Sublime

Why was the EPA willing to move on Flint and not in Washington County? The difference was public versus private water. If there had been forty houses below that leaking pond, and if Stacey, Beth, and Buzz relied on public water, which, unlike their private wells, was subject to regulation, then they’d have a winning criminal case.

get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.” In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of w

the U.S.

In its lab, the DEP was testing for twenty-four different metals, yet it was reporting results for only eight. Copper, nickel, zinc, chromium, boron, titanium, cobalt, and lithium—all could be harmful and relevant to drilling contamination. However, if any of these were in someone’s water, they were missing from the test results homeowners saw. If

Much of Plaquemines lies below sea level—six feet under, people sometimes say. This arrangement is made possible by levees—four sets of them. Two run along the river, one on each bank. Another two—known as “back levees”—run between the parish and the Gulf, to prevent the sea from rolling in. The levees, which keep water out, also keep water in. Whe

The geography of most modern urbanization can ultimately be traced back to navigable waterways and deep harbors, followed by hundreds or even thousands of years of network effects pertaining to industry (i.e., progressive integration of labor and capital) and the iteratively compounding Pareto distributions that naturally follow.