Bottled water in Flint. Who pays? Any discounts?

[ghostsinthemachine]

City has approx 100,000 citizens. At a quart a day that is 400,000 quarts of water. Or 800,000 bottles of pint sized water. (In all of the photos ive seen of the water, it is always bottles and never gallon or larger containers). One thing it does seem is a robust new market for the water industry. I think I might start looking for the money trail that leads from Nestle, Coke, Pepsi, etc to the Governors office.

What if you can't afford to buy water? (Shit can add up fast)..... Do you shower with bottled water? That would, of course, skew the above figures, which are deliberately low, and who pays for it?

[JonathanRackham]

1. I grew up on a farm with iron and sulphur water.

We'd take jugs to the nearest town with treated municipal water or a house with a clean well and bottle our own. Bulk water could be trucked in via tanker like they did for Katrina.

For the lead chloride precipitate and iron oxide these people are experiencing a $30 gravity Britta table top filter will produce potable water.

The population is in shock and do not believe the local authorities can help them.

Can't wait until fracking screws up the rest of the ground water in the US.

[sweetapogee]

2. excellent question

We get our water from a well in our yard. Four years ago the pump failed. It cost us $1300.00 to replace the pump which was actually not bad because the well company is owned by a fellow volunteer firefighter and we of course know him.

About 30 years ago when we lived in NJ, our well point failed. The remedy for this is to drill a new well but because the township water supply was available at the street we could not get a permit to dig a new well. The only solution was to hook up to the city water supply. We had exactly zero experience doing this kind of work but the cost to have a contractor do this was at the time about $5500.00 (of which $3000.00 went to the city water works for the permit). Also there was a two week wait for the contractor to get to our project. We had no water in the home. None.

So we bought the specified materials (as required per code), rented a trench machine for the (edit) 40 foot trench and asked the city a bunch of questions. Three days and two inspections later we had water in our home. We missed two days of work and the total cost with us doing all of the work was about $3500.00 (that was again about 30 years ago). A few years later we had to have the old well capped at a cost of another $400.00

Last spring our septic system backed up. We had it pumped out at a cost of $220.00 but that didn't fix the underlying cause which was a clog or two in the leach-field. Lucky for us the septic company was able to hydro flush the field which fixed the problem but it cost another $350.00 Had that failed we would have needed a new sand mound installed which cost somewhere in the area of 8 to 10k. We have always babied our septic system but at some point things do go bad.

[ghostsinthemachine]

3. Detroit Lions players donate 94k bottles of water to Flint

Detroit Lions Players Donate 94,000 Bottles Of Water To Flint - http://huff.to/1VeMSSt

That ought to last about an hour. Good for them though, but the reality is Flint needs a lot more water that one bottle per citizen.

[ghostsinthemachine]

4. Flint learns to survive as water crisis continues

For Jennifer Stevens and her family, even a simple decision over what to cook for dinner now has to factor in how it will eat into a precious commodity in Flint, Michigan: drinkable water.

“Oh, we want spaghetti for dinner? Well, we’re going to have to use about five bottles of water to boil some noodles for a spaghetti dinner,” she explained from her home in Flint, which continues to suffer from a 2013 cost-saving decision to switch its water supply from Detroit’s system to its own new one, which will draw water from Lake Huron but drew water from the Flint River while the new system is being completed.

Faced with a water contamination crisis that could imperil the health of thousands of people and has has pitted residents against municipal and state officials they have accused of negligence, the Stevens family has had to learn a kind of household triage.

Life now revolves around bottled water. And everyday tasks like brushing teeth, washing hair and bathing have become needlessly difficult.

More here:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/1/22/flint-learns-to-survive-as-water-crisis-continues.html

[ghostsinthemachine]

5. How many bottles of water will this take?

Do they shower with bottles water?