Flint’s Water Crisis, 10 Years Later | Underwater Cables Could Help Detect Tsunamis
Science Friday
Science Friday and WNYC Studios
4.4 • 6.3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | What if there was a better way to detect tsunamis faster? |
| 0:07.0 | If the cable is closer to the trench that causes the earthquake, it can give significantly more early warning. |
| 0:14.0 | It's Friday, April 26th, and you guessed it, it's Science Friday. |
| 0:26.7 | I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. |
| 0:32.6 | The bottom of the sea is home to a wide network of telecommunication cables. |
| 0:37.5 | These are responsible for getting us our internet and connecting us to the world. |
| 0:43.1 | For decades, researchers have thought, what if we can use these telecommunication cables as a way to detect earthquakes and tsunamis as early as possible? |
| 0:48.1 | We'll explore that story in just a little bit. |
| 0:51.4 | But first, here's Ariel Duem Ross with the biggest science stories of the week. |
| 0:56.5 | It was 10 years ago when city officials in Flint, Michigan, switched their water source to the |
| 1:00.7 | Flint River, a move that was projected to save the city $5 million. Instead, the water corroded the |
| 1:08.1 | city's lead pipes, which in turn caused a lead poisoning crisis, as well as an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease, which itself killed around a dozen people. |
| 1:17.7 | So where do things stand now? Here to give us an update on the Flint water crisis, and to tell us about other top science stories this week is Umer Erfan, senior correspondent at Vox. Welcome to Science |
| 1:29.8 | Friday, Umair. Hey, Ariel. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being on the show. So it seems |
| 1:35.0 | that a decade later, some people in Flint still don't know if they have clean water. How could that |
| 1:40.8 | possibly be? Right. That's one of the key sources of frustration. |
| 1:45.0 | Even though this was a national story, it became a huge scandal that went all the way up to the president of the United States. |
| 1:51.0 | It's been a slow process to actually remediate and make sure that all the residents there can actually get clean drinking water. |
| 1:58.3 | Now, city officials say that they're in the last leg of the process, |
| 2:01.5 | that nearly 30,000 homes of businesses have had their water service lines investigated and |
| 2:05.8 | replaced, but there's still a few thousand left. And a lot of residents are saying that they've |
| 2:10.2 | been kept in the dark or not informed about the current status of their own lines or of their |
... |
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