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This website is authored by Lester Levy, Esq.
a founding member of JAMS.

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You are here: Home / Archives for Flint

Our Drinking Water Regulation Is So Weak Even Flint’s Water Got A Pass

July 6, 2016 by Environmental ADR Editor Leave a Comment

drinking-water-regulationWASHINGTON — Federal drinking water rules are so relaxed that not even the city of Flint, Michigan, has been cited for a violation, even though many Flint residents have been relying on bottled water for drinking and cooking since last year.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said Tuesday that 18 million Americans got water from systems that violated federal standards last year, according to federal data.

And the environmental advocacy group said an untold number of water systems break the rules without landing in the Environmental Protection Agency’s database of water regulation goofs — including Flint.

“Flint’s absence in the federal data system raises the question: If Flint’s extraordinary lead contamination problems are not included in the EPA’s official compliance data,” the NRDC’s report says, “how many other municipalities’ serious lead problems are being swept under the rug by officials responsible for protecting public health?”

An EPA spokeswoman noted it’s up to states to notify the agency of drinking water violations by municipal water systems.

“EPA recognizes there are ongoing challenges in compliance with the Lead and Copper Rule and is working closely with states, who under the Safe Drinking Water Act are the first line of oversight of drinking water systems and take the majority of enforcement actions,” the spokeswoman said in an email. The Lead and Copper Rule is the main federal regulation for limiting lead levels in public drinking water. Read More

 

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: EPA, Flint, water contamintation

A New Paradigm for Solving Complex Environmental Disputes

April 1, 2016 by Lester Levy 1 Comment

Complex-Environmental-Disputes

We live in a world of ever-growing concern about environmental harm to our health and wellbeing.  We are acutely aware of future environmental risk, such as climate change and sea level rise, and diminishing natural resources, such as clean drinking water and the air we breathe.   To address the concerns, environmental cases need to be handled more intelligently and more effectively.  As environmental problems grow in scale and complexity, we are in need of a new paradigm for resolving them.

We have the tools to make this happen but our dispute resolution models remain stagnant; stuck in the past tense.  Unlike rapid and continuous innovation in science, technology, telecommunication and medicine, for example, the “old” ways of environmental dispute resolution – primarily through generic pre-trial procedural mechanisms – is inefficient and overly expensive.  The current default reliance on the conventions of traditional tort litigation, where every party retains its own army of lawyers, experts, consultants, lobbyists, etc., is wasteful and often misdirected.  Further, current norms were not designed to effectively promote the efficient and orderly identification and remediation of the contamination, or other problem, at issue.  More often, they merely move money from one pocket to another without a corresponding increase in environmental improvement and protection.

The status quo ante imposes a high social cost to the extent complex environmental disputes remain unresolved and problems fester.  The more time it takes to implement a cleanup, the more expensive the costs of that operation become.  In groundwater, for example, the contaminants can continue to migrate laterally and vertically such that  larger, more powerful remedial technologies will eventually be required to do the job.  Or in the case of drinking water, just think of the high health and social costs imposed on the citizens of Flint Michigan as a result of delay in taking remedial action.  Many of these escalating costs, in turn, are ultimately borne by taxpayers, thereby increasing the societal economic costs of pollution and its cleanup. Moreover, the clean up costs are in addition to already extremely expensive litigation-based transactional costs, which multiply each week, as the case remains unresolved.  Unfortunately, most environmental cases move through the judicial system like molasses, while the environmental harm at issue tends to migrate and grow. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mediation vs. Litigation Tagged With: alternative dispute resolution, environmental clean up, environmental mediation, Flint, mediation process

Water Is Broken. Data Can Fix It.

March 28, 2016 by Environmental ADR Editor Leave a Comment

Water Is Broken Data Can Fix It

Water Is Broken Data Can Fix It

AS a nation, we have become disciples of data. We interview 60,000 families a month to determine the unemployment rate, we monitor how much energy we use every seven days, Amazon ranks sales of every book it sells every hour.

Then there is water.

Water may be the most important item in our lives, our economy and our landscape about which we know the least. We not only don’t tabulate our water use every hour or every day, we don’t do it every month, or even every year.

The official analysis of water use in the United States is done every five years. It takes a tiny team of people four years to collect, tabulate and release the data. In November 2014, the United States Geological Survey issued its most current comprehensive analysis of United States water use — for the year 2010.

The 2010 report runs 64 pages of small type, reporting water use in each state by quality and quantity, by source, and by whether it’s used on farms, in factories or in homes.

It doesn’t take four years to get five years of data. All we get every five years is one year of data.

The data system is ridiculously primitive. It was an embarrassment even two decades ago. The vast gaps — we start out missing 80 percent of the picture — mean that from one side of the continent to the other, we’re making decisions blindly.

n just the past 27 months, there have been a string of high-profile water crises — poisoned water in Flint, Mich.; polluted water in Toledo, Ohio, andCharleston, W. Va.; the continued drying of the Colorado River basin — that have undermined confidence in our ability to manage water.

In the time it took to compile the 2010 report, Texas endured a four-year drought. California settled into what has become a five-year drought. The most authoritative water-use data from across the West couldn’t be less helpful: It’s from the year before the droughts began.

Read the entire article at the New York Times.

This article was originally published in the New York Times written by Charles Fishman.

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: data analysis, eco-friendly, EPA, Flint, water, water summit

Groundwater in New York: A Threatened Resource?

March 4, 2016 by Environmental ADR Editor Leave a Comment

Groundwater in New York: threatenedNew York State residents have long enjoyed high quality, affordable potable water; the result of the State’s protected source waters and reservoirs, and robust testing and filtration programs. In fact, most New Yorkers have taken the quality of their potable water for granted. But in recent weeks two upstate New York towns – Hoosick Falls and Petersburg – have detected elevated levels of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) in their drinking water supplies, leading state and federal authorities to warn residents against using tap water for human consumption.

There is no reason to believe that the elevated PFOA levels detected in the Hoosick Falls and Petersburg water supplies are indicative of a far-reaching problem with the safety of New York’s municipal water supply systems. However, given the recent tragedy in Flint, Michigan, where elevated levels of lead in the city’s water system were apparently ignored by city, state and federal regulators, and initial criticisms leveled by residents against the State for its response in Hoosick Falls, the State has sprung into action on several fronts. These actions may impact the operations of those providing private and public potable water as well as manufacturing companies throughout New York State whose operations have or may be impacting the quality of the water source.Read More

Read the entire article at Lexology.

This was orifginally published on Lexology written by Phillips Lytle LLP

 

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: climate change, environment, Flint, ground water, New York, NYS, water contamintation

Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap Water Not Limited to Flint

February 10, 2016 by Environmental ADR Editor Leave a Comment

Unsafe Lead Levels in Tap WaterIn Sebring, Ohio, routine laboratory tests last August found unsafe lead levels in the town’s drinking water after workers stopped adding a chemical to keep lead water pipes from corroding. Five months passed before the city told pregnant women and children not to drink the water, and shut down taps and fountains in schools.

In 2001, after Washington, D.C., changed how it disinfected drinking water, lead in tap water at thousands of homes spiked as much as 20 times the federally approved level. Residents did not find out for three years. When they did, officials ripped out lead water pipes feeding 17,600 homes — and discovered three years later that many of the repairs had only prolonged the contamination.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: EPA, Flint, lead, pollutants, water contamintation

President Obama Appoints Water Czar to Address Flint Water Issues

January 21, 2016 by Environmental ADR Editor Leave a Comment

Yesterday evening, the Department of Health and Human Services designated Dr. Nicole Lurie, an agency assistant secretary, to lead the federal government’s response to the elevated lead levels allegedly found in the drinking water being provided by the City of Flint, Michigan, to its residents.  This designation came on the heels of a meeting between Flint’s mayor and Valerie Jarrett in Washington, D.C.  The federal government has elected to play a significant role in addressing this crisis, with President Obama signing an emergency declaration on Saturday which provided Flint with access to up to $5 million in federal funds.  The crisis began in 2014 when Flint stopped getting water from Detroit and began obtaining its drinking water from the Flint River in an effort to lower costs.

The appointment of a federal “czar” to coordinate a federal response to contamination of a local drinking water system is somewhat unusual.  However, it is likely that the political nature of this issue, coupled with the fact that  U.S. EPA may have been aware as far back as April 2015 that Flint’s water supply was at risk for lead contamination, likely contributed to this decision.  For those that watched the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday, the Flint water issues were discussed by the candidates, with blame not surprisingly being directed at Republican Governor Rick Snyder.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: In the News Tagged With: EPA, Flint, Michigan, water con

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lester-levy

I strongly believe in the value of mediation – said another way, environmental mediation really works. I would go even further: I believe that environmental disputes are perfectly suited to the mediation process – perhaps more so than any other area of legal practice. I have formed these views after mediating environmental cases for more than 20 years, throughout the United States, and having worked with thousands of lawyers, companies, insurance carriers, regulatory agencies and courts. My … Read more

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  • Our Drinking Water Regulation Is So Weak Even Flint’s Water Got A Pass
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