisoned children. There is no such ward. No children in Flint (and by "no children", I mean zero) have reached the level of lead concentration where treatment is recommended.
I just found the article - you can read the full details here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/22/opinion/flint-lead-poisoning-water.htmlGetting back to Sandy - I imagine what the mayor was told and the conclusions he came to were this: this is a relatively minor mishap that will just be in the system a few days. People have been primed by the media to react hysterically to the word "lead", regardless of the amount, and some people think fluoride in any amount is toxic, so they too will be engaged in much arm waving. Trying to educate the people about this is simply impossible. The event will be long over before we have any chance of success at calming people down. Easier not to say anything.
I think that was the wrong decision. Trying to educate the public is extraordinarily difficult in a situation like this, but they need to try. Unfortunately, corporations/institutions have either been in error, or outright deceitful when they knew there was a problem and they lied to cover it up, that the public is rightly suspicious.
What galls me is when people View with Great Alarm (which is an OK starting point IMHO), but either lack the skills, or interest, or are even openly hostile to actually evaluating the evidence. Again, anti-vaxxers are an excellent example.
Knowing how to evaluate evidence is the most fundamental critical thinking skill, IMHO. The fewer people willing and able to do that, the greater the peril to civilization. Critical thinking is indeed a critical skill.
[ETA: I do not know what the lead levels in Sandy are/were, or if they constituted a hazard. Toxicologists should determine that. It's way above my pay grade.]
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2019 03:35PM by Brother Of Jerry.