Lead Story, Today and Yesterday

[XLFD]

Just got confirmation from city officials that a hidden problem I brought up ten years ago is not in my backyard; it's in my front yard.  Nowadays, when I get a letter from the City of Ludington, I expect something coming from the Mason County prosecutor soon to follow.  This reporter has been prosecuted three times over the last 16 months arising from charges crafted by the city's police department, each one a variation of a common theme of trespassing on public land, public land that was fully open to the public-- but apparently not me.  

But this was different.  This letter would inform me that the City of Ludington has been poisoning me, my family, and my former tenants for over three decades.  This was more of an affirmation that the City has been poisoning large segments of our population for over a hundred years, and the only reason they will be going from a policy of "who cares?" to a policy that cares about the citizens of Ludington is that the state is forcing them to.  

Sadly, the state was the likely party forcing city lead-ers to send letters like this to the people whose lives they put in jeopardy.  This was news when I tapped into the issue 10 years ago, warning the city council of the problem at the always-televised meetings.  I was no chicken little, my concerns were based fully on science and shocking news about elevated blood lead (EBL) levels in our most precious resource:  our children.  When Flint was being spotlighted nationally for lead leaching into the water supply of their older homes and having EBL problems, Mason County saw themselves be at the top of the list or second in the list of Michigan counties with EBL levels in their children, and we pointed this out.

The next year, we closely monitored the work on water lines in a project happening in the Fourth Ward.  While the project was not to remove lead pipes in the lines (mostly in the form of goosenecks, pipes that connected galvanized or lead pipes to the water main), we found a lot of goosenecks in the mix and even some lead piping.

The sickest thing at the time wasn't our lead-infused kids, it was our city lead-ers mostly ignoring the problem, and when they weren't ignoring the problem, making light of a heavy problem.  Councilor Kathy Winczewski, mercifully to be term-limited out at year's end, was the staunchest defender of the poisoning.   She was waving lead goosenecks in the air and passing them around in 2017 when she said the following, was it any wonder why she was feeling ill?

"I have been feeling under the weather a little bit. I have to respond to the lead goosenecks... I am a retired chemistry teacher, when we used lead in school, I didn't let the kids even touch the fresh lead. I'm gonna pass this around for you guys, the stuff you will touch on the outside, and if you look at the inside of the pipe, you will notice a coating on there, so you can touch this and you'll be OK, but the fresh lead, the lead that has not been oxidized is in the cut area, and it looks like all metals, it's really shiny, it's really silver, and that's the area you don't want to be exposed to...

Again, when this was brought up a while ago I called the health department to find out why our Mason County children may have high levels of lead, and they again pointed out to me that #1, we still have a lot of homes with lead paint in them, and a lot of kids are being exposed that way. Number 2, there's still a lot of stuff in the soil from our heavy industry. We used to, believe it or not, have a lot of factories in Mason County, and we don't have that many now.  

But another thing too that I was thinking about; I taught in Custer three years, a lot of those kids, a lot of those people make their own sinkers, lead sinkers, they smelt them right in their kitchen. OK they melt them down, they put them in molds and they make their own lead sinkers, then those kids play with those, they're toys, they put them in their trucks and so forth, and everything else.

So I think there may be places that people in Mason County can be exposed to lead, but I do not believe it is coming from Ludington's city water situation, so thanks for putting up with my tirade on that."

This shameful and long tirade (fully analyzed in the link provided above) did its best to diminish the threat of lead to our citizens and try to put the lead issue in our county onto many other sources.  But other counties in Michigan have older houses, more lead paint, and more businesses that used lead than Ludington, but the areas in our county that had the worst EBL levels happened to be served by city water.  

It sure would be nice for the lead queen and her other apologists for the city's inaction over their infrastructure before and (mostly) since then to actually apologize to every citizen they tried to pull the lead-sheeting over their eyes.  But this letter is likely the closest thing we will get to that.  Has anyone else also got a letter like this?  Please say so in the comments.