August 19, 2016
By Ron Fonger
Lansing, MI -- Criminal cases against state employees (click here) charged with wrongdoing in the Flint water crisis are just beginning, but legal fees have already risen to more than $5 million for Gov. Rick Snyder and two departments in state government.
Snyder will tell the State Administrative Board on Aug. 30 that he is raising the spending caps on contracts for two law firms representing his office against civil lawsuits related to Flint water — enough to cover $3.4 million in billings so far, the governor's press secretary said.
In addition, Department of Environmental Quality and Department of Health and Human Services representatives said they have spent an additional $1.6 million for lawyer fees related to Flint as of Aug. 1....
Some would say Dr. Edwards bites the hand that feeds him. It is easy to classify a real hero to the common man or woman a troublemaker. But, the trouble would not exist to find if government was not so corrupt and disinterested in the people that elected them. To me, I envy his lab and consider him a revolutionary. He is the only scientist frustrated with the spill over politics into science; global warming is only part of that reality.
Troublemaker brings images of "Dennis the Menace" or a scientist that creates their own absurd ideas. Dr. Edwards is none of those. He is a PhD scientist prepared to address real issues of real people. To think his work is only beginning and not following in the foot steps of those before him would indicate those before him were corrupted by the same politics that has tossed out establishment politicians.
Dr. Edwards is a hero and nothing short of it. I doubt he sees himself as anything more than a scientist conducting necessary work. What is surprising is that his necessary work would not be required IF the governance was not so corrupt to allow poisoning of the people of the electorate. An odd thought, isn't it? People are elected to office and instead of protecting the electorate and afraid of being removed from office or defeated in the next election; they hunker down with cronies and plan against the very people that should be protected by their government.
No. Dr. Edwards is not a troublemaker, he is one who discovers the trouble instilled by the corrupt and uncaring. He is definitely a revolutionary, carrying out the moral path that will add quality of life and longevity to American lives.
August 16, 2016
By Donovon Hohn
'''In the history of political graffiti, (click here) “We want Va. Tech” may sound like one of the least stirring demands ever spray-painted on a wall, but in the context of Flint, it was charged with the emotion and meaning of a rallying cry.
By “Va. Tech,” the message’s author meant a Virginia Tech professor of civil and environmental engineering, Marc Edwards. Edwards has spent most of his career studying the aging waterworks of America, publishing the sort of papers that specialists admire and the rest of us ignore, on subjects like “ozone-induced particle destabilization” or the “role of temperature and pH in Cu(OH)₂ solubility.” Explaining his research to laypeople, he sometimes describes it as “the C.S.I. of plumbing.” Edwards is a detective with a research lab and a Ph.D. In 2000, after homeowners in suburban Maryland began reporting “pinhole leaks” in their copper pipes, the water authority there brought in Edwards. In 2002, after receiving a report that water in a Maui neighborhood had mysteriously turned blue and was giving people rashes, Edwards took on the case.
Until last year, the most famous case Edwards investigated was the lead contamination of the water supply in the nation’s capital — still the worst such event in modern American history, in magnitude and duration. In Washington, lead levels shot up in 2001, and in some neighborhoods they remained dangerously elevated until 2010. Edwards maintains, and spent years working to prove, that scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exacerbated the D.C. crisis....
If DC isn't even interested in it's own water, why would anyone expect anyone else to be? It is corruption through and through and it needs to be flushed out at every turn. Dr. Edwards is not an idealist, he is a realist.
May 20, 2010
Some would say Dr. Edwards bites the hand that feeds him. It is easy to classify a real hero to the common man or woman a troublemaker. But, the trouble would not exist to find if government was not so corrupt and disinterested in the people that elected them. To me, I envy his lab and consider him a revolutionary. He is the only scientist frustrated with the spill over politics into science; global warming is only part of that reality.
Troublemaker brings images of "Dennis the Menace" or a scientist that creates their own absurd ideas. Dr. Edwards is none of those. He is a PhD scientist prepared to address real issues of real people. To think his work is only beginning and not following in the foot steps of those before him would indicate those before him were corrupted by the same politics that has tossed out establishment politicians.
Dr. Edwards is a hero and nothing short of it. I doubt he sees himself as anything more than a scientist conducting necessary work. What is surprising is that his necessary work would not be required IF the governance was not so corrupt to allow poisoning of the people of the electorate. An odd thought, isn't it? People are elected to office and instead of protecting the electorate and afraid of being removed from office or defeated in the next election; they hunker down with cronies and plan against the very people that should be protected by their government.
No. Dr. Edwards is not a troublemaker, he is one who discovers the trouble instilled by the corrupt and uncaring. He is definitely a revolutionary, carrying out the moral path that will add quality of life and longevity to American lives.
August 16, 2016
By Donovon Hohn
'''In the history of political graffiti, (click here) “We want Va. Tech” may sound like one of the least stirring demands ever spray-painted on a wall, but in the context of Flint, it was charged with the emotion and meaning of a rallying cry.
By “Va. Tech,” the message’s author meant a Virginia Tech professor of civil and environmental engineering, Marc Edwards. Edwards has spent most of his career studying the aging waterworks of America, publishing the sort of papers that specialists admire and the rest of us ignore, on subjects like “ozone-induced particle destabilization” or the “role of temperature and pH in Cu(OH)₂ solubility.” Explaining his research to laypeople, he sometimes describes it as “the C.S.I. of plumbing.” Edwards is a detective with a research lab and a Ph.D. In 2000, after homeowners in suburban Maryland began reporting “pinhole leaks” in their copper pipes, the water authority there brought in Edwards. In 2002, after receiving a report that water in a Maui neighborhood had mysteriously turned blue and was giving people rashes, Edwards took on the case.
Until last year, the most famous case Edwards investigated was the lead contamination of the water supply in the nation’s capital — still the worst such event in modern American history, in magnitude and duration. In Washington, lead levels shot up in 2001, and in some neighborhoods they remained dangerously elevated until 2010. Edwards maintains, and spent years working to prove, that scientific misconduct at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exacerbated the D.C. crisis....
If DC isn't even interested in it's own water, why would anyone expect anyone else to be? It is corruption through and through and it needs to be flushed out at every turn. Dr. Edwards is not an idealist, he is a realist.
May 20, 2010
...CDC has yet to Inform the Public Health Community of its Faulty Analysis...
Saving lives, delivering a better quality of life and adding longevity to Americans can hardly be called trouble making.
Let's just call Dr. Edwards a new breed of scientist and for them the world is grossly flawed. Dr. Edward's view of the world increases opportunity for new scientists that actually don't want to surrender their careers to corruption.
Let's just call Dr. Edwards a new breed of scientist and for them the world is grossly flawed. Dr. Edward's view of the world increases opportunity for new scientists that actually don't want to surrender their careers to corruption.
